Loneliness? It’s all a state of mind

Researchers from UCL have found that lonely people have less grey matter in a part of the brain associated with decoding eye gaze and other social cues. Published in the journal of Current Biology, the study also suggests that through training people might be able to improve their social perception and become less lonely. "What we've found is the neurobiological basis for loneliness," said lead author Ryota Kanai (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). "Before conducting the research we might have expected to find a link between lonely people and the part of the brain related to emotions and anxiety, but instead we found a link between loneliness and the amount of grey matter in the part of the brain involved in basic social perception."  To see how differences in loneliness might be reflected in the structure of the brain regions associated with social processes, the team scanned the brains of 108 healthy adults and gave them a number of different tests. Loneliness was self-reported and measured using a UCLA loneliness scale questionnaire. The idea of training is one way to address this issue, as by maybe using a smartphone app to improve people's basic social perception such as eye gaze, hopefully we can help them to lead less lonely lives - Ryota Kanai When looking at full brain scans they saw that lonely individuals have less greymatter in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)-an area implicated in basic social perception, confirming that loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues.