Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed. To be able to build such a world, to make it believable and beguiling, to leap across the abyss that gapes between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller must draw on an immense library of experiences and impressions across the infinite spectrum of life’s possibilities — those building blocks of which we make the combinatorial work we call creativity.
Art by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
Another epoch earlier, Walt Whitman distilled these eternal truths even further. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “strong artists and leaders… fresh broods of teachers… and coming musicians,” he considers the elemental material of creative work:
All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world.
Whether the words be few or many, practical or poetic, emanating from them all is the same fundamental truth about the nature of creativity, demanding the same basic qualifications: nonjudgmental curiosity, an empathic imagination, and a willingness to live not flawlessly but fully.
The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less time had she not needed to supplement her paltry elementary schoolteacher income by tilling potato fields and pruning plum trees in rural Bulgaria. Born in the final years of the sovereign monarchy Bulgaria briefly enjoyed after five centuries of Ottoman occupation, she had worked on her embroidery in the middle of the Communist dictatorship that had begun when she was five and would last until I was five. Denied university admission on account of her family’s opposition to the regime, my grandmother never strained a single synapse on higher mathematics, yet her embroidery exudes the elegant simplicity of a great theorem — a living affirmation of trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell’s insistence on the needle as an instrument of the mind.
She had learned the technique from her own grandmother, who had in turn learned it from her grandmother before that — generations of women using thread and needle to pattern a world of chaos and peril into something sensical, something resinous with feeling and time, defying the banality of mere survival with a quiet, methodical insistence of beauty.
The year the Communist dictatorship curled its fist around Bulgaria, the English writer Rebecca West (December 21, 1892–March 15, 1983) — one of the finest, subtlest, most passionate and precise minds I have ever read — traveled to the Balkans and recounted her encounter with those ancient cultures in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (public library), at the heart of which is a reckoning with the relationship between art and aliveness, between storytelling and resilience, between the things we make and the world we make.
Dame Rebecca West
In village after village, West saw elderly women bent over their embroideries, saw in what they did a way of “examining life as they lived it and inquiring into their destiny as it overtook them” — a philosophy for living in the shape of a craft, passed down the generations to make life more livable. She writes:
The old women [are] not fully conscious of the part their embroideries play in the preservation of their ancient culture: when an Englishwoman plays a sonata by Purcell she is not likely to feel that she is maintaining English musical tradition. Yet these women are certainly aware that they are about some special business when they sew. I am told by an Englishwoman who has collected such embroideries for twenty years and knows their makers well that it is an esoteric craft, those who are expert in it do not give away their mystery. Many of the themes which often reappear in the designs have names and symbolic meanings which are not confided to strangers, and a woman will sometimes refuse to discuss the embroidery she has worked on a garment made for her own use. When they marry they make caps for their bridegrooms and about these they are always resolutely reserved. Here is, indeed, another proof of the impossibility of history. There cannot be taken an inventory of time’s contents when some among the most precious are locked away in inaccessible parts and lose their essence when they are moved to any place where they are likely to be examined carefully, when their owners are ignorant of parts of their nature and keep secret such knowledge of them as they have.
In this West sees a scale model of all we call tradition:
A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people’s power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires.
I look at my grandmother’s embroidery, aflame with her life, prayerful as an Islamic mosaic, perfect as a Euclidean proof, and West’s closing words resound like a bell in the cathedral of time:
If during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe. We shall discover what work we have been called to do.
In my early forties, living through a rupture of overwhelming complexity and no small measure of heartache, I took up embroidery — untrained, unpatterned, not following any tradition, more like jazz improvisation to my grandmother’s Bach cantatas. I did it daily, obsessively, not understanding what it was doing for me but trusting that it was doing something, shifting something. It did. It was a way of learning, not with the mind but with the hands, that you have to make a hole to make a stitch.
A wealthy lady once bought a bright yellow Canary from a pet shop. The bird was lively and playful and whistled beautifully. But the bird was in a plain cage which the lady felt did not suit the decor of her house. So, she scoured the antique shops to find a cage she thought was really special.
Finally, she found the most amazing cage. It had once belonged to the King of Ethiopia. The cage was beautifully handcrafted in gold and was dazzling like the sun. It was supported by pillars of jade and had perches crafted from ivory. Even the seed and water containers were made from pure silver.
The lady brought home the cage and installed the bird. She could not wait to show it off to her wealthy friends- she knew they’d be impressed. She became so enamored by the beauty of the cage that she was constantly polishing and decorating it. She would walk back and forth admiring its rich lustre and she failed to even notice the small bird perched inside.
She became so obsessed with the cage that she forgot to feed the bird inside the cage and one morning she came out and the bird had died. The cage now seemed empty and pointless despite its gold and precious jewels. It was only then that she realized how lively and playful were the bird’s movements and how sweet was its song.
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On June 12th, 2026, Uranus exactly squares the Nodal axis.
While this aspect might easily get overlooked in an already eventful June – with Venus conjunct Jupiter, and both Chiron and Jupiter changing signs – it might actually be the big elephant in the room.
When a planet is square the Nodal axis – which means it is simultaneously square the North Node and the South Node – astrologers call it a “skipped step”.
The Skipped Step
The skipped step is usually understood as unresolved developmental material from the past that needs to be addressed before a person can fully move forward.
“Unresolved” here is not to be confused with feeling stuck. Instead, it points to a dynamic where the conflict of the nodal opposition gets resolved through an outlet (the planet squaring it).
Just like in a T-square, we can look at the planet that squares the Nodes as the outside catalyst that resolves the tension of the opposition.
Oppositions and squares, while both classified as “hard aspects,” have very different functions.
An opposition is a “number 2” aspect – it divides the circle in 2: either, or. It’s internal, a constant pendulum between options. The tension is never resolved because this tension is exactly what makes the opposition an opposition: “either, or” – “this or that.”
The square, instead, is a “number 4” aspect – it divides the circle by 4, and 4 is the number of matter. This is why squares make things happen. They bring matters into the material world.
So in a T-square, or a skipped-step type of dynamic, the planet that squares the opposition axis acts as the catalyst that makes things happen (like for real, in the 3D world). It’s like a fuse that suddenly goes off – and the tension of the opposition is finally addressed.
And this reframe of the square invites a slightly different way of thinking about the skipped step itself.
Perhaps we’ve been taking the skipped step metaphor too seriously – but not literallyenough.
And perhaps the easiest way to understand a skipped step is through an actual skipped step.
When you skip a step and stumble upon something, the script gets interrupted.
The skipped step not as something you’ve missed. But literally, as what happens when something occurs on the outside – the square – that resolves the problem of the opposition.
The Skipped Step And Snow White
And this takes us to the Snow White fairytale.
Snow White grows up under the shadow of a jealous stepmother, the Queen. Unable to reconcile with the passing of her own beauty, the Queen poisons Snow White with an apple, sending her into a death-like sleep.
We could go on and on about the rich symbolism of this fairytale – from the mother-daughter dynamics and the little-discussed jealousy that can coexist with love, yet still poison the next generation with the regret of one’s own unfulfilled potential.
If we look at it through the lens of the Lunar Nodes, the poisoned apple becomes the generational heritage (this could include past-life content if we choose to look at the Nodes this way) that someone is born into.
We all have a North Node and a South Node – this is the one aspect, the one opposition, that regardless of the rest of the natal chart, everyone is born with.
We are all born into some sort of story, heritage, or unprocessed material (South Node) which exists in polarity with our North Node – a symbol of future directions and possibilities.
The past and the future are continuously renegotiated, but unless a planet comes to activate this axis, nothing happens.
. . . but not without shadow Rob Brezsny Jun 9, 2026
I’ve been an astrologer since I began studying astrology at Goddard College at age 19.But I’ve never been a traditional astrologer. I love the ancient art too much to keep peddling its most fearful inheritances. Over the centuries, astrology has absorbed a heavy cargo of dread, including curses, afflictions, exiles, and warnings of cosmic bad luck.I’ve spent years reading the same sky that the dread-ridden practitioners read, and I’ve arrived at different conclusions about what it’s trying to tell us.On this Freedom from Fear holiday, I will offer disclaimers to refute the doom-mongering and uphold the zoom-and-boom approach to living our magical lives.
1. I don’t use any version of astrology that claims some planets and some houses are “malefic.” There are no villains in the solar system. There is no celestial body whose essential job is to ambush or ruin you.So, for example, Saturn isn’t a hooded executioner; it teaches discipline, patient structure, the dignity of limits. Mars isn’t a brute; it grants courage, drive, and the holy capacity to fight for what we love.To brand a planet or a house as evil is to misread the gift inside the intense packaging.Read more about my understanding of Saturn: tinyurl.com/BlessingsOfSaturnRead more about my understanding of Mars: tinyurl.com/MarsWithinUs
2. I don’t believe that planets are in “detriment” or “fall” in particular signs. The notion that a planet is crippled, demoted, or exiled simply because of which signs it happens to occupy strikes me as an astrological caste system: as if Venus in Scorpio were a broken instrument, or the Moon in Capricorn a wounded animal. I know people with Venus in Scorpio and Moon in Capricorn, and I guarantee you that those placements don’t hobble or torment them.No to all that noise. In fact, I relish the hypothesis that every placement is a particular intelligence—a specific flavor of power, a distinctive way of getting things done—not a defect to apologize for.
3. I don’t regard planetary retrogrades as inherently problematic. Mercury retrograde, in particular, has become pop culture’s favorite scapegoat, blamed for every dropped call and missed text.But a retrograde isn’t a malfunction. It’s a different mode: a turning-inward, a season for review, revision, recapitulation, and second looks. The backward-seeming motion isn’t the universe glitching. It’s the universe inviting us to circle back and finish what we left unfinished.My understanding of Mercury Retrograde: tinyurl.com/RetrogradeMercuryRead more about retrograde planets in general: https://tinyurl.com/y89kuwa6
4. I don’t think we should do anything differently when the moon is “void of course.” I won’t tiptoe through my life, postpone my decisions, or hold my breath because tradition warns that “nothing will come of” what I begin during those hours.I start my projects whenever the spirit moves me. The cosmos isn’t waiting to penalize my timing.Read more about my understanding: tinyurl.com/PraiseMoonVoidOfCourse
5. I don’t treat the aspects of square and opposition as being inherently negative and troublesome. The so-called “hard aspects” are engines of growth, not glitches in the wiring. Tension isn’t the enemy of a vivid life; it’s one of its primary creative forces.A square denotes friction that strikes a spark. An opposition is the dynamic, generative tug between two truths that both deserve to be honored. Smooth and easy is lovely, but it’s less likely to make us braver, deeper, or more alive.
6. I don’t believe that solar or lunar eclipses portend peril or distress. Eclipses are thresholds, hinges, and dramatic punctuation marks in the ongoing narrative of our lives.They’re portals: moments when energies can be released and new modes born. To greet them with anxiety is to mistake intensity for worrisome twists.More about my understanding of eclipses: tinyurl.com/EclipsesAreInvitations
When I periodically lay out my approach to astrology on social media, some readers are alarmed, even angry, as if they imagine I’m a first-class spiritual bypasser. One sneered, “So you practice astrology that strips away negative aspects and shadow?”That’s a big, unjustified leap from what I actually say.The answer is no, I’m not stripping away shadow. I’m not saying everything that ever happens is cheerful, positive, and easy. What I’m refusing is far more specific: the assignment of fixed, fatalistic, fear-based verdicts to the phenomena of the sky. I’m questioning the medieval bookkeeping that decides in advance which configurations are curses and which are blessings, before we’ve even had the chance to live them.Shadow is real. Difficulty is real. Grief, loss, struggle, and the long dark passages of a human life are real, all worthy of our intense attention. As a chaos magician and dreamworker, I am on intimate terms with what’s unresolved, wounded, and not-yet-redeemed. I work with the shadow every single day and have for years. It’s one of my deepest callings. It’s an important reason why I am such a diligent dreamworker.The difference is this: I don’t believe the shadow is a punishment handed down by malefic planets. I believe it’s raw material: teachings that invite us to grow into a more beautiful and resilient version of ourselves. The squares that grind against us and the transits that jolt us out of our habits are the curriculum. They’re not sentences pronounced by a hostile universeTo strip away shadow would commit the grave error of toxic positivity. I have zero interest in that. PRONOIA—my conviction that the whole of creation is conspiring to move us in the direction of liberation—isn’t the denial of pain. It’s the radical trust that even our pain is conspiring to liberate us.
So here’s the core of how I practice:All omens deserve to be interpreted in ways that provide guidance and teaching. All configurations deserve to be read as messages about how to live more skillfully, love more fiercely, and wake up more fully: including the comfortable and the uncomfortable aspects, the flowing trines and the disruptive squares, the new moons and the eclipses.All omens are revelations about how to successfully wrangle with our problems, perpetrate liberation, ameliorate suffering, find redemption, and perform the tricky maneuvers and ingenious tweaks that enable us to slip free of our mind-forged manacles and discover the deeper meanings beneath our experiences.Those manacles, as William Blake understood, are often forged in our own imaginations. They are made of our fears, inherited superstitions, and half-conscious agreements about what we’re allowed to become.And astrology at its best is a locksmith’s art, not a fortune-teller’s racket. It hands us the picks and shims and skeleton keys. It shows us where the lock is, and how the mechanism turns.An omen isn’t a verdict handed down from on high. It doesn’t tell us what will be done to us. It’s an invitation that reveals what might be done by us and through us and with us if we’re cunning and brave and generous enough to read it as a teaching rather than a threat.I read the same sky every other astrologer reads. I refuse to read it as a rap sheet. To me, it’s a love letter that includes, among its tender passages, the hard and holy lessons we need to learn.
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also pulsates beneath every ism we have ever invented, beneath every stereotype and every genocide, beneath every algorithm that reduces us to variables then adds them up to sell the sum of who we are, beneath all the parcels of preconception we trade daily and mistake the barter a for a genuine encounter with one another.
Two centuries ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) offered a pithy, powerful antidote to this double-edged instinct.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
In a notebook entry from the autumn of 1836, penned shortly after his moving meditation on how not to waste your life, Hawthorne proposes a revision of our standard classification system for humanity — one that would rehumanize us with the simple awareness that what binds us is infinitely stronger than what divides us or by what affiliations we divide ourselves. He writes:
A new classification of society is to be instituted. Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed, — First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty of the same sins, whether the world knows them or not; whether they languish in prison, looking forward to the gallows, or walk honored among men, they also form a class. Then proceed to generalize and classify the whole world together, as none can claim utter exemption from either sorrow, sin, or disease; and if they could, yet Death, like a great parent, comes and sweeps all through one darksome portal, — all his children.
What a magnificent way to remember that down where the spirit meets the bone, we are all facing the same struggle: to feel safe, to feel seen, to wrest some meaning and some marvel from the ephemeral bewilderment of being alive.
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To our human eyes, a mouse’s furred face doesn’t betray much emotion. But if you watch the body language of a mouse who’s reunited with one of her sisters after five days in a cage alone, you might suspect you know what she’s feeling.
The formerly isolated mouse chatters in squeaks too high for a human to hear. She follows her sister, crawling beneath the other mouse’s body as if trying to get a hug. She looks like she’s feeling what you or I feel when meeting a long-lost friend or a family member — maybe with more sniffing.
She looks like she’s been lonely.
Loneliness isn’t just for humans, and neither are its harms. Over the past decade or so, some researchers have come to believe that an animal’s craving for the company of others isn’t just a preference, but a basic, deeply held need. When we don’t socialize enough, we feel the lack like hunger or thirst, they say. When we’ve had our fill of togetherness, we feel satisfied or quenched.
The amount of socializing a creature needs may be particular to that species, and even to that individual. Scientists have found within-species social differences in birds, monkeys, fish and even cockroaches.
Among humans, “you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office,” says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. Today, they are on a hunt to find where, in the brain, this equilibrium is controlled — and hoping their work will hold dividends for lonely humans.
A range of socializing
Beavers live with their immediate families. Starlings flock in huge murmurations. Adult male orangutans roam solo until it’s time to find a mate. What determines an animal’s ideal amount of socializing?
Tim Clutton-Brock, an evolutionary biologist retired from the University of Cambridge, says several factors can push species to become more or less social as they evolve. One is the need to keep warm. Another is foraging: Does searching for food in a group make it easier for that animal to eat, or harder? What about predation — is there safety in numbers, or is it better to be alone and inconspicuous? Do females need help from others to raise their young?
Different species, and even individuals within species, have different social needs. Orangutans, for example, are the most solitary of the great apes.CREDIT: ALANBEDFORDSHAW / iNATURALIST.ORG
“Dealing with the neighbors” is also important, Clutton-Brock says. For example, the meerkats he studies in the Kalahari Desert live in territorial groups, and constant conflict means it’s better to live in packs. A wild meerkat who’s separated from the group is visibly distressed and looks around constantly. “They very clearly get extremely worried,” he says.
Within each species, Clutton-Brock says evolution has probably allowed for a range of personality types around a certain species average. “There are costs to too much anxiety” about being alone, he says, “and costs to too little anxiety.” A species may do best with a mix of social styles.
Whatever an animal’s right amount of social activity, research suggests there can be dire consequences to mental and physical health when it’s not met. People who are socially isolated, or feel lonely, die sooner. Poor social connections are linked to heart disease and stroke. Certain female rats, when housed alone, are more likely to develop cancer.
Tye started investigating loneliness well before the pandemic brought the subject to the forefront. In 2016, she showed that certain neurons in the brainstem — the deepest, oldest part of the brain — are active in male mice who are isolated for a day and then meet another mouse. When scientists inhibited those neurons, the formerly isolated mice were more standoffish; when scientists activated the neurons, the mice were more eager to seek out company.
The researchers realized they might be getting a glimpse, Tye says, of “the cellular substrate of loneliness.”
In 2019, Tye and coauthor Gillian Matthews proposed that those brainstem neurons are part of a system of social homeostasis. Like a thermostat, they theorized, a mouse’s brain senses how much company the animal has been getting, and measures that against an ideal. This ideal can also be called a set point. In the human body, for instance, the set point for temperature is around 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit); when we deviate from that we’ll shiver or sweat. Likewise, the researchers suggested, the mouse’s brain drives its behaviors to maintain the right balance of social activity.
The scientists hypothesized that other animals, including humans, share this system. Though it’s not easy to test such a thing in people, Tye did team up with a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an experiment in which people sat alone in a room for 10 hours.
Afterward, subjects reported craving social interaction. When they viewed pictures of people laughing together, their brains lit up in the same region as the brains of fasting subjects who viewed pictures of food: an area, also within the brainstem, packed with dopamine neurons that are involved in cravings.
Our sense of touch may be an important part of our social thermostat.CREDIT: PHOTO BY PATTY BRITO ON UNSPLASH
For more evidence that this craving is part of a true homeostatic system, Catherine Dulac, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, looked in another part of the brain: the hypothalamus, a deep region just above the brainstem that houses control centers for hunger, thirst and our need for sleep. It calibrates each of these basic needs using a kind of neural thermostat — or, as Dulac likes to call it, a “bean counter.”
In the case of hunger, for example, scientists have found one set of neurons within the hypothalamus that drives appetite and tells an animal to eat. A separate set of neurons drives fullness — what biologists call satiety — and tells the animal to stop eating. Dulac guessed that she’d find a similar system in the hypothalamus for loneliness, comprising two sets of neurons: “one that encodes the need” for company, she says, “and one that encodes the satiety.”
In a study published in 2025, she and her colleagues isolated adult female mice for five days. On days one, three and five, each isolated mouse got to have a 10-minute visit with her sister. Peering inside the heads of the mice undergoing these separations and reunions, the researchers saw just what they were looking for: One cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus started firing when animals were isolated, and turned off when they were reunited. A second cluster of neurons did the opposite.
What’s more, when scientists used a technical trick called optogenetics to artificially activate the separation neurons every time the animals entered a certain chamber, the mice avoided spending time there. That suggested that these brain cells, when activated, give the mice a bad feeling. “It’s unpleasant to be alone, in the same way it has been shown that it’s unpleasant to be hungry,” says Dulac, who coauthored an overview of social interaction as a fundamental need in the 2026 Annual Review of Neuroscience.
But activating the opposite cells — the reunion neurons — led the mice to spend more time in the chamber. These cells are connected to the brain’s dopamine system, which doles out pleasure and rewards.
Aside from making us feel good or bad, Dulac says, the hallmark of a homeostatic system is a “rebound” effect — the greater the deprivation, the more an animal needs to make up for it. When we’re parched, we drink more. And the researchers saw the same thing in their mice: The longer a mouse had been isolated, the more time she spent following, sniffing and squeaking to the other one.
In a laboratory experiment, a mouse who has been isolated reacts to a reunion with her sister by sniffing, following and trying to crawl underneath the other mouse.
CREDIT: D. LIU ET AL / NATURE 2025
Dulac says that her findings in the hypothalamus and Tye’s in the brainstem probably represent different components of the same system. Other studies have found neurons in still more parts of the brain that may be involved.
Like our appetite for food, the mechanism for social homeostasis may be distributed through many parts of the brain, Tye says. After all, our brain needs to detect the amount of socializing we’re getting, compare it to an ideal, and then drive our behavior so we get more or less company.
The scientists also believe that the circuitry that senses and manages loneliness is likely to be similar in the human and rodent brains. Unlike our more recently evolved cortex, our deep brain regions look much the same as what’s inside a mouse’s head. A lonely human may be feeling the effects of wiring laid down long ago in our evolution.
The importance of touch
After studying female mice, Dulac has now turned to studying male mice, who have competing social motivators because they’re territorial toward other males.
Tye, for her part, has begun to look at females after studying males. So far, she’s observed that they get more and more social over time — unlike the males, which become antisocial after two weeks in isolation and don’t seem happy when reunited with other mice. “It’s like avoidant, territorial, get-off-my-lawn vibes instead of wonderful-to-see-you-again vibes,” Tye says. The scientists don’t yet understand this fundamental sex difference.
Intriguingly, researchers have also observed an antisocial effect in human prisoners subjected to long-term solitary confinement. In addition to other psychological harms, prisoners may stop craving social contact, and start to fear it.
Besides attempting to understand the differences between chronic and short-term isolation, researchers are also trying to learn how creatures use their senses to gauge how much company they have.
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In Dulac’s experiments, vision didn’t seem to be necessary: Blind mice reacted to separation similarly to sighted mice. Nor did scent or sounds hold the answer: When mice were physically separated by a perforated divider within the same cage — so they could still hear and smell their companions — they reacted as if they’d been fully isolated.
The only sense that seemed to matter was touch: The brush of another mouse’s body told mice they had a friend nearby.
When the researchers lined a tube with soft cloth for mice to walk through, they saw that isolated animals preferred the soft tunnel to a hard one. Like a weighted blanket for humans, perhaps, the touch of the furry walls made the lonely mice feel a little better.
Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neurobiologist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute who studies touch and was a coauthor on Dulac’s study, says the result didn’t surprise him. “It is consistent with touch being perhaps one of the most essential sensations for well-being,” he says.
Our sense of touch is not just one thing. Bodies have different pathways for processing different sensations, such as pain or itch — or social touches. We humans have specific neurons in the hairy parts of our skin, for example, that are activated by slow stroking. (Mice have related neurons.) And deep pressure, akin to a hug or a massage, activates a similar brain region to stroking touch.
Abdus-Saboor is now working with naked mole rats in his lab. These quirky, colony-living rodents are both the world’s most social mammals, and conspicuously cuddly. He hopes studying them will provide more answers about the connection between touch and sociality. He even thinks they might be better models than mice for social touch in humans, because their nearly hairless skin is more similar to ours than a mouse’s.
Naked mole rats are the only mammals that live in organized, cooperative colonies akin to those of honeybees or ants. They’re also extremely cuddly.CREDIT: BOB OWEN / FLICKR
These social touch neurons may carry signals from an animal’s skin to its brain that tell its bean counter it’s not alone, making the animal feel better. “If we can hijack this pathway, can this be used as a therapeutic to promote health and well-being? I think so,” says Abdus-Saboor, who wrote an overview of social touch research in the 2026 Annual Review of Neuroscience.
Even before scientists use this research to develop new treatments, Dulac says it highlights the danger of solitary confinement in prisons. “When individuals are left alone, their brain is just sending this danger signal: ‘You should not stay alone,’” she says.
Tye imagines that if scientists better understood the brain’s social bean counter, they could one day find a way to lessen the health effects of isolation. For now, she and coauthors suggest that spending time in a variety of social settings is the best way to buffer yourself against discomfort.
Before Covid, Tye recalls, she was always with other people. Then, “during the pandemic, I was alone a lot. And it was really stressful for me,” she says. She thinks that giving ourselves regular alone time, as well as time in small and large groups, can make us more tolerant of changes.
Because we’re not rodents, we might be able to get our social needs met — at least partially — in ways that they can’t. We can connect with a loved one through a call or text. Still, Tye says, touch seems to be especially vital.
Abdus-Saboor, who is married with two children, says he’s “very intentional” about touching his family: a supportive tap, a back rub. His kids are old enough to walk to school on their own, but he makes sure to check in before they go.
“It’s like, ‘Let me get that hug before you leave,’” he says.
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours,no feet but yours, Yours are the eyes through which to look outChrist’s compassion to the world.Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.”
~ Teresa Avila
Teresa of Ávila, religious name Teresa of Jesus, was a Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic and spiritual reformer. Active during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal, reforming the Carmelite orders of both women and men. Wikipedia
In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.
