Human Connection – A Lost Art?

How would you answer this question – Are people today more in tune with people or electronics? The answer is obvious when you look around you. You may be at a party, grocery store, doctor’s office and people everywhere are connected to their phones. Electronic devices offer many valuable services, but they can also cause some biological damage.

Barbara L. Fredrickson is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill contributed a fascinating article to the New York Times about this very subject. Fredrickson highlights the biological science between the brain-heart connection. The bottom line is that we need to exercise our ability to connect with others. If we focus on building human connections, our physical health improves. That’s a win-win!

In the article, Fredrickson comments, “When you share a smile or laugh with someone face to face, a discernible synchrony emerges between you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror each other. It’s micro-moments like these, in which a wave of good feeling rolls through two brains and bodies at once, that build your capacity to empathize as well as to improve your health. If you don’t regularly exercise this capacity, it withers.”

Let’s work hard to build a human connection. If we don’t, we might just lose it!