New understandings into the neural activity associated with loneliness could help people improve the way it could be treated, a study says. It may also lessen the many effects on mental and physical health linked to feelings of sadness.
A ScienceAlert report says that according to research entitled "Cognitive and Neural Correlates of Loneliness and Wisdom during Emotional Bias," the brains are reacting to loneliness in a nearly exactly opposite manner to the manner they are reacting to feelings of wisdom.
This contributes to a growing body of research suggesting that the wiser an individual thinks he is, the less lonely he feels.
While the link between loneliness and wisdom has been identified before, this is the first time researchers have been able to observe its apparent association on the neural level.
Loneliness and Wisdom Linked to Emotional Biases
According to Jyoti Mishra, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego, they were interested in how loneliness and wisdom are linked to emotional biases.
Meaning, she continued, they got interested in how people are responding to different positive and negative emotions.
Involving more than 140 participants whose age ranges from 18 to 85 years old, and with the help of electroencephalogram or EEG brain recordings, Mishra, together with her colleagues focused their attention on the TPJ or temporal-parietal junction.
TPG, as described in JNeurosci, is a brain hub where information, both internal and external, is collected and processed.
Participants were provided with a self-assessment survey to assess their feelings of wisdom and loneliness. They were also asked to complete a simple cognitive test while a choice of faces with positive or happy, negative or sad, threatening or angry, or neural expression were exhibited in the background.
As a result, self-evaluated lonelier people were most distracted by the angry faces. As indicated in the study, published in Cerebral Cortex the cognitive processes of their TPJ slowed down.
The wiser individuals though, responded more to the happy faces, speeding up the cognitive processes of their TPJ.
The neural responses were, in various ways, opposites, depending on whether a person was feeling sad or wise.
Link Merely Not a Result of Subjective Biases
The study authors found too, that the lonely-angry reaction resulted in more activity in the left superior parietal cortex of the brain which is essential for allocating attention.
Meanwhile, the wise-happy reaction resulted in more activity in the left insula of the brain which handles social traits like empathy, for one.
Dilip Jeste, a neuropsychiatrist, also at UCSD said, this research shows that the opposite link between loneliness and wisdom that they detected in their previous clinical studies is at least partially implanted in neurobiology, and is not merely an outcome of subjective biases.
While the research team says much more studies will be needed, including analyses on people for a longer period of time, this research does not offer a helpful indication of how lonelier people are processing information in the brain.
It does not seem that age has something to do with this processing of information although with loneliness now reaching what researchers call 'epidemic' levels, any assistance that medical experts can get in handling such feelings, including their effect on both mental and physical health, should be useful.
Essentially, the brain's TPJ part is being examined as well, as a way to treat certain conditions including tinnitus and auditory hallucinations, and it is possible that some sort of neural stimulation could help alleviate a strong feeling of loneliness too.
BrainFacts.org presents on its YouTube video below, related information on how the brain processes information:
RELATED TOPIC : Your Happiness Might Very Well Be Inherited, Says Scientists
Check out more news and information on Brain in Science Times.
