Scientists find that loneliness changes people’s thinking and speech 04:18

American scientists from Columbia University in New York discovered that loneliness affects people’s neural activity and manifests itself in their speech when describing someone or something famous. The research was published in the scientific journal magazine Communication Psychology (CommsPsy).

Loneliness is a subjective feeling of social isolation or lack of meaningful connections, regardless of actual social contact. It can occur due to life changes as well as social rejection or lack of supportive relationships.

Chronic loneliness is associated with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, as well as physical health problems such as weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease and increased risk of death.

The authors of the new study suggested that lonely people form mental representations of modern culture that differ from those generally accepted in their social environments. In other words, they think outside the box. Therefore, lonely people tend to feel that their ideas are not shared by others, which is a defining characteristic of loneliness.

Research has shown that socially connected people (such as friends or romantic partners) tend to have similar neural responses to popular cultural media.

Based on this, scientists hypothesized that lonely people would have different neural responses to popular topics (like celebrities) than the reactions of the majority in their group. Also, the way they talk about these topics will be unconventional.

Experts conducted a series of experiments using magnetic resonance imaging; During these experiments, a group of volunteers answered questions about specific celebrities. Among the participants, there were both those who were lonely and those who did not see themselves as lonely.

The test results showed that the lone participants’ neural representations of the celebrities were at odds with the rest of the group. This was also reflected in the textual descriptions provided by the trial participants.

Pairwise comparisons of participants’ brain responses during a celebrity rating task focused on the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in the encoding and retrieval of social information.

The researchers found that lonely people’s brain responses in this region were less similar to other participants’ brain responses compared to people who felt less lonely. This probably shows that single people are thinking about celebrities and other mundane things in more unconventional ways.

Previous scientists I learnedloneliness is not as dangerous to human health as it is thought.