Lonely people can turn to fictional characters for belonging: Risch – Dainik Savera Times

New York: The boundary between real friends and favorite imaginary characters becomes blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others. This has been revealed in a new study. For the study, researchers at Ohio State University in the US scanned the brains of people who were fans of ‘Game of Thrones’ while they thought about various characters in the show, their real friends and all the participants.

‘The difference between those who scored highest on loneliness and those who scored lowest was huge,’ said Dylan Wagner, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University. The researchers involved scanning the brains of 19 self-described fans of the series. Whereas, he thought about himself, his nine friends and the nine characters of the series. Participants’ brains were scanned in an fMRI machine while they rated themselves, friends and ‘Game of Thrones’ characters.

fMRI indirectly measures activity in different parts of the brain through small changes in blood flow. In the fMRI machine, participants were shown a series of images, sometimes their own names, sometimes one of their nine friends’ names, and other times one of nine ‘Game of Thrones’ characters.

The team wanted to know what was happening in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which shows increased activity when people think about themselves and other people. They simply asked participants to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether the characteristic accurately described the person? Whereas, the researchers simultaneously measured activity in the mPFC part of their brain while the participants were thinking about their friends and fictional characters, then compared the results.

Researchers conducted study by analyzing brain patterns in MPFC
‘When we analyzed brain patterns in the mPFC, real people were represented very differently from imaginary people in non-lonely participants,’ Wagner said. But, among lonely people, boundaries begin to break down. You don’t see clear lines between the two groups.’ The findings suggest that lonely people may turn to fictional characters for a sense of belonging that they lack in real life, and the consequences can be seen in the brain, he said.