Filed in Relationships and Connection,
The brain is a prediction machine that gets lonely
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One of the more useful ideas in recent neuroscience is that the brain is not mainly a receiver. It is a guesser. It predicts what will happen next and then checks the guess against what arrives.
Other people are part of the model
Much of what we predict is other people. Their faces, their timing, the way a friend will laugh before the punchline. When those people are missing, the brain loses a large part of the world it learned to expect.
Loneliness, seen this way, is partly a prediction problem. The model keeps reaching for signals that do not come.
Learning to expect again
If that is right, reconnection is a kind of learning. Small, repeated, predictable contact may matter more than the occasional grand gesture.
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