Why do you feel lonely? Neuroscience is starting to find answers.

Long before the world had ever heard of covid-19, Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: When people feel lonely, do they crave social interactions in the same way a hungry person craves food? And could she and her colleagues detect and measure this "hunger" in the neural circuits of the brain? "Loneliness is a universal thing. If I were to ask people on the street, 'Do you know what it means to be lonely?' probably 99 or 100% of people would say yes," explains Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences. "It seems reasonable to argue that it should be a concept in neuroscience. It's just that nobody ever found a way to test it and localize it to specific cells. That's what we are trying to do."