How does loneliness affect the brain? with Bruce Hood #shorts #brain #psychology #loneliness

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Being excluded is such a painful experience.

[00:00:04]Ostracism is something which resonates painfully for all of us. And it begins early because when the child's in their home environment is fine, but when they go into the environment where their peers start to become more important, then they become acutely sensitive to the possibility of being excluded. To the extent it registers in the same regions of the brain where pain registers. So, in these studies, this is a magnetic resonance imaging study, they got patients to play a game and they they induced a sense of being ostracized by excluding the player, the patient. And what you find is that an area known as the anterior cingulate here lights up. This is the same area which lights up under pain. Pain, if you think about, is nature's way of warning you you've got to do something to change your behavior. Take your hand out of the fire and so on.

[00:00:54]And the same way, social exclusion or social pain tells you need you need to do something to change your circumstances.

[00:01:02]Not only is isolation problematic when you're young, it's really problematic as you get older. And this is an increasing problem of loneliness. Now, I don't expect you to be able to read all of this, but this is a meta-analysis, which is a study of all the studies looking at the morbidity risks for various factors. And here we have, famously, social relationships have a greater morbidity risk than more familiar ones such as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and alcohol consumption like exercise and obesity.

[00:01:30]So, being left alone is not just mentally distressing, it's physically distressing as well.