Lying inside the dark, cylindrical tube was a young woman waiting for the experiment to begin. The tube was a Functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (fMRI) measuring brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. Doctors had told her that two others would simultaneously have their brains scanned while playing a video game with her over the internet. A game called ‘cyber ball.’ The scientists told her they were interested in how brains coordinate to perform simple tasks like ball tossing. After a few minutes of playing, the two other participants stopped throwing the ball to the
young woman. But they continued to throw the ball to each other, effectively excluding her from the game. What the young woman didn’t know was that there were no other subjects in the experiment. She was playing with pre-programmed avatars, programmed to stop throwing her the ball after a short period.
The leader of the experiment, Matthew Lieberman, was not measuring coordination as he had said. He was, in fact, measuring the effects of being socially rejected. After the experiment, the participants were taken to a room to answer questions about their experience. Lieberman explains how they reacted: “Frequently these individuals would spontaneously start talking to us about what had just happened to them. They were genuinely angry or sad about what they had gone through. This was unusual for an fMRI study because most tasks didn’t generate personal emotional reactions.” When Lieberman and his team examined the data, they compared emotional pain images to images of physical pain. The images should have been very different, but they were strikingly similar. What Lieberman and his team had found was that social pain is identical to physical pain. The neural circuits used for physical pain are the same circuits used for emotional pain. The implication is that for humans, social threats are as significant as physical threats. Lieberman sums it up nicely, “Humans need to feel social separation as painful. It keeps infants and caregivers close together. That may have been the reason evolution gave us social pain, but now we are stuck with it our entire lives, and it colors almost every social experience we have”.