Creation Moment 6/17/2023 - The Science of Gen. 2:18

And the LORD God said, 

It is not good that the man should be alone; 

I will make him an help meet for him.  

Genesis 2:18

 

"The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking. In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink. Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.

This may be why the emotional well-being of lonely individuals often follows “a downward spiral,” said Danilo Bzdok, an interdisciplinary researcher at McGill University with a background in neuroscience and machine learning. “They tend to end up with a more negative spin on whatever information they receive — facial expressions, texting, whatever — and that drives them even deeper into this loneliness pit.”

The default network — a collection of neural centers that are most active when we think about other people

 

Bzdok and his colleagues conducted the largest studies to date looking for signatures of loneliness in the human brain —Their results, published in 2020 in Nature Communications, revealed that the brain’s loneliness hot spot nestles within the default network, a part of the brain that activates when we are mentally on standby. “Until 20 years ago we didn’t even know we had this system,” Bzdok said. Yet studies have shown that activity in the default network accounts for most of the brain’s consumption of energy.

Bzdok and his team showed that some regions of the default network are not only larger in chronically lonely people but also more strongly connected to other parts of the brain.

Moreover, the default network seems to be involved in many of the distinctive abilities in humans — such as language, anticipating the future and causal reasoning. More generally, the default network activates when we think about other people, including when we interpret their intentions.

The researchers found that in all such individuals, the orbitofrontal cortex — a part of the brain linked to processing rewards — was smaller.

 

Recent brain imaging data supports the idea that loneliness is that

deeply rooted in our psyche. 

In one study Tomova underlined an important truth about loneliness: If just 10 hours without social contact is enough to elicit essentially the same neural signals as being deprived of food, “it highlights how basic our need to connect with others is,” she said.

Lieberz and her colleagues showed that lonely people struggle to synchronize with others, and that this discordance causes the regions of their brain responsible for observing actions to go into overdrive."

QuantaMagazine/MarataZaraska