I lived overseas for a time in an area that didn't use English. I loved it, enjoyed being there, but one day I noticed that I was talking to myself! At first, it was just exclamations out loud (quietly) when something happened around me. It progressed to me describing or evaluating my meal, a book, a scene I was looking at. I realized it when I noticed ppl looking at me strangely (they normally did anyway), and as I looked back wondering why they were looking at me, it hit! I had been talking out loud to myself, normal volume! Why? I figure it was loneliness; but loneliness for hearing English. I was the only one who could speak it! And then it hit me again, a new found epiphany about all those "crazy homeless" ppl who I'd seen back home, muttering to themselves as they wander around. What if, instead of (or in addition to) being mentally unwell, they were just lonely, and having no one to talk to led to them talking to themselves? Whoa.
As someone who's considered himself lonely for most of his life, I can very much relate with the idea of feeling like an outcast, like an alien, someone who doesn't really fit in or understand what others find interest in. I think, in my case at least, it was probably related to being told over and over as I kid that I was doing everything wrong, that I wasn't acting manly enough, etc. Being told I didn't fit in led me to believe it. After a long journey of rebuilding my self-worth, I'm a lot less lonely this days, but I still feel it pulling at me, especially when I'm in a situation where I feel like an outsider.
I'm a state that resonates a lot with what you wrote, thank you for that. Checking out your bio I found out you have a very interesting blog, I really liked "Unexpected Benefits of Being Vulnerable on the Internet" as it's something that I often wonder about, how we condition ourselves to say things we believe will be accepted (and to receive upvotes) instead of what we truly feel, leaving our true self behind.
> Shared reality fosters social connections between people and increases confidence in one’s knowledge because it is corroborated by others. While lonely individuals report feeling disconnected from others in terms of their interests and ideas it was previously unclear to what extent this is true with respect to the zeitgeist—defined here as the widely shared perceptions between members of contemporary culture.
I kinda get what they were looking for but knowledge and description of "celebrities" seems like a poor metric for many reasons including somebody just not interested in celebrities. For example, one can be lonely but online all day and so very connected to the "zeitgeist." Or one can have many interactions with other people but never discuss
celebrities.
But, ignoring all that, the headline suggested that loneliness alters something in the brain akin to how blindness alters ones view of reality. Or maybe it's the different way of thinking and talking that leads to loneliness.
Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg
The celebs in the test. I'm not sure I could say anything meaningful about Bieber other than he's a pop star from Canada. Similar for Kardashian - Instagram influencer with lots of cosmetic surgery and makeup. Is the test expecting me to know other details beyond the completely inane and superficial?
It would be even worse if they tested on athletes. I haven't watched any of the big US sports in decades. NFL, NBA, MLB - no clue. I guess I could answer a few questions about World Tour cyclists, but that's not likely to be on a test outside of Belgium or Italy.
I agree with you, so I did some quick research and: Bieber is very well known by the general population, Kardashians moreso. A large majority (70%+) watch a moderate to significant amount of live sports on TV. Anecdotally, interacting with normal people at my job agrees with this.
We're the non-neurotypical people they're talking about.
Traveling across the developing world, I have been astonished at how many women even in countries with limited English skills follow the Kardashians (and the young men follow Andrew Tate). Yes, on one hand celebrities are silly, but on the other hand they have a global societal impact that nerds like us might not appreciate.
but see, we got our own celebrities and a way to talk about them. doesn't that kind of confirm the idea? the problem is just that the content of the test is to limited.
every group has their own language and people not in that group have a different one.
I don't understand how your comment relates to mine (or even the article). It feels like you're trying to correct me but I have no idea on what. Skimming through the other comments, I see numerous other criticisms of this article and study that you've ignored. I'm genuinely curious about why, of all the other comments, you chose to respond to mine.
From the article: "lonely individuals tend to perceive that their ideas are not shared by others"
I wonder how the current loneliness epidemic is intertwined with our current social/political climate and "us vs them" polarization.
I suspect almost everyone has some secret disagreements with their in-group, even if only by a matter of degree, but are afraid to voice that opinion. There have to be tens of millions of Americans who identify as a INSERT_POLITICAL_IDENTITY but disagree with some aspect of that group's platform, narrative or goals.
It's a wonder that anyone doesn't feel like their ideas are not shared by others.
> I suspect almost everyone has some secret disagreements with their in-group
This is assuming they have anyone close enough to even call them an in-group
I think there has been an over-emphasis on individuality and a strong resistance to conformity that has been instilled in a lot of people, which has led to a lot of those people cutting ties with anyone that has even minor disagreements with them
They are forever in search of their perfect friend group that doesn't exist, made up of only people who agree with them about every single thing
The study assumes too much, and falls into its own trap.
There is loneliness, and then there is solitude.
Loneliness can be induced through the outer world, through images and projections that obfuscate reality in favor of dopamine spikes, idolizing and fandom. Then it is internalized, and causes suffering. it is possible to experience loneliness even when you are surrounded by people.Even when you are a fan of bieber and zuckerberg.
In solitude you can recognize the images for what they are, you decide to live a life away from them. Of course you won’t care.
In any case, they seem to over-derive from the MRI results. They take samples from mechanical turk. Come on. This is a really bad study.
Interesting premise but did this article _feel_ off to anyone else? Maybe it was me , but did it seem a bit redundant while also not saying a whole lot?
Probably written by a lonely person. It expresses things in unusual ways and has repetition that is not typical when compared to articles written by non-lonely people.
> Loneliness corresponded with idiosyncratic [unusual, unique] neural representations of celebrities as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities
must be the best argument to date for being more lonely.
> Chronic loneliness is linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, as well as physical health problems, including weakened immunity, cardiovascular disease, and an increased risk of mortality.
A lot of pshycologists make that claim but I haven't found any compelling studies that prove it. Depression and axiety is understandable because we're social animals but the physical aspect isn't convincing unless the socially isolated person is lying around in bed doing drugs and eating unhealthy food all day. In that case instead of loneliness, we should blame drug abuse. It's unclear whether drug use is causing social isolation or if the latter is causing drug use.
All the studies I've seen so far have weak evidence and most of them don't address confounding factors. I'm no scientist but I'd appreciate if someone could point to studies with strong evidence about this claim.
> the physical aspect isn't convincing unless the socially isolated person is lying around in bed doing drugs and eating unhealthy food all day. In that case instead of loneliness, we should blame drug abuse.
It's important to remember that "linked to" does not mean "causes"
You are saying "we should blame the drug abuse and not the loneliness" but "linked to" doesn't imply blame at all already
Also yes, if there's a consensus on something, thinking different to said consensus would be unusual because it's not the usual. There are no value judgements in this article, so really interpreting this in any other way other than the literal sense makes you come off as defensive.
More to the article itself, I wonder which comes first, the unusual thoughts, or the loneliness?
"Our findings provide evidence that loneliness is associated with deviations from the zeitgeist, specifically when it comes to perceptions of well-known celebrities"
Soooooo... thinking differently than the majority of people may lead to loneliness, because those who think differently than the zeitgeist have a hard time connecting with the majority of people because of the way they think?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the abstract here, but doesn't this also suggest that lonely individuals more readily reach their own conclusions about common ideas and concepts? I can't get away from the thought that all this confirms is that groups tend to converge their thinking and speech through regular contact, and that different social groups (including groups of one) will diverge in thinking over time.
Meanwhile I don’t listen to anyone on that list except for Charli XCX because I arrived at her music from a rave/hyperpop background and then became a stan with her last album Crash in 2022.
I was tired of BRAT though about 2 weeks after release because I listened to the teasers so much… then it blew up and even attached itself to VP Harris…
Amusingly, calling a devoted fan of something a "stan" is a reference to an Eminem song. A lot of these people claiming they don't know who Drake is would probably recognize the meme even if they don't know his music.
Also, not a response to you, but rather the parent, that Destiny's Child and Eminem both released their debut albums in 1997. Not being a fan is one thing, but saying you've never heard a single song of theirs goes a bit beyond being out of touch with "today's" culture unless you define today as this entire millenium and a few years of the last one, too.
I recognize 8/10 as well, but like you, can't name actual songs from most.
Same would have been true if I was tested in the mid-90s (HS and college). Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Backstreet Boys - I know the names, but can't think of the names of songs. I'd test better on alt/grunge rock of the era - STP, Nirvana, REM, etc.
And I don't think I'm particularly lonely - I happily married, have a few office friends, and see normal friends regularly. I'm not as social as I was in my 20s, but I assume that's normal.
There are many cultures. You’re on HN, so my guess is you’re connected with today’s hacker culture. I’ve heard of 6 of those names, but can’t name any song from any of them. It just means I have my own interests.
These artists are definitely popular, but I doubt they are the most popular. The list doesn't fully match up with the most streamed artists list on Spotify, for example.
Both Google results and Spotify "most streamed artists" stats are heavily gamed, but in different ways and by different groups, so no surprise they diverge.
I thought they were saying they _had_ heard of 8 in 10? Strangely Karol G was also new to me. I'll resist searching for the name - I enjoy not knowing things sometimes.
Doesn't this just mean that some people don't connect with this kind of music. I don't. Possibly my loss but there's a lot of music out there and life is short.
Same result here, never heard about karol G and Charli XCX but to be fair, I find most modern pop music to be very manufactured and boring. People like Max Martin can create a lot of hits but it makes the music rather uninteresting.
Just listened to Brat from Charli XCX and yeah, not missing much.
I feel that when it comes to Music, being in sync with pop music is more of a generation thing.
On the other hand, I wouldn't describe myself as lonely... I'm not super social (I've worked remotely for 13 years because I don't particularly like working in an office) but I do meet up with friends 2 times a week (used to be more but with a kid at home, there's less time).
Charli XCX is a standard-issue pop singer. She's a brunette. She's probably best known for doing the singing bits on "Fancy", the only Iggy Azalea song you know (if you know any at all).
> Does that make me very disconnected with today's culture?
Just disconnected with pop culture. I only know 6 of the names on that list and can only name Brain Damage by Eminem off the top of my head. I don't know what Taylor Swift sounds like though I have probably heard a few of her songs in my day to day without noticing. Just don't worry about it and do what makes you happy.
Something that's been talked about every so often is that there aren't representative (generational) pop icons for the past few generations (probably from millenials onwards).
One theory from Japan, that I still remember and think is most likely, is that the democratization of entertainment since the 80s and especially from the 90s onwards with the invention of the internet has eliminated the very concept of pop culture.
Back in ye olde days a person's choices for entertainment were fairly limited, basically a small regional selection. People in the same locale ended up consuming the same entertainment and thus gravitated towards forming similar tastes and directing their fervor on that small selection of entertainment.
Entire generations identify with icons of their time like Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Elvis Presley, and so on. Entire generations sang "the song of their people" so to speak.
Today, though? Everyone can access any entertainment they want from anytime anywhere. The entertainment consumed by one person is very likely completely different from that consumed by a person right next to him; entertainment has been democratized. There is no longer a "song of our people" because everyone has a "song of me", there are no longer generational icons because everyone has their own icon.
The intense political push from the Left to make any form of social cohesion and loyalty undesirable also hasn't helped. The dismantling and removal of tradition, religion, and nationalism/patriotism from society means there can't be a "song of the people" from outside of entertainment either.
So no, I don't think you're disconnected with today's culture. Rather, today's culture doesn't value social cohesion and unity as much as it does freedom and power. Everyone has their own icon and song, everyone is their own generation.
Maybe Gen Z, but I'd say Millenials definitely had their generational Pop icons. Those icons simply did not live a good life once they left the spotlight. Like, most people I know don't really want to talk about Brittney Spears nor Micheal Jackson, even if they loved their music.
But I agree with your core point. There is no "Spongebob" of animation for Gen Z (except for... Spongebob. Maybe). There's no Friends, nor Breaking Bad of the 2010's/2020's. There's barely any individual movies that break the cultural zeitgeist period.
>The intense political push from the Left to make any form of social cohesion and loyalty undesirable also hasn't helped. The dismantling and removal of tradition, religion, and nationalism/patriotism from society means there can't be a "song of the people" from outside of entertainment either.
we can have social cohesion without resorting to nationalism nor religion. It's just that when you give people infinite choice, we diverge at best to the pareto principle. But 20% of society not being in the know is still a lot of society you fail to connect with.
> The intense political push from the Left to make any form of social cohesion and loyalty undesirable also hasn't helped. The dismantling and removal of tradition, religion, and nationalism/patriotism from society means there can't be a "song of the people" from outside of entertainment either.
Funny, because I don't think there is a "song of the people" on the right at all, while every leftist I know are all in on Charlie XCX and Brat Summer.
> Lonelier individuals were also more likely to use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities and to describe them in ways that were not typical for their group.
How is that surprising? If they are lonely, they are not part of the group and intergroup communication (including shared values, opinions, gossip etc).
The text fails to define "unusual" in a meaningful way other than "not part of the majority". It's like saying "we found that the minority tends to vote differently than the majority".
Indeed, I struggle to even imagine what "use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities" even means! Maybe like using "musician" rather than "artist" or some other combination?
edit: Ok, I've read through the paper, and still have no idea. Apparently the responses to questions were compared as semantic vectors using cosine similarity in Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder space. Or something lol.
and interestingly they say they share their data, but after looking through the data I don't see what I'm looking for, which is closest-approximate words for each celebrity.
Very unsurprising but perhaps still valid research that needs to be done to be known. A better conclusion might have been: increasing socialisation increases homogeneity of language use.
You can infer (with various degrees of fidelity) a lot about people by their communication patterns: age, gender, education, hobbies, reading habits, news sources, place of origin or residence.
And obviously, socialization.
This study suggests socialization is a(n inverse) proxy for loneliness, and there's surely some truth to that, but it is not the same thing.
> five well-known celebrities (Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg)
It feels weird to me to bundle a tech CEO and a former President of the United States in with a pop idol, a talk show host, and a reality TV influencer as "celebrities".
Why not? They are all celebrities. Celebrity status is not really correlated to the actual work they do [although some work requires some notoriety]. Gordon Ramsey's a restaurant owner and chef but he's also been on reality TV. Malala became internationally famous for being the target of an assassination plot, not her years of advocacy for women's education beforehand.
> Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds
That's not really what this article finds... the title is "Loneliness corresponds with neural representations and language use that deviate from shared cultural perceptions", but even that title is too general when it's only talking about a handful of pop-culture celebrities.
And also, remember when a researcher says "loneliness" they mean "self-reported loneliness," I know a lot of people with very little companionship who might insist they are a 0 out of 10 on the loneliness scale.
There's so many different ways to interpret this data:
Perhaps people who are willing to admit they are lonely (usually something that's very mildly frowned upon in my experience) are more willing to break with social norms. Or perhaps having wild takes on reality results in you becoming lonelier. Or perhaps a few outlier individuals really pushed the average. Or perhaps people who are less lonely are generally more knowledgeable/well-informed about these individuals. Etc etc.
> And also, remember when a researcher says "loneliness" they mean "self-reported loneliness," I know a lot of people with very little companionship who might insist they are a 0 out of 10 on the loneliness scale.
That seems reasonable. Lonliness is a subjective phenomenon. There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely. There are people who are desperate for interaction and get a lot but who are never satisfied. I can't imagine any other way to measure this than by asking.
But there are also people who believe they are fine alone but are negatively affected by it, and people who have lots of friends and interaction but nonetheless lack connection. People aren't very good at judging their own emotions.
Not having a better way to measure doesn't mean this measure is sufficient.
> Not having a better way to measure doesn't mean this measure is sufficient.
It necessarily does mean that. Empiricists (such as scientists) must work with the tools with which they are equipped. Sure you're not going to get deductively-true results out of it (true for any scientific field), and certainly psychological findings are on the emphatically less-certain side of the scientific fields, but that doesn't imply that results aren't meaningful.
Granted, scientific reporting is so terrible the hedging the (good) scientists engage in to reflect this uncertainty invariably goes out the window. But c'est la vie.
"People who self identify as lonely" is a different class of people from "people who are negatively affected". It's worth researching both groups. This study happens to be about the former.
"There are people who don't interact as much as other people but feel content about it and aren't lonely."
Yet the difficulty about self-reported degrees of loneliness, is that it doesn’t tell you how resilient a person’s contentedness is. Put that person in a crisis situation, like a suddenly precarious financial situation or a serious illness, and they might feel that they desperately crave human contact and were masking it before.
All of what you mentioned looks like a possible contributing factor, but this one stood out to me:
> Or perhaps people who are less lonely are generally more knowledgeable/well-informed about these individuals.
I'd go as far as saying, people who are less lonely are more interested in those individuals in the first place. Celebrities are social objects. There's nothing inherently interesting in life or personality of any specific celebrity - what makes them interesting is that other people know about them too, so discussing them is a way to bond with others, have fun, etc. Lonely people do less of that, so they have less of a motivation to care about celebrities in the first place.
> Prior work even finds that celebrities that generate common ground between strangers are disproportionately discussed in conversation, suggesting shared celebrity knowledge can provide a “foot in the door” to forming ties with others
Heh, I know that studying obvious things is the "bread and butter" of scientific study, but it's still funny to read sometimes...
"Hello, fellow coworkers! How about the local sports team, did you see them play last night?"
I was a standup comedian in the 1980s and was occasionally asked why “my people” were so funny, and it’s odd because there are a lot of things that are funny about us, but not the real answer to this one. We had to be, for thousands of years, or we died. If we had humorless dumb ones (and we do, but not as many, again, because of what happened to them, as well as quite a number of our best) they didn’t do as well.
I was also a clinical psychologist for a few years, and could say more on this, but some other time.
Jewish humor, gay humor, autistic humor… they’re all more similar than they are different. You learn, from atypical experience, to see everything one degree off and you have a story that people will listen to and eventually they might even like you. You see things three degrees off and you shut up so no one else knows. You get six degrees off and even you don’t know, but everyone else does.
This is why the male oriented dating communities call it “goofmaxxing” or “jester maxing” to get good at comedy for the purposes of attracting others.
The need to become funny for literal survival is among the worst of all humiliation rituals that most of us will be forced to do. I want people to be funny because they like being funny - not because they will literally not breed or be killed without it!
There’s also being funny not quite for attracting others, but for avoiding alienating people one has already attracted. As someone surely autistic somehow, I find myself making frequent jokes because I know my interlocutors don’t want to hear about the subjects I’d really like to talk about, so joking seems the least-offensive and least-effort part I can play in socializing. When I saw Mike Leigh’s 1987 short film The Short and Curlies, about a young man who reacts to every single thing with a little joke, I very much recognized myself.
Lonely people are weird because there's no social feedback loop, a lot of teachings are "self-taught" (for example how not to be an asshole), and even in engineering there's a "different" way self-taught engineers think
For a lot people this lack of a feedback loop started as children. In the worst cases, where there's child hood abuse and neglect, any seeking out of positive feedbacks either goes unheard or punished
The feedback loop reinforces itself in the short-term because being lonely and staying in the "hell you know" is better than dealing with the social failure, which might "prove" you don't belong in society and it will never change
Breaking the negative feedback loop is the hardest thing to do especially being born into it
> Breaking the negative feedback loop is the hardest thing to do especially being born into it
And it doesn't happen overnight. It's taken myself five years just to be at a level where by you can defensively stand for myself and look at myself in the mirror and be pleased at where I am. The only support being my mother.
Hence why the term “oversocialization” is more real than ever. Autists don’t deserve the hell they get just because everyone else around them was over socialized. It’s telling that these days, the majority of real advancements in the world are done by people with ASD. Maybe the world should try being nicer to them.
That's hard because of negativity bias. 90% of the world can be nice, but that 10% will stick out like a sore thumb. That strategy of "be nice" works on a micro level, but not macro.
terms like "oversocialized" suggest you spend too much time on imageboards and you would do well to get off those sites. same with "humiliation ritual"
Well, exactly. Parents poster is pointing out that the cause is ambiguous. Actually, technically, they are attributing causality to the opposite direction, but in practice, I'd say it gets the point across.
Feels like fancy neuroimaging being used to scientifically justify excluding people who don't conform to mainstream social norms. Classic case of using tech to medicalize being different. Also kind of makes sense from an evolutionary psych perspective - groups have always tried to identify and push out "others" for survival. But maybe in 2024 we can do better than using million-dollar brain scanners to shame people who see the world (oh sorry, “famous” people) differently?
Seems logical. If you're into medieval re-enactments, you'll have a much harder time connecting with people than being into the NFL. It'll be a blast once you find that group, but you're finding a needle in a haystack.
It's a bit why there's common advice (that I'm ambivalent on) in "if you're lonely, get a dog". Not just for the social factor, but because dogs are an almost universally loved pet and instant icebreaker for other pet owners or pet lovers. that first step to socialization is harder than ever.
The article has some weird stuff in it which makes the whole thing seem ridiculous (did we really need two paragraphs detailing the effects of loneliness?). The paper frames it much better:
So they tested disconnected individuals against connected individuals in the perception of socially constructed objects (celebrities). And they found that people who don't socialise much don't share that socially constructed perception. What else did they expect? Seems quite obvious.
This is a bullshit study. It is entirely based on trying to confirm a priori assumptions about ”lonely” people, who are seen by authors as pathologically abnormal.
> Chronic loneliness is linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, as well as physical health problems, including weakened immunity, cardiovascular disease, and an increased risk of mortality. Lonely individuals tend to experience lower self-esteem, heightened sensitivity to social rejection, and difficulty forming or maintaining relationships. They may also perceive social interactions more negatively, creating a cycle that reinforces their isolation. In older adults, loneliness is particularly concerning, as it is strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia. In children and adolescents, it can hinder social development and academic performance.
I think they are trying to learn more about it to see if there is something that can be done in cases where there are negative outcomes. Not where someone is alone and happy.
I find it strange that there's so much alignment in gen pop on how celebrities are perceived, and that any original opinion on these celebrities is considered "idiosyncratic". I feel like there's a Spiegelgrund being built somewhere for people who don't think Taylor Swift is the absolute cat's ass, because that means they're different and different is threatening.
Also, what constitutes idiosyncratic neural representation of celebrities? Back when Britney Spears became huge, my nickname for her was "the succubus", after a contemporaneous episode of South Park in which Chef fell under the sway of a succubus when she sang "The Morning After" to him. Britney Spears was clearly an idiot, and she had a weak voice compared to other female singers, yet when people saw her gyrating and mewling on MTV'S TRL they went absolutely bonkers and I didn't get it. Is that idiosyncratic celebrity ideation?
I agree with this interpretation. Plus, I don't think it generalizes that well. In my stomping grounds, there are three circles of trust where people tend to talk about different things:
- Outer circle: the weather, dead relatives (yes, dead relatives!) and "expensive vs cheap" but without actual figures.
- Middle circle: what to eat, where to travel.
- Inner intimacy circle (people who are okay sharing a bed): money with actual figures. But you may not discuss the salary.
Celebrities don't show up in any of the circles, because one needs a measure of lightheartedness and humor to deal with that topic and use it on gossip about somebody else... which is a combination not everybody can or want to manage...not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but it is what it is.
The article mentions a popular musical artist. Are there popular artists whose work you have an opinion on? Well then as soon as you express those thoughts, you are talking about a celebrity and this study says the way you talk about it may reveal something about you.
Surely you recognize that you are an outlier then. Most people have some opinions on at least one popular musician or actor or writer. If you don't, then I'm a little envious. There's so much great stuff out there waiting for you to discover it. I'd recommend checking out the Beatles.
> Interestingly, the study also revealed a particularly strong consensus among participants regarding the neural representations of Justin Bieber compared to the other four celebrities.
is this academic speak for “yeah…… that guy…… nope.”?
So many words used to convey so little meaning, what a waste of time. How do they think differently about celebrities, why, and is it a bad thing in and of itself?
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