A recent US study has urged experts to find solutions for the growing social isolation caused by the pandemic restriction because it may have a significant effect on both the physical and mental health.
Many past researches examined the impact of chronic loneliness on health, but a study published in the latest issue of the Nature Communication journal, found ample evidence that it is bad for our physical and mental health.
A team of researchers from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that when people crave company, the same part of their brain lights up as when they crave food. The research supports the intuitive notion that socializing is a basic human need, akin to eating.
According to a report by The Medical News Today website, the team has compared the brain activity of people after they fasted for 10 hours with activity after being deprived of social contact of any kind for 10 hours.
The neuroscientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify any changes in the volunteers' brain activity, compared with a normal day, when they looked at pictures of their favorite food or people enjoying socializing.
They discovered that a tiny region in the middle of the brain called the substantia nigra became more active not only when socially isolated participants looked at images of socializing, but also when hungry subjects looked at pictures of food. Neutral images of flowers, used as a control condition, failed to activate the substantia nigra.
"These results prove that people who are forced to be isolated crave social interactions similar to the way a hungry person craves food. Our finding fits the intuitive idea that positive social interactions are a basic human need, and acute loneliness is an aversive state that motivates people to repair what is lacking, similar to hunger," senior author Rebecca Saxe, from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT wrote in the Medical News Today report.
"We now plan to investigate how social isolation affects behavior and whether virtual contact, such as video calls, can ease cravings for social interaction," she added.