Loneliness can be depressing, but it may have helped humans survive

The Washington Post:

Loneliness not only feels nasty, it can also make you depressed, shatter your sleep, even kill you. Yet scientists think loneliness evolved because it was good for us. It still is — sometimes.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that being lonely ruins health. In one recent study, the risk of dying over a two-decade period was 50 percent higher for lonely men and 49 percent higher for lonely women than it was for those who did not experience feelings of isolation. According to some research, loneliness may be worse for longevity than obesity or air pollution.

Yet according to scientists such as John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, loneliness has evolved to protect us. He likens it to hunger: “When you get hungry, it increases your attention to finding food. We think that loneliness is an aversive state that motivates you to attend to social connections.”

And just like pangs of hunger, loneliness can feel like real pain — at least inside the brain. When people who had been put in a functional MRI scanning device played a computer game that allowed them to be rejected by other players, the areas of the brain that lit up when they were rejected were the same ones associated with physical pain. The experiment, by UCLA psychologist Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues, proved that the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain that becomes more active when we are in physical pain, also switches on when we experience the pain of social rejection.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post