I somehow doubt that it's a purely socially ingrained tendency though.
It wouldn't surprise me if many of us develop similar traits of isolation even when cut off from internet too not just physical interaction.
One thing I've always been really curious about is how an experienced meditator like a Buddhist monk would deal with forced solitary confinement. I think they would probably do much better than the average, untrained person. Now that would be a really interesting experiment.
Yeah, if I was isolated I would use it to my advantage and meditate. Perhaps I would exit enlightened :)
The story of Yuri Nosenko looks very similar to the main protagonist of Zweig's last book, written in 1942. A must read about solitary confinement, about chess, about the Nazis, about a lot of things actually.
"Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away)."
It seems that isolation works like a virus attack, slowly rendering the mind incapable of working properly. Somewhat like a mental Gom Jabbar. Some people at least seem to fight back by consciously creating stimulation. Hack and Counter Hack.