隔离的孤独感会引发大脑类似于饥饿的渴望

隔离的孤独感会引发大脑类似于饥饿的渴望

People are starving for human contact.

人们渴望与人接触。

As the US approaches nearly one month since the coronavirus pandemic prompted Americans to isolate themselves from family and friends outside the home, many have been chiefly concerned with boredom or newly upended routines. But those who live alone are suffering from an emotion far more insidious: loneliness. For some, the compulsory solitude has already become too overwhelming to bear.

自从冠状病毒大流行，美国人与家人和朋友隔绝已经接近一个月了，许多人主要关心的是无聊，或者是刚刚被打乱的日常生活。但那些独自生活的人正遭受着一种更可怕的情感:孤独。对一些人来说，这种强制的孤独已经让他们无法承受。

A nationwide study reported this week that 53% of Americans said they had felt lonely or isolated within the past week, particularly those in the 18-to-29 and 30-to-49 age ranges — groups that may be more likely to be single and childless. While mental health plays a considerable role in how individuals cope with being alone, scientists have recently come to reveal that the hungry brain looks strikingly similar to the lonely one.

本周的一项全国性研究报告称，53%的美国人表示他们在过去一周内感到孤独或被孤立，尤其是那些18- 29岁和30- 49岁的年龄段——这些年龄段的人更可能是单身和无子女的。尽管心理健康在人们应对孤独的过程中扮演着相当重要的角色，但科学家最近发现，饥饿的大脑与孤独的大脑惊人地相似。

A prescient new study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology being previewed in BioRxiv prior to peer review is the first to show that both loneliness and hunger trigger deep centers of the human brain eliciting feelings of desire and craving. They say their findings suggest that the need for social interaction is as primordial as the need to eat.

麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)的研究人员在同行评审之前在BioRxiv发表了一项具有先见之见的新研究，该研究首次表明，孤独感和饥饿感都会触发人类大脑的深层中枢，引发欲望和渴望。他们说，他们的研究结果表明，对社交的需求和对吃的需求一样是原始的。

Neuroscientists Livia Tomova, Rebecca Saxe and their team say they had no idea how timely their research, which began more than three years ago, would be today — as COVID-19 forces people around the world to seek shelter and socially distance themselves for the near future. In fact, they hardly could imagine a world outside of prisons where the scenarios they tested would be played out in reality.

神经科学家利维娅·托莫瓦、丽贝卡·萨克斯和他们的团队说，他们不知道他们三年多前开始的研究在今天会有多及时——因为COVID-19迫使世界各地的人们在不久的将来寻求庇护和社交距离。事实上，他们很难想象在监狱之外的世界里，他们所测试的场景会在现实中上演。

“I sometimes struggled to articulate what that would be like in the real world,” Saxe told Scientific American. “Why would that ever happen?”

萨克斯告诉《科学美国人》说:“我有时很难说清楚在现实世界中那会是什么样子。”“为什么会这样呢?”

By the time Saxe and her colleagues were writing the study, their worst-case scenario had become the new normal.

当萨克斯和她的同事们写研究报告的时候，最坏的情况已经变成了新的日常。

“What feels most significant about this paper is that it’s a way to step outside the experience we’re having and look on it through a different lens,” Saxe said.

萨克斯说:“这篇论文最重要的意义在于，它是一种超越我们现有经验的方式，并通过不同的视角来看待它。”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists compared brain responses in 40 healthy adult volunteers after 10-hour deprivation periods forcing either loneliness or hunger. The rules on food-deprivation day were simple: No eating or drinking anything but water.

科学家们使用功能性磁共振成像技术(fMRI)，比较了40名健康成年志愿者在被迫孤独或饥饿10小时后的大脑反应。食物剥夺日的规则很简单:除了水，不能吃或喝任何东西。

Evoking loneliness was less straightforward, as some people crave regular social interaction, while others are more comfortable with solitude. To create the most consistent feeling of loneliness, participants were confined to a stark room at a lab with no phones, computers or novels, as some might have been inclined to bond with the characters. From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., they were allowed only puzzles and pre-approved nonfiction reading or writing.

唤起孤独感则不那么直接，因为有些人渴望有规律的社交活动，而另一些人则更喜欢独处。为了营造最一致的孤独感，参与者被限制在实验室的一间简陋的房间里，没有手机、电脑或小说，因为有些人可能倾向于与角色建立联系。从早上9点到晚上7点。在美国，他们只能玩猜谜游戏和阅读或写作非小说类书籍。

Immediately following the sessions, the volunteers were subjected to brain scans, focusing on a midbrain region called the substantia nigra, as well as visual cues, such as images of food or hugging, meant to induce craving. An active substantia nigra indicates a strong wanting that is produced by a dopamine release.

实验结束后，研究人员立即对志愿者进行了脑部扫描，扫描的重点是中脑的黑质区域，以及一些视觉线索，如食物或拥抱的图像，这些都是用来引起渴望的。活跃的黑质表明强烈的欲望是由多巴胺释放产生的。

“We found that this brain area specifically responded to the cues after deprivation but only to cues of what they had been deprived of,” said Tomova — meaning that periods of solitude were not soothed by pictures of participants’ favorite snacks. The brain’s response correlated with the subjects’ self-reports of how lonely or hungry they felt, though their reported feelings of hunger were consistently stronger than feelings of loneliness.

托莫娃说:“我们发现，被剥夺食物后，大脑的这一区域会对暗示做出特定的反应，但只对那些被剥夺了的暗示做出反应。大脑的反应与受试者自我报告的孤独感或饥饿感相关，尽管他们报告的饥饿感始终强于孤独感。”

The scientists put their results through AI analysis to trace neural patterns between the two brain states, which told them “that there seems to be an underlying shared neural signature between the two states,” Tomova said. “Social contact is a very basic need.”

科学家们通过人工智能分析来追踪这两种大脑状态之间的神经模式，这告诉他们“这两种状态之间似乎有一个潜在的共同的神经特征，”托莫娃说。“社交是一种非常基本的需求。”

Tomova and Saxe hope to continue their study, particularly to reveal how social media impacts loneliness — for better or worse.

托莫瓦和萨克斯希望继续他们的研究，特别是揭示社交媒体是如何影响孤独感的——无论好坏。