Can bringing the joy of travel, discovery, and old memories to people who can’t experience them firsthand combat the physical and mental affects of loneliness and isolation?
Ninety-two-year-old Estelle Paris has never been to France, but on a warm day this past June, she slipped on a virtual reality headset, which allowed her to meander through streets by the Louvre, pop over to Mont Saint-Michel abbey 230 miles away, stop by Times Square in New York City, and journey underwater, just for a few minutes, to see some dolphins up close. Before taking off the headset and returning to her room at Neville Place assisted living facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Paris also visited her childhood home in Buffalo, New York—a place she moved away from around age 10—and virtually “walked” up and down her street by tapping a button on the side of the headset.
“It looks a whole lot different, but that house here, that looks familiar,” she says. “When I think of Buffalo, I think of snow. People didn’t ordinarily shovel their walks, the way they do in Boston.”
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If the world seems like a lonely place to you these days, science confirms you’re right. A 2006 study conducted by scientists from Duke University and the University of Arizona examined how social networks and social isolation changed between 1985 and 2004 by looking at two separate population samples. While researchers anticipated that the two populations would have core social networks of roughly the same size, they found that network sizes shrank by about 30%. Most disturbingly, the number of Americans who reported having only one (or no) contacts they would feel comfortable sharing personal matters with increased from about 25% of the population to nearly half, a sharp increase researchers thought might be partially due to societal shifts away from activities that foster community or neighborhood ties. Fast forward a few years, and despite the many socially connective technologies that have arisen in the interceding time, loneliness is still a widespread problem that affects one in three Americans over age 45 and nearly half of those over age 60.
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Source: Fastcoexist