The article is about severe social isolation, meaning you don't interact with another person in any way.

> the researchers had 40 socially-connected healthy human adults spend 10 hours (9am to 7pm) alone, with no social interaction and no other social stimulation (e.g., twitter, email, reading fiction).

I'm not even sure what I could do during the day to avoid social interactions to this extent.

I do wonder what the participants were allowed to do. It’s possible they just measured the effects of terminal boredom.

Yes, I understand that. But also from the article:

> Participants with higher levels of chronic loneliness at baseline reported less craving for social contact after 10 hours of isolation

Based on what the article states I guess this is similar to people that react differently to fasting; those that are used to loneliness for whatever reason (In my particular case I understand it to be my "natural" state) are better prepared to go through this.

I guess the idea was to be able to _really_ measure the effect of being alone in the least harmful way so they went all in (Not even allowing the participants to read) trying to make the time of the experiment as short as possible.