Part of the process of maturing into adulthood is gaining control over our unbridled emotions and impulses. Loneliness diminishes that control, then causes more trouble as it engenders other negative emotions such as hostility and anxiety. When we feel lonely, people may see us as aloof, less than empathic, socially insensitive, perhaps even ungenerous, when, deep down, what’s really going on is that our cognition and self-regulation are being distorted by fear. But no matter how socially contented we are, none of us leaves our less controlled responses entirely behind.
The great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson was the first to recognize that during maturation, individual development follows the same general pattern of layered upgrades, rather than downloads and overwrites, that unfolded over the course of the brain’s evolution. This means that as we mature, rather than dispensing with our more infantile and animalistic impulses, we merely bring more sophisticated forms of processing online, which give us the ability to inhibit—sometimes only with considerable effort—those lower-level responses. This already complicated arrangement is further complicated by the fact that our neural wiring does not contain a simple, binary switch for good sensations and bad sensations labeled “pleasure” and “pain.” Instead, these sensations come in multiple varieties, and evolution sculpted them to operate as carrots and sticks both separately and in coordination across the many different layers of the nervous system.
Layering higher levels of function on top of lower levels allows us to make use of stimulus-response mechanisms from the spinal cord, brain stem, and limbic region when we need them: “quick and dirty” reflexive responses such as “baby falling—reach out to catch!” But we also have the more sophisticated cortical functions that allow for prolonged consideration, mental time travel, and nuanced decisionmaking.
Despite its advantages, maintaining the low road as well as the high road can sometimes be a prescription for anguish, ambivalence, and being at cross-purposes with ourselves. Loneliness, as we have seen, is a great enabler of such conflicts, causing us to seek warmth and companionship while at the same time allowing fearful perceptions to make us harsh and critical toward those we wish to be near.
Holding Your Horses
Plato saw human nature as a charioteer trying to control two horses, one representing our “noble” impulses, the other our unruly passions. But that dual responsibility would be child’s play compared with the complexity that neuroscience now shows us actually to be the case. The multiple neural pathways in our brains are not divided along simple lines such as good/bad, noble/base, logical/passionate; in fact, they are not even arranged in a typical hierarchy or a consistent chain of command. Instead, they are organized into a complex amalgam that the neuroscientist Gary Berntson has characterized as a “heterarchy.”
While the higher capabilities of the frontal cortex exercise executive control, the limbic region, or midbrain, serves as a processing platform for information and regulation. It takes in sensory information, transmits it up the chain of command, and then conveys the messages back down the line in order to carry out our intentions. But as we have seen again and again, both high road and low road are subject to the influences of social context, including whether we feel warmly included or distressingly alone.
The prefrontal cortex that is central to rational planning and deliberate execution of behavior is also critically involved in the regulation of emotion. When people are asked to reflect on themselves or on others, the prefrontal cortex is where we see heightened activation on brain scans.1 So this newest part of the brain is a charioteer with multiple reins. Higher-order control (working memory, attention, choice and decisionmaking) has the challenge of imposing order on lower-order processes such as affect, drive, and motivation. For instance, we have a reflexive tendency to spit out bitter substances. This response developed because the poisons we once encountered in our natural environment tended to taste bitter. Some cough syrups also taste bitter, though, and here is where a well-functioning frontal cortex comes into play. A child may cry and gag when given such remedies, but with maturity we learn to override those natural impulses and “take our medicine.”
The distributed arrangement of neural processing in the human brain also has the great advantage of allowing increased behavioral flexibility and contextual control. But we need the executive brain to filter out extraneous thoughts, focus our minds, and regulate our more deeply embedded, sometimes primitive, responses. And here again, loneliness gets in the way.
With the dichotic listening task described in Chapter Three, we gave participants conflicting auditory signals. In 1935 the psychologist John Ridley Stroop developed a way to measure conflicting signals that are cognitive. Psychologists, administering what became known as the Stroop Test, show participants a list of color names on a page, but the word “red” will be written in yellow or green, the word “yellow” will be written in blue or red, and so on. Then they ask participants to name the colors. The dissonance between the visual information (the color itself) and the verbal information (the word written out) interferes, causing a tiny delay as the participant tries to make sense of the competing stimuli.
We set up a test of interference based on the Stroop model by printing out various words on a page in many different colors.2 Among those random choices were some emotion words, such as “fear,” and social words, such as “compete.” The task was to name the color in which each word was printed. For the social words, participants who were lonely took a split second longer than those who were nonlonely to identify the colors. The delay indicated an interference effect. Even when the task had nothing to do with sociality, and with no awareness of any intention to do so, the lonely participants were scanning for, and being distracted by, social information. Social words associated with negative emotions, such as “torture,” ramped up the effect even more.
Just as dieters, despite their best efforts, find themselves trans-fixed by food, the lonely, far more than others, are focused on social connection and social rejection in everything they see and do. And thus even everyday social situations can do for the lonely what the sight of all that candy did for the mathematically adept chimp, Sheba, which was to trump her knowledge of how to play the game.
The Stories We Tell
A basketball-playing friend of mine used to wander into pickup games while traveling on business. Charlie looks the part—he’s tall and lanky—and in fact he’s pretty good. He was even on some championship teams in school, but he was always just a rebounder and a role player, never a shooter, and certainly never the “go-to guy.” But on one particular day, in an unfamiliar gym in a city far from Charlie’s home, the only thing the other players saw walking onto the court was a new face with some height. The men sorted themselves into teams and began to play, and the first time Charlie got his hands on the ball, he happened to be open just inside the top of the circle, so he took the shot and made it—nothing but net. One or two of his teammates gave him a nod, but no big deal. On their second possession, Charlie once again got the ball in good position, so once again he took the shot, with another beautiful arc that ripped right through the net. More nods this time, combined with a couple of smiles and a high five, but Charlie remained nonchalant—at least in the eyes of the other players. He tried to make it look as if he did this all the time. After all, nobody else knew anything about his twenty-year history of performance anxiety, inevitably passing off to avoid throwing up clunkers under pressure.
His teammates were feeling good now—obviously they had a scoring machine on board. And so it went for the next ten minutes. They fed Charlie the ball, he continued to shoot, and he went eight for eight from the outside, plus one spectacular drive to the basket. His team smoked the other guys, and then with a wave of his hand, Charlie said, “Thanks…gotta go,” and ducked into the locker room. Charlie’s deep, dark secret was that he was only impersonating a great shooter, and that it was time for him to quit while he was ahead. He had never shot like that in his life, but the luck of the first attempt had given him confidence for the second, which was then reinforced by his complete anonymity. For all the others knew, he was a smalltime Kobe Bryant. So, for that one brief scrimmage, he was.
Biased meaning-making is a powerful force that can help us reach new heights or keep us from getting out of bed in the morning. And, as we have seen in many other contexts, such an effect is not “all in our heads.” Whenever we fear that we might fail at an important task, this bias can cause us to handicap ourselves, producing insurmountable obstacles to our own success. But loneliness, and the egocentrism it generates, can turn this natural tendency into a serious and persistent state of affairs. Even when the important task is to achieve human connection, seeing ourselves as congenital outsiders, subject to threats, hungry and needing to be fed, undermines our best efforts. Then again, it is this same human ability to be the “architects of our own reality” that gives us the key we need to emerge from our solitary confinement.
When We Get It Wrong
As we try to determine the meaning of events around us, we humans are not particularly good at knowing the causes of our own feelings or behavior. We overestimate our own strengths and underestimate our faults. We overestimate the importance of our contribution to group activities, the pervasiveness of our beliefs within the wider population, and the likelihood that an event we desire will occur.3 At the same time we underestimate the contribution of others, as well as the likelihood that risks in the world apply to us. Events that unfold unexpectedly are not reasoned about as much as they are rationalized, and the act of remembering itself—even the “eyewitness testimony” offered in courtrooms—is far more of a biased reconstruction than an accurate recollection of events.4 Subtle reminders of mortality can push people to blame the victim. Female jurors are actually more likely than their male counterparts to believe that a rape victim somehow contributed to her fate. “After all,” the juror thinks, “if this happened to her without her behaving badly or taking stupid risks, then it could happen to me! She has to be somewhat responsible for what happened; otherwise, I can never feel safe.” We are also very poor judges of how long particular experiences will make us feel either good or bad. In virtually every domain we confirm what we already believed to be true. We say that opposites attract with the same certainty we express when we say that birds of a feather flock together. Or, as the sage of the New York Yankees Casey Stengel put it, “Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice versa.”
Amid all the standard distortions we engage in, as well as the kind of interference effects we saw with Sheba and the candy, loneliness also sets us apart by making us more fragile, negative, and self-critical. In one study participants performed a simple task, after which they received feedback evaluating their success or failure. The higher an individual’s loneliness, the more likely she was to attribute failure to something about herself and success to something about the situation.5 For the nonlonely public at large, it is far more the norm to see bad luck in one’s failures and to take personal credit for success, even when it comes on a lucky break.6
One of the distinguishing characteristics of people who have become chronically lonely is the perception that they are doomed to social failure, with little if any control over external circumstances. Awash in pessimism, and feeling the need to protect themselves at every turn, they tend to withdraw, or to rely on the passive forms of coping under stress that elevate their total peripheral resistance and, eventually, their blood pressure.7 The social strategy that loneliness induces—high in social avoidance, low in social approach—also predicts future loneliness. The cynical worldview induced by loneliness, which consists of alienation and little faith in others, in turn, has been shown to contribute to actual social rejection. This is how feeling lonely creates self-fulfilling prophesies. If you maintain a subjective sense of rejection long enough, over time you are far more likely to confront the actual social rejection that you dread.8
This process was demonstrated in another iterated prisoner’s dilemma game in which study participants, some of them lonely, some nonlonely, played against a person they didn’t know.9 In this version of the game, the participants played for money. Before each trial, players told their opponents whether they intended to act on the basis of loyalty or betrayal—but the opponents did not know if they were lying or telling the truth. If one player followed through on his stated intention but the other did not, the double-cross would lead to the trusting player’s losing the game. But this being a study and not just a parlor game, the opponent was, in fact, a researcher who pretended to be a study participant and who always responded the same way the real participant had on the prior trial—that is, the researcher used a tit-for-tat strategy. Because the researcher always copied the previous move, the actual participants were determining how the events unfolded, even though they did not realize this to be the case. During early trials, lonely and nonlonely individuals were equally cooperative. As play continued, however, and occasional defections occurred by players only to be followed by defections by their opponent, the lonely players became much less trusting. Their interactions devolved into consistent defection and acrimony. Meanwhile the nonlonely players, despite occasional defections by themselves and by the researcher, were generally cooperative throughout the game. The different social realities created by the lonely and nonlonely participants reflected their different default expectations about the nature of others.
The eminent American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan described loneliness as an experience “so terrible that it practically fables clear recall.” For young people especially, he said, the fear of ostracism is “the fear of being accepted by no one of those whom one must have as models for learning how to be human.”10
Seen in those terms, it is no wonder that loneliness evokes such feelings of dread, or that the young are often so desperate to connect with peers that they sacrifice their own identity as well as their good judgment. The fear of being excluded can make anyone, young or old, do foolish things, including self-defeating things. In an effort to protect themselves against disappointment and the pain of rejection, the lonely can come up with endless numbers of reasons why a particular effort to reach out will be pointless, or why a particular relationship will never work. This may help explain why, when we’re feeling lonely, we undermine ourselves by assuming that we lack social skills that in fact, we do have available.
Mind over Matter
Although he put the words into the mouth of Satan, John Milton summed up much of the human condition when he wrote:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
Shakespeare’s variation on the theme was to say: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”11
Human beings are inherently meaning-making creatures, and the lonely are hardly unique in interpreting social cues through a highly subjective lens. The human brain must take disparate, atomistic snips of sensory input and weave them all into a “theory of the case,” an interpretation of time and space, cause and effect, that allows us to survive today, plan for tomorrow, and make sense of the past. Ideally, the narrative we construct aligns with objective reality well enough for us to appropriately address the problems confronting us in the real world. However, there is no guarantee. Reflexively, the hypersocial human brain registers three dots in a triangular pattern as representing a human face, but sometime a pattern of three dots is merely three dots.
In the 1940s the psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel produced a brief animated film portraying a small triangle, a small circle, and a large triangle that moved around and into a large rectangle. The film was nothing more than these swirling geometric shapes, yet everyone who viewed it “saw” a social drama unfold, complete with intentions, plans, and an emotional subtext. This is simply the human brain doing what it does best—constructing a “reality” out of whatever sensory data it receives.12
In the same way that observers could find a story in moving geometric shapes, young children, before they develop theory of mind, promiscuously project their own thoughts and experiences onto other people. During the infancy of the human race, it was this same tendency, most scholars agree, that gave rise to early religions, in which natural forces were given names and complex personal histories—humanlike attributes that served as source material for the first myths and legends.
From Plato’s charioteer to Freud’s tortured subconscious, philosophers have seen a rational and admirable side of human nature combined with a darker, emotional side. But social neuroscience leads toward a more unified view. Because the emotional system that governs human self-preservation was built for a primitive environment and simple, direct dangers, it can be extremely naïve. It is impressionable and prefers shallow, social, and anecdotal information to abstract data. But the same irrational processes that can bring us down can also be the foundation of our finest qualities as human beings.
Hope entails irrationality. Positive illusions about one’s spouse contribute to longer and happier marriages.13 Without an optimistically biased weighing of the odds, few people would start new ventures. Going by the statistics alone, it is irrational for any individual to assume that he or she can start a successful business, paint a canvas that will sell to a serious collector, write a novel worth reading, make a significant contribution in science, or marry for life.
Bias also can result from the simple need to take cognitive shortcuts. Confronted with more information than we can possibly process, we tend to economize on thought when forming beliefs that are not immediate to our survival: beliefs about politics, culture, or religion. At other times we make choices while remaining completely unaware of the embedded images, preconceptions, and prejudices that govern our preferences. But it is the confluence of the rational and the emotional/irrational that determines much of the narrative of our lives. The same experience can be a challenge or a nightmare depending on how we frame it, the same glass half empty or half full. And it is this threat-surveillance system, coupled with hyperattention to social information—social information often distorted by a defensively egocentric perspective—that we need help escaping once we have slipped into a period of prolonged loneliness. This negative framing is the Catch-22 that makes people with a heartfelt and deeply rooted need for social connection wind up busily creating the very roadblocks that will frustrate that need. And that Catch-22 can ensnare any one of us at any stage of life.
A teenager walks into a party at his new high school, a twenty-something shows up for her first day at a new job knowing no one, an elderly widow attends an event at a friend’s church or club not long after the death of her spouse. A sense of isolation can make any of them feel unsafe. When we feel unsafe, we do the same thing a hunter-gatherer on the plains of Africa would do—we scan the horizon for threats. And just like a hunter-gatherer hearing an ominous sound in the brush, the lonely person too often assumes the worst, tightens up, and goes into the psychological equivalent of a protective crouch.
It is hard for most of us to be articulate about our emotions under the best of circumstances. It is that much harder when we have intense sensations of threat flooding our body with stress hormones, and no conscious awareness of what is causing us to sweat or to take rapid, shallow breaths. Accordingly, a great many of us spend a great portion of our lives acting a bit like agitated wind-up dolls, walking into the same walls again and again, wondering why we are trapped inside such a small, lonely room—a room that we ourselves have inadvertently helped design.
The Realities We Construct
Happily, the same cognitive capacity allows us to become conscious of what confines us, and to design doors and windows that open wide. But again, those liberating social cognitions don’t come with just a snap of the fingers.
The kind of “reality” we construct for ourselves also determines in large part how others view us and act toward us. They “see” the reality we construct, use it to define us, then act toward us on the basis of that assessment. That’s why gaining freedom from loneliness requires a bit of retraining, and a bit of discipline—because the mind’s tendency to twist reality into shapes unrecognizable to others is nothing transitory or superficial.
When we feel lonely, we are painfully aware that our social needs are not being met; at the same time, we have a greater tendency to see ourselves as having little control over our ability to fulfill those needs.14 The prejudiced opinions of others always play a role in this negative feedback loop. If people expect a new acquaintance to be fun and nice, they will behave in a fashion that draws out the pleasant and enjoyable side of that new acquaintance. If parents or teachers think a child is intelligent, they will do and say things that will encourage that child to exercise her intelligence. In one study, participants were introduced to opposite-gender partners after being told that the person they were about to meet was either lonely or not lonely. They subsequently rated the partners they had been primed to consider lonely as less sociable than the others. They also behaved in a less sociable manner toward the partners they expected to be lonely.15
When our negative social expectations elicit behaviors from others that validate our fears, the experience makes us even more likely to behave in self-protective ways that spin the feedback loop further and faster toward even more isolation.16
So while any of us may become lonely because of a genetic disposition coupled with an unfortunate situation, we remain lonely partly because of the manner in which we and others think. As the trap of loneliness becomes more a function of social expectations and aspirations, the literal reality recedes in importance.
One might expect that a lonely person, hungry to fulfill unmet social needs, would be very accepting of a new acquaintance, just as a famished person might take pleasure in food that was not perfectly prepared or her favorite item on the menu. However, when people feel lonely they are actually far less accepting of potential new friends than when they feel socially contented.17 Studies show that lonely undergraduates hold more negative perceptions of their roommates than do their nonlonely peers. This divide between the lonely and the nonlonely in their perceptions was even larger when the others being perceived were their suite mates, was larger still for floor mates, and was even more pronounced for students on other floors of their dormitories.18
Time also plays a role in constructing these negative “realities.” Researchers asked participants to interact with a friend, and immediately thereafter to rate the quality of the relationship and the quality of the communication. Participants then watched a videotape of the same social exchange and rated it again. A few weeks later the researchers reminded participants of their earlier exchange with their friend and asked them once again to rate the quality of interaction and communication. The participants watched the videotape once more and, once more, rated the interaction. At all four measurement points, lonely individuals rated relationship quality more negatively than did nonlonely individuals. But the further in time they were removed from the social exchange, the more negatively they rated it. They were especially negative after each viewing of the videotape.19 When they rated the interaction soon after it happened, it appears that their negative social cognition was reined in by their understanding of the reasons for their friend’s behavior. As time went on and memory for the underlying subtext faded, however, the constraints faded as well. The more time that passed, the more objective reality succumbed to the “reality” constructed by the lonely individual’s negative social cognition.
Despite their display of social skills in the study that specifically asked them to take on a supportive role, lonely students have been shown to be less responsive to their classmates during class discussions, and to provide less appropriate and less effective feedback than nonlonely students.20 All in all, the cognitive and behavioral distortions induced by loneliness can cause plenty of trouble, and that is before the external environment gets into the act. The world is not always benign, and even at the level of the chromosome, new research shows, it can be a jungle out there. The agenda of any given gene does not necessarily align with the plans and wishes of the individual it is passing through. Many genes, fragments of chromosomes, and stretches of noncoding DNA act in their own interest at the direct expense of other genetic elements. Some damage other chromosomes in order to get themselves replicated as part of the repair process. Others disable the transmission of all other chromosomes from father to offspring, making sure that affected males pass along only the renegade element.21
With such intense competition as part of the human condition at every level from noncoding DNA to the North American Free Trade Agreement, what kind of disadvantages do we suffer when a sense of isolation impairs our best thinking and behavior?