HOW DO WE REPRESENT OURSELVES AND OTHERS?
Why can we feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by others? Why do we struggle to make decisions in the present that would be better for our future selves? We are finding that the default network organizes representations of ourselves and others based on how “connected” we feel to them. People who feel socially disconnected also show less neural pattern similarity between the self and others in the default network. In other words, they show a “lonelier” neural representation in the brain. Participants also show less default network neural pattern similarity between their present and future selves, which may help explain quirky decision-making like temporal discounting (i.e., choosing a smaller reward in the present over a larger reward in the future).
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS:
Brietzke, S., & Meyer, M. L. (in press). Temporal self-compression: Behavioral and neural evidence that past and future selves are compressed as they move away from the present. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Download PDF.
Courtney, A. L., & Meyer, M. L. (2020). Self-other representation in the social brain reflects social connection. Journal of Neuroscience, 4(20), 5616-5627. Download PDF.