3.2 A Neurosociological Interpretation of Isolation
3.2.2 Two Kinds of Pain and the Cingulate Cortex
Lieberman and Eisenberger (2009) point to the fact that linguistically (and thus metaphorically), we assume that both social and physical pain are anatomical pro- cesses when we say, “he broke my heart” or “Oh, my aching heart.” Researchers found that people in 15 countries, other than the United States including non- European ones, use words for physical pain to describe social pains. Taking these metaphors at their word, Lieberman and Eisenberg propose that social and physical pain are also literally related in the brain to the extent that a common brain structure enables both. Social pain is, indeed, actually physical, at least in the sense that it is enabled by the physical matter of the brain and the two can be differentiated only cognitively by their separate causes. Most “heart-broken” persons would no doubt agree. Finally, we must consider the utter contrast in intensity between the pain of rejection when someone does not respond to an e-mail request for a dinner invita- tion and the pain experienced by a lover or spouse who discovers that his or her lover whom they trusted more than anyone on earth was having a long-lasting affair.
Intense personal losses are not available for research purposes, but Hsu et al.
(2013) find that the emotion of empathy is enabled by the very same brain areas that enable social rejection. The empathetic pain of watching a friend’s exclusion acti- vated the same areas, the dorsal anterior cingulate and the insular, that are involved in mild social rejection – and this activation was correlated with the self-reported identification with one’s friend. When a stranger was excluded, the brain activation did not occur as it did with a friend.
3.2 A Neurosociological Interpretation of Isolation
38
They follow this by an important statement: “… other brain parts than the one making physical and social pain possible must also be involved in these feelings.”
This is a frequent occurrence in the brain where interconnections among brain parts are typical. In the experience of pain, these brain parts are the somatosensory cortex, insular, and the right ventral prefrontal cortex.
The common structure that processes both types of pain is the cingulate cortex (Fig. 3.1). The front or anterior cingulate (blue) part enables physical pain, along with the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, ventral stratum, and midline thalamus.
Social pain is enabled by the back or rostral (yellow) part of the cingulate cortex.
Panksepp (1981) has observed that drugs intended to cure physical pain also worked to ease the pain of social isolation. This led Nelson and Panksepp (1998) to suggest that in evolutionary terms “the social attachment system may have piggy- backed onto, or developed out of, the physical pain system which has older phylo- genetic roots than the social pain system” (Lieberman and Eisenberger 2009: 169).
Remember the brain is a “tinkerer” and builds the new out of the old.
In three separate examples of a frequently replicated experiment, Leary et al.
(1995) found that subjects reported feeling the pain of exclusion after being told that they would be working alone because no one in the group wanted to pair up with them.
Baumeister and DeWall (2005) told participants that based on their answers to questionnaires, they would most probably end up alone in life even though they presently had numerous friends. Then the authors gave them IQ and GRE style tests on which they performed more poorly than those who had not been told they would end up alone.
Williams and Sommer (1997) arranged for two confederates who were waiting for an experiment to begin, to start throwing a ball to each other and include a naïve subject. Then they stopped throwing it to him and just threw it to each other. In all of these experiments, results included lowered self-esteem for the subjects, increased aggressiveness on their part, and increased conformity to group norms. The
Fig. 3.1 Locations of kinds of pain in the brain
3 What Is Social About the Human Brain
39
ball- tossing experiment was then replicated with a computer simulation and called
“cyberball.” Even when the subjects were informed that the other two players were fictional, they still reported genuine feelings of social pain.
Other experiments place participants in scanners while they experienced exclu- sion and they showed a similar sensitivity. In one case (implicit inclusion), persons were placed in “hyperscanners” (Montague 2007). Here, several persons simultane- ously communicated with others who were in hyperscanners while their brain activ- ities were recorded. Using such scanners, participants were told that there was some technical difficulty which meant that they could watch, but not throw or catch the ball. This arrangement was such that no normal participant could take this exclusion personally. Yet, they did experience it personally and it hurt.
For the final hyperscanner study, all participants played catch for 50% of the game, but the other two hyperscanner confederates excluded them for the rest of the game. Participants were then released from the scanners and asked to fill out a ques- tionnaire assessing the degree of social pain that they experienced. The researchers also had the additional information about brain activity. Although other brain cir- cuits were also involved, the cingulate cortex was strongly correlated with the self- reports of social pain. Recognizing that correlation is not cause, this connection does imply that a common enabler of both social and physical pain is the cingulate cortex. As far as this author knows, such scanners exist only at Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech Carillon Research Institute.
David Hsu et al. (2013) take a very different slant to this by way of mounting the first study of the brain’s opioid system. He starts out aptly enough by dismissing the old schoolyard saying, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Hsu placed people in hyperscanners, and even though he warned them ahead of time that this was just a game, he had them experience social rejection in the context of an online dating program whereby the person was rejected when they asked for a date. He then tracked the brain’s opioid responses. Areas known to be involved in physical pain were most affected – the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, ventral stratum, and midline thalamus. Participants who scored highly on a test of personal resilience also released more opioids when rejected, especially in the area of the amygdala, a part of the brain known for emotional responses. Not only did Hsu replicate what Lieberman had found about our social sensitivity, but he found additional information about it – namely that people vary in their sensitivity to rejection. Appreciation of this fact may become important for our construction of scientific conceptions of the person.
Speaking to my own sociology colleagues for example, we must develop an interest in the unconscious and ignore the old Freudian interpretations of it. One half of our brain – the right side – is mute. It does not talk to others and it does not talk to us. The self-aware left hemisphere of the brain is not totally aware and can be dead wrong. Brain research has opened up new ways of thinking about the unconscious for those who found it problematic before. This is an important contri- bution because we know now that much of the social attunement and coordination
3.2 A Neurosociological Interpretation of Isolation
40
that comprises social interaction is completely out of our awareness. Even George Herbert Mead (1934) considered role taking as being “more or less unconscious.”
As early as 1999, Stan Gregory reminded us that neonates within 3 weeks after birth adapt their brain waves to those of their mothers. Many of us will remember the study by McClintock in 1971 of the synchrony of menstrual cycles of women shar- ing dorms. Gregory cites many more such mutual adaptations.
Much of my interest in social conceptions of the brain derives from the hope that in some future day scientists may turn away from the individualistic and ideologi- cally distorted model of the self-contained person. Michael Gazzaniga, a prominent neuroscientist, wrote The Social Brain in 1985. The social nature of the brain for Gazzaniga comes from his discovery that the conscious linguistic side of the brain acted as a compulsive interpreter of events and as a coordinator of the brain’s many circuits. But Lieberman is giving evidence that it is much more than that.