Isolation provokes brain activity similar to that of hunger cravings: Study

Cambridge [US], November 28 : Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered the similarity between brain activities during isolation and the cravings people experience when hungry.
The researchers found that the brain activity of a person who has been hungry for a whole day is similar to that of a person who has been totally isolated for one day.
Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study said, "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."
The research team collected the data for this study in 2018 and 2019, long before the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns. Their new findings, described today in Nature Neuroscience, are part of a larger research program focusing on how social stress affects people's behaviour and motivation.
Former MIT postdoc Livia Tomova, who is now a research associate at Cambridge University, is the lead author of the paper. Other authors include Kimberly Wang, a McGovern Institute research associate; Todd Thompson, a McGovern Institute scientist; Atsushi Takahashi, assistant director of the Martinos Imaging Center; Gillian Matthews, a research scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; and Kay Tye, a professor at the Salk Institute.
The new study was partly inspired by a paper from Tye, a former member of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in which she and Matthews, then an MIT postdoc, identified a cluster of neurons in the brains of mice that represent feelings of loneliness and generate a drive for social interaction following isolation.
"We wanted to see if we could experimentally induce a certain kind of social stress, where we would have control over what the social stress was," Saxe says. "It's a stronger intervention of social isolation than anyone had tried before."
To create that isolation environment, the researchers enlisted healthy volunteers, mainly college students, and confined them to a windowless room on MIT's campus for 10 hours. They were not allowed to use their phones, but the room did have a computer that they could use to contact the researchers if necessary.
"There were a whole bunch of interventions we used to make sure that it would really feel strange and different and isolated," Saxe says. "They had to let us know when they were going to the bathroom so we could make sure it was empty. We delivered food to the door and then texted them when it was there so they could go get it. They really were not allowed to see people."
After the 10-hour isolation ended, each participant was scanned in an MRI machine. Before the isolation period began, each subject was trained on how to get into the machine, so that they could do it by themselves, without any help from the researcher.
"Normally, getting somebody into an MRI machine is actually a really social process. We engage in all kinds of social interactions to make sure people understand what we're asking them, that they feel safe, that they know we're there," Saxe says.
Each of the 40 participants also underwent 10 hours of fasting, on a different day. After the 10-hour period of isolation or fasting, the participants were scanned while looking at images of food, images of people interacting, and neutral images such as flowers. The researchers focused on a part of the brain called the substantia nigra, a tiny structure located in the midbrain, which has previously been linked with hunger cravings and drug cravings.
The researchers hypothesized that when socially isolated subjects saw photos of people enjoying social interactions, the 'craving signal' in their substantia nigra would be similar to the signal produced when they saw pictures of food after fasting. Furthermore, the amount of activation in the substantia nigra was correlated with how strongly the patients rated their feelings of craving either food or social interaction.