After being alone, people’s brains showed increased responses to pictures of other humans
Cognitive neuroscientist Livia Tomova, then at MIT, and her colleagues had 40 participants fast for 10 hours. At the end of the day, certain nerve cells in the midbrain fired up in response to pictures of pizza and chocolate cake.In people who reported that they were generally more lonely, the social responses were blunted. “We don’t really know what causes that,” Tomova says. “Maybe being isolated doesn’t really affect them as much, because it’s something that is not that different, perhaps, from their everyday life.”
The midbrain, which plays an important role in people’s motivation to seek food, friends, gambling or drugs, responds to food and social signals even when people aren’t hungry or lonely. After all, a person always could eat or hang out. But hunger and loneliness increased the reaction and made people’s responses specific to the thing they were missing.
