THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 |C3
video recordings couldn’t do the
same. “There was phenomenal
learning in the live group and no
learning at all via a disembodied
source,” said Prof. Kuhl.
To replicate the power of actually
being there, “contingency is what
we need,” she explained, referring
to the small nods, interjections and
changes in gaze that ping back and
forth during a meaningful conversa-
tion. “It’s all exquisitely tuned. Sec-
onds are an eternity; milliseconds
are what matter.” Responding con-
tingently signals to the listener that
you’re paying attention. “Think
about being on the phone. If some-
one doesn’t respond, we say ‘are
you there?’ When there’s no re-
sponse, we notice,” Prof. Kuhl toldme from her home office in Seattle.
To approximate that immediacy
in online conversations, Prof. Kuhl
prefers videoconferencing apps like
Zoom, which are less apt to freeze
or inject unnatural delays into the
conversation. She suggests propping
up your screen so you can look in a
straight horizontal line at the
speaker, making it easier for them
to see your micro-expressions.
Lighting your face from the front
and using clear facial expressions
helps, as does allowing pets and
children to wander into the frame.
“I’m getting to know my people,”
she said of her video calls with her
lab staff, whom she now sees
bouncing babies on their laps or
“zooming” from their children’s
bedrooms. “It’s not face-to-face, but
we’ll come back with a new under-
standing of each other.”
The social neuroscientist Elizabeth
Redcay, at the University of Mary-
land, wrote in an email that many of
the aspects of in-person contact that
we crave—like touching, following
the direction of each other’s gaze and
mirroring each other’s gestures—are
missing from most online exchanges.
But two key requirements of our so-
ROBERT NEUBECKER cial brains can be preserved duringHumans
depend on
physical gestures
to make us
feel that
we can trust
other people.REVIEW
ing a nuclear event, isolate
yourself in the interior room,
no windows, stay there until
you get the all clear sign.”
The phrase “shelter in place”
indeed got its start in Cold War
scenarios of nuclear attacks, as
Mr. Cuomo suggests, though it
has been used in a wide array of
emergency situations since then,
from chemical spills to terrorist
attacks to natural disasters.
“Shelter,” as a noun and a
verb, has been in use since the
late 16th century, possibly de-
rived from an earlier word “shel-
tron,” referring to a tight battle
formation formed by soldiers in-
terlocking their shields to pro-
vide defensive cover. By Shake-
speare’s time, “shelter” came to
mean any structure that offers
protection from the elements, or
a refuge from danger. As a verb,
“shelter” developed both a tran-sitive use meaning “to provide
cover for” (as in “shelter the ani-
mals”) and an intransitive one
meaning “to take cover” (as in
“the animals sheltered under the
trees”). The verb is intransitive
when people are instructed to
“shelter in place.”
The earliest known examples
of “shelter in place” come from
discussions on Capitol Hill
about civil defense plans in the
case of a nuclear war. In Febru-
ary 1976, George R. Rodericks,
then the director of Washington
D.C.’s Office of Emergency Pre-
paredness, testified at a con-
gressional hearing on civil de-
fense, outlining grave scenarios
for responding to the threat of
radioactive fallout: “One plan
looked at shelter in place for a
decade and then abandoned it
in favor of massive evacuation.”
The “in place” phrasing re- JAMES YANGWORD ON
THE STREETBEN
ZIMMERA
writer posted a brief
video of her husband
blasting crème brûlée
with a welding torch
and called it Fattening
the Curve. A cellist uploaded his
tender rendition of J.S. Bach’s Alle-
mande in G Major to calm down his
Facebook friends. During the
Covid-19 pandemic, such social me-
dia projects are attempted work-
arounds to social distancing, along
with more traditional methods like
calling old friends and chatting with
neighbors from opposite sides of
the street. The question is, what
works? How do we get our basic
social needs met during a pan-
demic?
Answers are starting to sur-
face from the field of social neu-
roscience, which uses brain im-
aging and biological measures
like the hormones circulating in
our bloodstreams to track
how physical states like
isolation affect our
brains, and vice versa—
how our moods and so-
cial situations affect our
physical resilience.
Evidence shows that
social interaction is a bio-
logical requirement, much
like eating, drinking and sleep-
ing. Our ability to learn to talk,
play, acquire new skills, fall in
love, conduct business, and age in
good health all hinge on our mo-
tivation to connect with other
people, social neuroscientists
have found. So while social
distancing reduces trans-
mission of the coronavi-
rus, which is good for us,
it also increases anxiety,
frustration and loneliness,
which is bad for us.
Even before Covid-19 forced us to
self-isolate, a quarter of Americans
were chronically lonely—a psycho-
logical state that is invisible, conta-
gious and physically damaging, much
like the virus itself. Animals that
have been forcibly isolated show en-
during changes in their brains and
behavior, including ramped-up ag-
gression in males, anxiety, depres-
sion, decreased immunity to infec-
tion, and a heightened desire for
alcohol, food and morphine.
It’s as if the craving for others’
company is suddenly replaced by a
biological drive for more immediate
and risky rewards, a trade-off also
seen in humans. A new survey of 24
studies on the psychological impact
of previous quarantines, recently
published in the journal The Lancet,
shows that human adults who were
quarantined due to SARS, H1N1 and
Ebola show many of the same reac-
tions: more fear, more alcohol and
substance abuse, and more post-
quarantine resistance to in-person
contact—a “back off” feeling more
common among health care workers.
But why? As social animals, hu-
mans depend on physical gestures to
make us feel that we can trust other
people. Close proximity, back pats,
hugs, handshakes, high-fives, even
just locking eyes with someone for a
moment—these are primitive signs
that we’re accepted and belong
somewhere. Yet these gestures are
exactly what we’re supposed to avoidvideo chats: paying attention to the
same thing at the same time and be-
ing able to react instantaneously. In
a 2010 study, Prof. Redcay showed
that when a test subject lying in a
scanner interacted with a researcher
via live videoconferencing, regions of
their brain related to mind-reading
and social reward showed far greater
activation than when they watched a
prerecorded video of the researcher
talking about the same topic. Inter-
acting in real time was key.
Even marmosets communicate
through reciprocal interactions, the
MIT social neuroscien-
tist Rebecca Saxe
told me via Zoom.
“When they can’t
see each other,
mother and baby
marmosets communi-
cate with contingent
gaps between their
calls.” Those exquisitely
timed call-and-responses
in the wild are a sign that
we primates need that so-
cial to-and-fro as much as
we need to eat. In fact, a new
study by Prof. Saxe and her
postdoctoral student, Livia To-
mova, shows exactly that: fMRI
images of adults’ brains scanned
before and after a day of social iso-
lation revealed patterns of neural
activity almost indistinguishable
from those of people who had
fasted all day. People who are
forced to be isolated crave social in-
teraction the way a hungry person
craves food, they write.
Clearly, interacting with other
people satisfies basic human needs,
but it has broader social benefits,
too. It can help temper our primi-
tive response to contagious dis-
ease, which is to feel dis-
gust. Disgust evolved in
humans to protect us
from real dangers,
such as eating rotten
food, but when ap-
plied to other people
it can lead to feelings
of moral superiority and so-
cial avoidance.
A new paper on the Covid-19 cri-
sis by a group of 36 psychologists
and neuroscientists, soon to be pub-
lished in the journal Nature Human
Behavior, warns that “feelings of
disgust can bleed into how we form
impressions of other people. With
worries about physical health more
salient, people may become more
judgmental of others’ behavior and
make less charitable interpreta-
tions.” Without a constant flow of
verifiable, transparent information,
the group warns, these reflexive
feelings of disgust can turn into an-
ger and hostility against out-groups,
with potentially dangerous, even le-
thal consequences.
As individuals and as a society,
the lesson is the same. “We need to
connect, we need to interact,” said
Prof. Kuhl. “When this is all over,
those first hugs and gazes will send
oxytocin through us that will last a
long time.”Dr. Pinker is a psychologist and a
Mind & Matter columnist for Re-
view. Her most recent book, “The
Village Effect,” explores the sci-
ence that underlies our daily in-
teractions.BYSUSANPINKERWith millions under quarantine, social neuroscience shows how
we can achieve real communication using virtual tools.The Science of
Staying Connected
right now. The togetherness we feel
at religious services when we sing,
sway or clap at the same time, the
reassurance we derive from family
and holiday gatherings—these activi-
ties seem like second nature to us,
yet they now present infection risks.
This inconsistency creates an unset-
tled, watchful feeling, an urge to rec-
oncile the contradiction that psy-
chologists call cognitive dissonance.
Until we can ease up on our vigi-
lance, social neuroscience can help.
Making genuine psychological con-
tact depends on infinitesimal cues
that the human brain picks up when
someone is talking directly to us,
says Patricia Kuhl, a co-director of
the University of Washington’s In-
stitute of Learning and Brain Sci-
ences. If you’re not actually in the
same room as the person you’re
talking to, making those cues ex-
plicit is a first step.
In 2003 Prof. Kuhl published a
study showing that nine-month-old
babies who heard a live person
speaking to them in a second lan-
guage, Mandarin or Spanish, fo-
cused intently on the person talking
and then recognized those speech
sounds later. Babies who heard the
same speech sounds on audio orAS THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS
has ferociously spread across
the country, most U.S. states
have imposed drastic measures
ordering residents to remain at
home to slow the spread of the
virus and the deadly disease it
causes, Covid-19. But there is
little consistency in what thesemeasures are called.
The city of San Francisco got
the ball rolling on Mar. 16 with
an order that “requires all indi-
viduals anywhere in San Fran-
cisco to shelter in place—that is,
stay at home—except for certain
essential activities.” When the
state of California followed suitSeeking
Safety
At Times
Of Extreme
Danger
three days later, Gov. Gavin
Newsom issued what he called
“a statewide, mandatory STAY
AT HOME order,” refraining
from using San Francisco’s “shel-
ter in place” language.
Thenextday,onMar.20,the
state of New York issued its own
directive, which Gov. Andrew
Cuomo termed the “New York
State on PAUSE” executive or-
der. (“PAUSE” is an acronym, or
more precisely a backronym—
the result of a series of words
reverse-engineered to form a
memorable acronym—that
stands for “Policies Assure Uni-
form Safety for Everyone.”)
When a reporter asked Mr.
Cuomo at a press briefing if he
was issuing a “shelter in place”
order, the governor insistedthat he wasn’t. “Words matter,”
he said, pointing out that Cali-
fornia too had avoided using
the term “shelter in place.”
“People are scared and people
panic,” he explained, adding,
“‘Shelter in place’ is used, cur-
rently, for an active shooter, or
a school shooting. It was, dur-sembles another expression that
took hold in the late 1970s: “ag-
ing in place,” used by demogra-
phers for those who grow old
while staying in their own res-
idences rather than moving
out. A 1979 report by the
Urban Institute, “The Gray-
ing of Suburbia,” explained
that “the growing share of el-
derly households in suburban ar-
eas is primarily attributable to
aging in place.”
As for “sheltering in place,” it
became the favored wording by
government officials wanting to
make sure that residents stay
put in a time of crisis. For in-
stance, during the 2013 manhunt
for suspects following the Bos-
ton Marathon bombing, the Mas-
sachusetts Emergency Manage-
ment Agency issued a citywide
“shelter in place” alert. (Bosto-
nians more commonly referred
to it as a “lockdown,” a term
that originated in the confining
of prisoners to their cells during
a prison riot and is now being
used as a shorthand for corona-
virus constraints as well.)
While Mr. Cuomo might want
to avoid the scary associations
of “sheltering in place” with ac-
tive-shooter situations and the
like, the coronavirus pandemic
is, day by day, increasingly justi-
fying such alarmist language.[Shelter in Place]