Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways

Summary & key facts

Researchers scanned the brains of 66 first-year university students while they experienced the same natural scenes and stories. They found that students who felt lonelier showed brain responses that were more different from their classmates, especially in brain areas involved in thinking about yourself and understanding others. This suggests lonely people may literally perceive or interpret the same events in more unique ways, which could help explain why they often feel misunderstood.

Key facts:

• The study measured brain activity with functional MRI in 66 first-year university students while they experienced the same naturalistic stimuli (everyday-like scenes or stories).
• People who reported higher loneliness had brain responses that were less similar to their peers than less-lonely people did.
• The biggest differences were in parts of the brain known as the default-mode network, which are linked to thinking about yourself and imagining other people's minds.
• The link between loneliness and unusual brain responses stayed even after the researchers accounted for age, background, how many real-world social contacts someone had, and whether people were friends with each other.
• The findings do not prove loneliness is caused by these brain differences, but they raise the possibility that being surrounded by people who see the world differently—even friends—might make someone feel more lonely or misunderstood.

Abstract

Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people's mental processing of naturalistic stimuli and tested whether lonely people actually process the world in idiosyncratic ways. We found evidence for such idiosyncrasy: Lonely individuals' neural responses were dissimilar to those of their peers, particularly in regions of the default-mode network in which similar responses have been associated with shared perspectives and subjective understanding. These relationships persisted when we controlled for demographic similarities, objective social isolation, and individuals' friendships with each other. Our findings raise the possibility that being surrounded by people who see the world differently from oneself, even if one is friends with them, may be a risk factor for loneliness.

Topics

Functional Brain Connectivity Studies Health disparities and outcomes Mental Health Research Topics

Categories

Cognitive Neuroscience Life Sciences Neuroscience

Tags

Biology Cognition Cognitive psychology Default mode network Developmental psychology Feeling Isolation (microbiology) Loneliness Microbiology Neuroscience Psychology Psychotherapist Social cognition Social isolation Social neuroscience Social psychology

Conditions & symptoms

Feeling disconnected from others