Lonely individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways | Hacker News Reader

Lonely individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways

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157 pointsPaulHoule96 comments

Todays threshold for lonely is yesterdays busy.

How far back do you have to go in time to get to people actually having time to themselves and walk (15+min) to get most places?

Idiosyncratism is increasingly rarer today than it used to be. There are so many pressures to homogenize almost anything you can think of to an intensely neurotic degree.

The best thing you can do to separate yourself from the pack is to find solitude and develop that distinctive perspective on your passion that you can wholly claim as your own and (hopefully) not futile.

Almost everyone who has ever lived in the past was parting a society where there was one communal view on almost everything. Having your own view is strikingly new.

You can read texts dating back to 2,400 years ago (and beyond). I strongly recommend them in fact. And suffice to say, no there was no "communal view" on most things, let alone everything. For one interesting example, Socrates chose not to write anything down. Most of everything we know from him came from his student, Plato. The reason is that he felt that words would end up distorted and, unable to defend themselves, may be used to misrepresent the views or values of the speaker. Obviously Plato disagreed.

Or another fun one. One of the first acts of the newly formed Athenian Democracy would be to charge Socrates with "corrupting the minds of the youth" and "impiety." And they ultimately decided to kill him over this, on a split [democratic] vote. Needless to say, views varied - to an absolutely extreme degree. To imagine there communal views on almost everything is just such an absolutely bizarre a notion to me. What led you to state/believe this?

Citing a few Athenians is basically the exception that proves the rules. Socrates in particular was executed for straying too far from community dogma. And this is one single city star during its golden age of philosophy. The whole history of humanity is a lot bigger that Greece in the 4th century bc.

Socrates was unique in his wisdom, yet hardly in his trend for debate. In literally all of human history for which we have even a semblance of reasonable record, there was widespread debate (which not infrequently would escalate to extremes) over essentially any topic imaginable. Even in topics that trend towards "natural" taboos, like religion, there has invariably been extreme debate.

Again I don't really understand how you could think people just held "communal" views on "almost everything" in the past. Can you offer literally even a single supporting example?

There is morning fact widespread debate for as long as we have a written record. The first several hundred years of writing are basically commercial records, royal edicts, a few prescriptive religious texts, and some poetry.

For example for most of human history, your community had a religion and set of etiologies explaining how the whole world worked. To disagree was to cast one’s self out of that community or to be cast out.

That's simply untrue. What today we refer to as misinformation and conspiracy theory was just rumors from the traveling merchant.

The most obvious examples of this is in ancient history how few political issues were actually campaigned on compared to today. Today every politician needs a public stance on hundreds of issues. Do you think that applied in ancient Rome or the various city states in Greece? People didn't care as much. There was less exposure to information, less granularity, and less individual empowerment.

Often times what separated politicians wasn't even the issues, it was their client base and direct familial connections. Issues were a secondary consideration.

Today, it doesn't matter what connections you have if you have the 'wrong' stances, even if trivial in fact (they don't have to actually believe or pursue them in office outside of token gestures) the performative dance politicians have to go through today is strikingly different than any time before. Thats directly because of homogenization of thought and how intensely voters value it.

True isolation is also rare these days. Difficult to spend years in your cabin when you have been conditioned to 10 second internet dopamine injections since childhood.

Loneliness and busyness are not antonyms.

yeah, I completely got confused because of this skewed used of the words. I have no clue he/she is saying.

Loneliness today is frequently a consequence of overstimulation and total withdrawal from our local environments, so even when we stop there's no social infrastructure to find comfort in.

Busyness 'yesterday' would be in such a state of stimulation you would have no time to involve yourself in your local environment as you usually do.

Basically, we've inverted our social time to be default overstim & withdrawn instead of default understim and present.

In many places in Europe it is perfectly possible to walk to shops and, say, to public transport. People choose not to but they could they have the time.

> How far back do you have to go in time to get to people actually having time to themselves and walk (15+min) to get most places?

I'll say this is my now in London. Like, sure I'll get the tube when it's gonna take me more than an hour to walk somewhere, but basically everything I need day-to-day is within 10-minutes walk.

Not far back you could know the tens or hundreds of people within a ten minute walk, and now you know virtually nobody of the thousands of people living in a 15min walk radius.

Also what people were doing was around tangible objects intuitively understandable to you, rather than “services” consisting 90% of the economy whose name or function or hiw they relate you will never know.

>Todays threshold for lonely is yesterdays busy.

The world, media and HR are run by extroverts.

The extroverts are advised by introverts, however.

Social people assume they're normal, and so does the study author. I prefer to be alone most of the time. I don't feel misunderstood nor isolated by others; I isolate myself. Not everyone, but in general, people are annoying, and worse, people suck. There are plenty of astoundingly good people, but not in crowds. As that great isolated Danish individual once wrote, "the crowd is untruth!" When I do spend time with others, it is usually one on one, with my girlfriend or a close friend. They're aware of my distaste of being around lots of people, and they don't mind. They're social. I don't begrudge their socializing. Also, from time to time, I am active in public theater, on stage, back stage, front of house, wherever, but I don't hang out with actors. They're the worst.

By definition people who participate in society at large, and end up sharing their views with the rest of society, are normal. That’s the meaning of the word. How much value being normal has, pretty much varies across cultures.

People who are perpendicular to the ground are normal.

Politicians participate in society at large, you really think they're normal? I think you should probably question your assumptions, because regarding people, there is no normal, by definition or otherwise.

So if you don't really like people or interacting, what drives you post here? We're people, and a pretty large crowd.

A Turing Test of you will show I can't tell wtf you are.

As an AI language model, I strive to provide helpful and accurate responses to the best of my abilities.

I found this quite interesting. So lonely people do indeed see and experience the world in an idiosyncratic way. I wonder how these individuals do in our modern world of life, are they successful (in the ways our society's usually deem with career and money etc) or are they not able to operate in it? Is there a certain type of job they fall into? For example are they entrepreneurs who try to change the world to a view that they see as possible, that would make the most sense to me. Trying to create a place of belonging

The title implies a causation that might be flipped.

It could mean "I'm lonely, so I think unlike everyone else." This doesn't make a lot of sense. Would people do it out of spite?

More likely "nobody thinks like me, so I am lonely."

The way it's phrased, I would guess they're after funding to spot idiosyncratic thinking to detect loneliness. Imagine if, based on the videos you like to watch articles you read, etc., they could detect that you were lonely, then target ads . . .

> It could mean "I'm lonely, so I think unlike everyone else." This doesn't make a lot of sense. Would people do it out of spite?

Makes sense to me actually: I wouldn't say it's even necessarily conscious, but the less you interact with others, the more you can become set in your own ways and create pathways to seeing your beliefs as truths.

I am (and esp have been) pretty lonely, and this is it, there's no sanity tests for thoughts. In good situations, other people provide a grounding, stabilizing influence. Without them, the mind has to do this by itself, leading to some pretty extreme overcompensating and "just so" stories.

Are you lonely by choice or by circumstance? And if you could change anything would you?

It can be good or bad.

I read one analysis of those who saved/hidden Jewish people during WWII. They tended to be socially isolated people, a bit outside of society. That is what allowed them to not fall to group think and to overcome fear. (The analysis was done by some Jewish institute).

Terry Pratchett put it well, I think: “Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings.”

I so miss his mind and view points! What a legend ! Brought me hours of smiles :)

When I was lonely and isolated, I did started to think differently. Not out of spite, it just happened automatically. We adjust to each other all the time. We change behavior to match others. When we talk with people, our opinions become more alike. But when you are lonely, you change in own way and become out of sync.

That is why it is difficult to reenter socialization after long loneliness. There is gap between you and others, you feel lonely even if people are there. It took years to fully get back and for a while I thought I never will.

The study acknowledges that:

> Although it is unclear whether the observed idiosyncratic processing in lonely individuals is a cause or a result of loneliness, the associated lack of shared understanding may lead to challenges in achieving social connections.

I'm a lonely person who spends almost all of his time alone. I work remotely and don't have any friends or family in my city. All of my "socialization" just happens at work, online.

I'm doing well as a software engineer, but I have no ambition or long term goals.

Just my anecdote. I feel like there's not going to be a consistent pattern, and you can probably find people like me in any line of work, and with a wide range of personalities.

You don't need to alter your beliefs to conform to a social group. I often say stuff even on hn that is apparently wildly controversial but I arrived at that belief on my own yet people accuse me of being part of wildly different political groups.

There are two main types people in this category as well. Those at peace with their situation and those that aren't. Controlling for this in a study like this one is crucial in my opinion.

But on your comment about consistent pattern, I agree.

For whatever reason, I would prefer to not have friends and even be hated than accept something I know to be wrong. But that also means when i myself am wrong you would need to reason and change my mind which is too much for most people. I find most people want to conform to some larger group, but if I don't belong to any group anyways then why not take advantage of that and find truth, even if i am wildly wrong at times maybe I can be authentic.

What I learned is that the world and other people owe me nothing but the opposite works too. But if I seek truth and take time to reason and understand how things work and what the root causes of different issues are then at least I can help change my situation and if I help others then my help would be based in truth and will eradicate problems at their core not at the surface level.

No plans to get married and have children?

That is often the default plan, but not necessarily a goal for everyone.

Nope

This is fascinating to me - my own situation is similar, but I do not consider myself lonely. I also have the pleasure of working remotely and don't have friends or family close by. I don't miss the awkward chaos of interpersonal social interaction in the flesh, nor do I engage in the use of social media.

I'm also employed as a software dev and assume that I must be filling my social well with banal Zoom meetings. I, too, have no specific ambitions or long-term goals beyond living as comfortably and well as possible until my meaningless little stretch of life reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Everybody needs somebody to love. It could be anybody. You just need someone to love.

Seriously, are you ok? Life doesn’t have to be meaningless, but that’s up to you. You get out what you put in.

It's nice to have somebody to love, and to be loved by somebody.

But you don't really need it. And being alone is better than be in company of toxic people. A surprisingly amount of people are toxic to have around. Being alone and feeling lonely are entirely different things anyway.

And life being meaningless is not really a bad thing, maybe it depends on how a person faces its meaninglessness. I happen to cherish it. I enjoy my meaningless moments.

This is really interesting!

I think my life would be much less complicated if i had the same feeling.

I always thought that most people that are most of the time alone, would be lonely. Especially because you hear a lot of old people trying to talk a lot to the people who help (cook/clean/shopping) because they tend to be lonely.

So suppose one day I would loose my close friends and family, there's a chance i could be happy on my own?

> Everybody needs somebody to love. It could be anybody. You just need someone to love.

Why?

Song lyrics tell us so it must be true.

Maybe just some thing to love is fulfilling. For example a hobby?

Similar here. Mostly alone, but not lonely (thanks in part to HN?). I usually manage to hang out with someone once a week or so (mostly, they come visit me to surf with me). That feels just about right. I do worry, though, about what happens if I get sick or injured.

In our country, the government helps people who are sick or injured, financially and materially. I hope it is the case in your country as well.

Hah, that would be nice! Unfortunately, I live in the USA. Where are you?

Belgium aka the country that was referred to as a 'hellhole' by a former US 'president'.

I'm alone more often than not because I'm idiosyncratic, not the other way around.

You're not alone in that

This is how you can be surrounded by people and still be lonely when your views differ from the group.

It's also why social media can be such a positive force in peoples lives, and a potential negative in banning under 18s from all social media as was discussed in relation to a recent story.

Lonely UNIVERSITY STUDENTS Process the World in Idiosuncratic Ways.

*first year University Students, if I read that correctly. The first year is so wild, because you haven't quite found your social circle yet.

Isaac Newton denied the Trinity privately. He was a "success", though different.

I'm so tired of people using science to preach and prosletize.

The past was better when feynman/einstein/ect was the 'model scientist'.

Put me to sleep, this guy's thesis was summarized by his own admission, in the first sentence of Anna Karena.

Give us a new physics to learn. Open our minds, science!

The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina is: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

When we focus on our differences does that lead us to feeling lonely? Is that a reason for the trend in depression? If so does it mean we need a more balanced view, one that also reveals to us what we have in common with others?

"The participants in our study consisted of first-year students at a large public university (University of California, Los Angeles) in the United States."

Selection for ease of of obtaining the sample.

You might be surprised, and possibly alarmed, at the number of psychology studies (including some of the most well known) that are based on cohorts of undergraduate students at the institution conducting the study.

Can confirm. Most psychology undergraduate classes at research universities offer free/extra marks for research participation. Most studies leverage purely these participant pools, with behavioural psych perhaps being the area where this is seen the most. As such, most behavioural psych PIs at these universities won't even budget for research participant honorariums.

Mine required participation in at least 3 studies.

I feel like undergrads who are participating in a study only because they’re told to will shift the results a bit.

My initial thought was "Yes, you're absolutely right. That must shift the results", and I think that selecting for any particular subset of the overall population will shift it, but given that the researcher is already using a convenience sample (i.e., easily available college students) is it really going to change it more than the convenience sample already does?

Like, I can see there being a difference between a truly random sample from the overall population vs. students who are required to participate, but how much of a difference are you going to see between local students who volunteer vs. local college students doing this 'as part of their homework'.

Yeah, the biggest problem seems to be taking a bunch of extremely hormonal 18-20 year olds in an awkward and idiosyncratic social situation (university in general, and often forced dorm life for undergrads), and then calling that a universal study of human nature. Over and over and over again.

I once participated in a study in college for $50. I was not studying human sciences.

When I took intro psych in 1986, we were required to do 3 studies, but some of the studies did offer cash. Those usually were the first to get filled. I think I only got money for one of the three.

It’s not the only thing to shift the results. I took one of those surveys asking the classic question of whether I’d like money now, or a decent bit more money in a few months.

There I was, earning nothing, a little shy on cash, but I had a job offer in a few months for a decent little software job. I said I preferred the money now.

Uhhhh doesn't that violate informed consent? "Participate in a study or don't graduate" doesn't feel as consensual as research ethics normally require...

I went to what was called a laboratory school tha was part of the education department at a large state university. They would pull us out class occasionally and wire are heads, stick us in a black room and ask about a small white dot.

No idea what it was about but must have been research.

Oh yeah, I did that study for my TA once. It was something about reaction time or visual tracking or something like that. I was distracted, though, because my TA was really hot.

I ended up quitting the Psych major with one credit remaining, and begrudgingly grinded through CS instead.

> I ended up quitting the Psych major with one credit remaining, and begrudgingly grinded through CS instead.

So you graduated a CS major with a double minor in Math and Psych? Interesting.

Huh? There was definitely no math involved - I would never have graduated if there were!

Incidentally it was a double CS + Psych that I started with, but I abandoned the psych portion and did the entire CS part in the last two years. Would not recommend.

fyi, computer science is a subset of mathematics, the "computer" part sort of gives it away, because what it really means is "one who computes, factors, reckons." To be more clear, CS is Math. My CS degree, and most others I am aware of, had a built-in math minor, i.e. 22 credits of the 60 credit degree were courses from the math department, including discrete math, two years of calculus I, II & III, linear algebra, statistics, differential equations, number theory, and numerical analysis. If your CS degree didn't include any mathematics whatsoever, then your alma mater didn't prepare you to find work as a computer scientist. And if being only one or a few credits shy of a psych degree didn't earn you at least a psych minor, I'd ask for my tuition back with a lawsuit.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy

Extra flow to regions could just be lonely students being happy to be part of some social activities like a study /s

indeed, it’s easy to get stuck in your own spiral, ever inwards.

“it is not good for persons to be alone”, indeed.

I’m curious whether 1:1 vs group based social interaction might play a role.

Is it also ones own subjective self belief of their idiosyncrasy vs objective differences that plays a role?

Are the idiosyncrasies based on content of thoughts, or the methods of coming to them?

People are strange When you're a stranger Faces look ugly When you're alone Women seem wicked When you're unwanted Streets are uneven When you're down

Sad this was downvoted; it was the first response I related to.

When you're strange, faces come out of the rain.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disord... for a kind of neurodivergence you’ve never heard of although it affects 5% of people but there is no autism-industrial or stimulant prescribing community of practice to promote it.

In case anyone else was wondering, it's the opening verse to The Doors' People Are Strange[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHaGrZkkv4

Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever. All I know can be shown by your acceptance of the facts there shown before you. Take what I say in a different way and it's easy to say that this is all confusion

Another one of these, eh? I have a really hard time believing that FMRI studies like this tell us anything useful.

There are repeatibility concerns, e.g. see this article from the same journal as the original link posted here: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620916786 , but that's not what bothers me the most.

What bothers me is that FMRI only measures blood flow, and people get tricked into thinking it's reading minds or revealing personalities. It just measures blood flow -- not electrical signals, not neural architecture, not thought. Sure, if you map that in high res 4D you're going to get lots of data and when you have lots of data you can find lots of patterns. When you can find lots of patterns you can publish lots of papers and fund yourself.

If there is a significant effect here, the paper should at best be titled "Lonely individuals have blood going to slightly different parts of their brains than non-lonely individuals." Ok, maybe... so what? Is this going to lead to some breakthrough therapy? No, it's going to be used to build further castles in the air. It'll be cited in other FMRI studies.

I don't have medical training, but my experience publishing and reviewing papers in science gives me a strong gut feeling that this stuff is worthless other than as a way to amplify bias and mint papers.

Feels tautological to me almost. And of course reinforces that “those others that don’t think like the hive mind are BAD!!!” Which I find problematic.

Brains are incredibly more complex than simple blood flows indicate. I’ve read that the DNA of individual neurons morphs in the storage and recall of memory. Feels a stretch to use fMI and really anything singular to grasp at what’s going on. And feels grounds for abuse taken too seriously.

Brains are different one day to the next. They’re clearly going to be different one person to another.

Exactly. Blunt instrument, tautological reasoning. "The different people's heads are different!" History will group these studies with phrenology.

>FMRI only measures blood flow

Isn't it more like a measure of metabolic activity?

Indirectly. The idea is that when cell metabolic rate increases, the brain's circulatory system compensates by dilating vessels to increase flow to that area. (EDIT: this is wrong, see below)

But the fmri is measuring change in decay time caused by change in blood oxygenation rather than change in flow rate, right? And that's a relatively direct measure of local metabolic activity (at least for some metabolic pathways).

You're right, and I didn't know that. Thanks for educating me. Apparently it's called BOLD-contrast imaging. Time for me to go read about haemodynamic response since I didn't know that was a thing.

Well, it would be some amount of physical proof for this maybe?

"The models also revealed new evidence of specific and non-specific associations, including the first evidence of a potential benefit (creativity) associated with unsociability."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

It seems that the statement "blood flow doesn't tell you anything about neural activity" is definitely not true: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/brain-metrics/what_does...

Also, it seems dangerous to suggest rejecting studying a specific area because the scientific tools and our understanding around it are currently limited - this is what science is for after all. If we thought this way, we wouldn't have nutrition research.

Nutrition research is famously inconsistent though?

Terribly so. So we need more high-quality research, not to stop researching it. The scientific method can only get better by putting it in practice.

Or we need to recognize some fundamental limits on what is measureable

>What bothers me is that FMRI only measures blood flow, and people get tricked into thinking it's reading minds or revealing personalities. It just measures blood flow

So? It can still be a great proxy for thought processing in different areas of the brain, which is what is used for.

For example one would expect a brain to show very small blood flow while creating a shallow HN dismissal.

> It can still be a great proxy for thought processing in different areas of the brain

It's a great proxy for energy being used in different areas of the brain.

The concept of 'thought' is not crisply defined, and lots of brain activity doesn't correspond to what we usually mean by the folk idea of 'thought'.

Too late to edit my comment, but I want to note that I was misinformed that FMRI just measures blood flow. BOLD-contrast imaging is sensitive to oxygenation of haemoglobin, and it measures haemodynamic response, I just learned. So it's a little bit closer to information about actual neural activity. Thanks to thfuran below for pointing out this error.

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