Wisdom and loneliness are two elements of human experience with opposing effects on a person’s health. Wisdom is a complex human characteristic that encompasses qualities like intelligence, lived experience, and compassion. Being wiser is associated with greater personal satisfaction and resilience, as well as increased quality of life. Loneliness, on the other hand, is one’s subjective perception of an absence of social connection, regardless of whether or not they are actually isolated. In other words, people can feel lonely, whether they are around others or not. Increased loneliness can actually have real physical effects, as it is associated with increased risks of dementia and other negative health outcomes. Interestingly, wisdom and loneliness have been shown to be inversely correlated: wiser people tend to report less loneliness.
The human microbiome is the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that reside in the body and perform many important life functions. The high microorganism concentrations in the intestines are referred to as the gut microbiome and perform many important digestion functions. Gut microbiome health has also been linked to personality and cognition by way of the gut-brain axis, which refers to how the digestive tract, home to the gut microbiome, and the brain send signals to influence each other. Loneliness is associated with harmful inflammatory responses in the body as well as activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which plays an important role in the human stress response. As it turns out, inflammation and the HPA axis are also both affected by the gut-brain axis. The gut-brain axis has also been shown to influence traits such as compassion, which is closely associated with wisdom. However, the effects of microbiome diversity on the gut-brain axis are not well-understood.
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Research shows that the bacteria in the gut may have an influence on many aspects of health, from mood to disease risk.
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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego were interested in studying loneliness, wisdom, and gut microbiome diversity to better understand how biology and personality influence each other. The scientists administered surveys that measured psychological traits including loneliness and wisdom to 187 study participants between the ages of 28 and 97. Fecal samples were collected from participants and analyzed to determine their gut microbiome compositions. Microbiome diversity was characterized in two ways: alpha-diversity referred to the amount of diversity within a participant, while beta-diversity referred to the difference in gut microbiome composition between different participants. When the researchers compared alpha and beta-diversity with the measures of personality and psychological traits, they found that both high alpha and beta-diversity correlated with high wisdom ratings, and low loneliness ratings.
This research demonstrates that psychological concepts such as wisdom and loneliness may be affected by the gut microbiome, with a more diverse microbiome being associated with high wisdom and low loneliness. This connection implicates the gut microbiome as a concrete target for potential new interventions for loneliness. In the future, it may be possible to create medications or alter the diet to improve gut microbiome diversity, alleviating loneliness in patients and improving their quality of life!
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