This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Vivek Murthy was seven years old when his mom

woke him up one night long after he'd gone to sleep. She rushed him and his sister into

that car. I remember piling back into the back seat and my sister was sleepy sitting next to me.

Vivek's parents, who were immigrants from India, ran a medical practice in Miami. His dad was a

physician as they raced through the night in the car. My parents told me that their patient

Gordon had just died after a long struggle with anesthetic cancer and we were driving to a trailer

park in Miami where Gordon lived because my parents were worried that his widow Ruth would be

grieving alone and to this day I will never forget like the image of my mother in her traditional

sorry standing on the steps of that trailer illuminated by the moonlight and embracing Gordon's

wife Ruth as they both cried and cried. And in that moment you know it struck me that

their their lives were so different routes and my mothers but in that moment they were family

like not the kind of family that's chosen for you but the kind that you choose for yourself.

Vivek is now a physician himself. He has experienced what it's like to be at the bedside of sick

patients to comfort the families of the dying. One lesson that has stayed with him is something he

learned that night when he was seven years old. In the final moments when only the most meaningful

strands of life remain it's really our human connections that rise to the top that's the clarity

that we get at the end of life. But it was my parents who taught me from the earliest ages that

we don't have to wait until the end of life in order to recognize and act on the power of connection.

This week on Hidden Brain we continue our relationships 2.0 series with a look at the hazards

of loneliness and how we can all live more connected lives.

Many years after the night when Vivek moved the watchtist's parents comfort the grieving widow

of a patient who had died he left Miami to pursue his own medical career. That journey took him to

...