Brain activity differs among people who feel out of touch with their peers.
There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.
Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely people not only interpret things differently from their non-lonely peers, but they even see them differently from each other.
“Our results suggest that lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the research team, led by psychologist Elisa Baek, said in a study recently published in Psychological Science.
Feeling misunderstood
Previous studies have hinted at Baek’s findings. Feeling understood by others activates regions of the brain—the ventral striatum, middle insula, precuneus, and temporoparietal junction—that are related to social connections and reward processing, according to a 2014 study. That same study discovered that the brains of those who felt misunderstood showed more activity in regions associated with negative emotions, such as the anterior insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
For example, neurons that release dopamine—a neurotransmitter that can boost pleasure—are found in the ventral striatum. This is just one way that feeling connected can produce positive effects. On the other hand, the anterior insular cortex is highly involved with social interactions and emotions, including loneliness.
Studies like this made Baek want to see if there was something to an idea known as the “Anna Karenina principle.” Leo Tolstoy’s iconic novel Anna Karenina opens with the line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” To explore this idea, Baek and her team took functional MRI (fMRI) scans of the brains of 66 UCLA college freshmen as they watched short video clips of scenes associated with social interactions, such as parties and (of course) music that was supposed to be sentimental and could possibly trigger emotions.
Students participating in the study had already filled out a survey about how they felt about their social lives. Note that you can have lots of friends and a busy calendar but still end up feeling disconnected and misunderstood, which will affect the results of this survey. Those who scored above a certain level were categorized as “lonely,” while those who scored under that level were categorized as “non-lonely.”
The researchers then analyzed the fMRI scans, which show what is going on in the brain by measuring slight changes in blood flow that occur during neural activity. fMRI can also see which regions of the brain are engaged during specific activities; Baek’s team was looking for activity in those areas involved in socializing and the emotions that come with it.
Same feeling, different activity
The results of the scans were analyzed in pairs to search for intersubject correlations. This way, the researchers could identify similarities and differences in brain activity between lonely and non-lonely individuals and between any two lonely individuals or non-lonely individuals.
In this context, Tolstoy turned out to be right. The fMRI scans showed that the reactions of non-lonely individuals to the videos they watched were extremely similar. Lonely individuals had brain activity that was not only significantly different from that of non-lonely individuals but was even more dissimilar from each other, meaning that each lonely person in this study perceived the world in a distinct way.
Baek suggests that having a point of view different from others makes the lonely even lonelier, as they’re less likely to feel understood (though she does mention that it’s not clear whether this is a cause or effect of loneliness—or both). Loneliness also did not depend on social activity, as not every lonely subject lacked a social life. Even some of those who reported a decent amount of social activity in the survey, such as having many friends and participating in social events, exhibited neural characteristics that differed from those of non-lonely people.
“Lonely individuals process the world in a way that is dissimilar to their peers and to each other,” Baek said in the same study. “Future work can further test this possibility… to examine what aspects of lonely individuals’ interpretations are particularly idiosyncratic."
Anyone who is lonely can now be assured there is probably someone out there who feels just as isolated—just in a completely different way.
Ars Technica
