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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: The neuroscience of loneliness

Lynne Baab • Tuesday November 7 2023

I want to introduce you to the academic field of social neuroscience, focused on the connections between social experiences and biological functions. Human beings are social creatures, and it makes sense that our relationships would affect us on a neurological level, and also that our neurological functions would affect our relationships.

Here’s the abstract of an article by one of the co-founders of social neuroscience, John T. Cacioppo, and a second researcher. Notice the way they describe loneliness as “perceived social isolation.” That raises a lot of questions about the difference between being alone and feeling lonely, a topic for a future...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Types of reflecting, a listening skill

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 31 2023

The listening skill reflection or reflecting can range from simple to complex. I want to open this post with a story about the most challenging form of reflecting, drawing implications:

When we moved to New Zealand in 2007, we rented out our Seattle house. We put a lock on the door of the family room in the basement and stored our furniture and my hundreds of books there. After two years, our tenants wanted to buy the house, and the timing felt right. So we returned to Seattle and had a giant sale of most of the stuff in that family room,...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Lessons from two periods of loneliness

Lynne Baab • Wednesday October 25 2023

Twice I have experienced extended periods of loneliness. Both times I learned something important.

The first period was in high school (tenth through twelfth grade in those days). We had moved 11 times in my first 15 years because my dad was in the military, and I attended five schools between kindergarten and ninth grade. I learned to make friends easily among the girls in my various neighborhoods and classes. When we moved from Virginia to Washington State, and I started high school, I decided to try an experiment. I decided to act like I’d been a popular girl in junior high....

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: One more way reflecting helps us

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 17 2023

Two weeks ago, I opened a post with a story about a friend who was telling me about the funeral she attended. I asked you to imagine that I was watching her body language. Because she was drooping a bit and had a sad expression on her face, I imagined that I said to her, “You look really sad.” That’s a form of reflecting or reflection, a listening skill where we make a brief statement about what we’re observing in the person’s body language, tone of voice, or words. I said that my words were an invitation for her to talk...

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