Feeling out of sync with others, even when discussing a celebrity or well-known singer, could be linked to how the brain functions. A recent study shows that lonely people not only have fewer friends; they think and talk about what everyone knows in an unusual way.
Researchers point out that chronic loneliness is a subjective feeling: one can feel lonely even when surrounded if they believe that no one truly shares their vision. This enduring feeling is associated with more depression, anxiety, and health concerns, including in how the brain and language process others.
In the brain, celebrities seen differently To explore this, Timothy W. Broom and colleagues conducted two studies published in the journal Communications Psychology. In the first study, 80 students around 20 years old underwent fMRI scans while evaluating their own traits, those of others, acquaintances, and well-known celebrities like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, or Barack Obama.
They examined the medial prefrontal cortex, a critical region for processing social information. In the loneliest participants, the activation patterns related to celebrities resembled less those in the rest of the group. In other words, the brains of lonely individuals formed more atypical mental images of these figures from popular culture.
Unusual words among lonely individuals The second study took place online with 923 adults. After completing the UCLA Loneliness Scale questionnaire, they had to describe with their own words a familiar celebrity as if introducing them to a friend. This method mainly targets chronic loneliness, not just temporary sadness.
Researchers then analyzed these texts with the Google Universal Sentence Encoder, which estimates the similarity of meaning between two sentences. The loneliest participants wrote descriptions less similar to others and more often claimed that their view of celebrities was inaccurate or not widely shared, feeding the impression of not seeing things like everyone else.
When shared reality breaks down among lonely individuals “A shared reality fosters social connections between individuals and increases confidence in one’s knowledge because it is corroborated by others. Our results provide evidence that loneliness is associated with deviations from the mainstream, especially concerning the perceptions of well-known celebrities.” “Loneliness corresponded to idiosyncratic neural representations of celebrities, as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities, especially when there was otherwise strong consensus among less lonely individuals. The feeling of lonely individuals that their ideas are not shared by those around them is more than a metaphor; it is objectively reflected in an idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary culture that diverges from the consensus,” they write, as cited by PsyPost.
