The Neurology of Loneliness By Mrs Vera West
I have been covering the problem of loneliness in modern degenerate society, being alone myself, apart from my two black cats, who hate each other, and live at the house in relays. Now it seems, loneliness can eat away at one’s neurology.
“Neural activity in our brain can show whether we are experiencing loneliness, scientists say.
US researchers claim sociable people show similar 'stamps' of brain activity when they think about themselves and their friends.
In comparison, brain activity in lonely people is more skewed, leading to more dissimilar activity patterns when they think about themselves and others.
While social connection with others is critical to our mental and physical well-being, how the brain maps our relationships with other people has long been a mystery.
Researchers therefore used 'functional magnetic resonance imaging' (fMRI) scans to record brain activity while people thought about themselves and others.
fMRI scans measure brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.
In particular, researchers looked at the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) – a brain region that has been associated with self-representation, or how we see ourselves.
The findings revealed new insights into how our brain maps out our social connections and perceptions of friends.
'If we had a stamp of neural activity that reflected your self-representation and one that reflected that of people whom you are close to, for most of us, our stamps of neural activity would look pretty similar,' said senior author Meghan L. Meyer, assistant professor at the Dartmouth Social Neuroscience Lab in Hanover, New Hampshire.
'Yet, for lonelier people, the neural activity was really differentiated from that of other people.'
The study was comprised of 50 college students and community members ranging from the ages of 18 to 47.
Before going in an fMRI scanner, participants were asked to name and rank five people whom they are closest to and five acquaintances.
During the scan, participants had their brain activity recorded while they thought about themselves, close friends, acquaintances and celebrities at different times.
For each category, they were asked to rate how much a trait described a person on a scale from one to four, from 'not at all' to 'very much'.
In addition, they reported their subjective 'closeness' to each target.
The brain seemed to cluster people into three different categories – oneself, one’s own social network and well-known people, like celebrities.
The closer participants felt to someone, the more their brain activity patterns resembled the pattern seen when they thought of themselves, which scientists labelled the 'self-other' overlap.”
That is all very well and good, but the core question is what is to be done about the alienation produced by mass society? Getting rid of mass society and returning traditionalism would be nice, but may need a civilizational collapse to occur.
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