Comparing the brain scans of lonely people to those of those who don’t experience loneliness, a researcher from the USC Dornsife Department of Psychology identified substantial changes in the patterns of brain processing carried out by the two groups. We now know, as a result of new research, that people who are lonely appear to have a different and one-of-a-kind way of perceiving the world, in contrast to those people who aren’t lonely and whose brain information processing patterns are comparable to those of people who aren’t lonely and who do not experience loneliness.
Find out more about the new study below.
It was surprising to find that lonely people were even less similar to each other. The fact that they don’t find commonality with lonely or nonlonely people makes achieving social connection even more difficult for them. The ‘Anna Karenina principle’ is a fitting description of lonely people, as they experience loneliness in an idiosyncratic way, not in a universally relatable way, explained Elisa Baek, assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife.
In this study, Baek and her team examined the brains of 66 first-year college students (ranging in age from 18 to 21) while they viewed a series of video clips using a neuroimaging method called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The films covered a wide range of topics, from wild party scenes and intense athletic events to upbeat music videos, giving viewers a wide variety of situations to dissect and evaluate. The data present a number of fascinating ideas.
The researchers found that lonelier individuals had more distinctive and unique neural processing habits than their counterparts who were not lonely when they compared the results from brain imaging between the groups of lonely and “nonlonely” individuals. The study also implies that the degree to which a person interprets the world in an idiosyncratic manner may be influenced by the fact that social connections and disconnections change throughout the course of an individual’s lifetime.
