Hi mj

I have to say "ditto" and I think I'm a great person to be around, I don't think I'm not worthy of attention, my friends are very busy, and yet still I feel as if there is a "conspiracy" to neglect me. I'm alone now all day every day and it really gets to me.

I think it may have to do with the way our brains work... everyone's brain... and how depression interferes with the normal working. One thing that is amazing about the human brain is that it works constantly to seek out and recognize patterns of all sorts. It's like a fundamental operation of our brains OS and it is a great part of our ability to learn and invent... without trying our brains make connections, finding patterns in everything, and we use those connections to help understand how the world works... physics, chemistry, math, society, people, language... everything.

The funny think about this pattern search is that a lot of times it "tricks" us... it looks so hard for patterns that it finds them where no true connection exists. This is why we see animals in clouds. Looking at a speckled ceiling we sometimes see faces.

We take that stuff for granted, but it is a high function of the brain... the same pattern matching that lets us recognize faces (which is a REALLY difficult thing to do, but our brains make it seem easy) and recognize printed material no matter what typeface it is printed in, even handwriting, even BAD handwriting. Even text that is broken from wear and has parts of the letters or even whole letters missing.

If you draw three sides of a square on a piece of paper, you can still identify it as a square... because the brain finds a "pattern match" with the drawn elements and is able to infer the missing line. We easily recognize the stick figures that our children draw as representing "people" and the crudest configuration of lines we easily identify as a "house."

People often match patterns subconsciously when there is a serious historic event or something in our lives. We can find a series of numbers as part of an article in a newspaper and think something prophetic is going on because the numbers "match" some aspect of our lives... there's nothing "supernatural" there, just our brains working overtime "behind the scenes" to find a pattern and then shout "hey look I found one!"

All reports of secret messages in hidden old books are a result of this. Entire cults are often built around this, finding connections in old books that seemingly predicted current events. Our brains make these connections so strongly that no amount of logic can prove to us that something mysterious isn't going on. In the case of the "predictions" it is notable that the predictions are only found AFTER the event has occured (so it really isn't a prediction, just pattern matching of an event to text) and they are NEVER able to find a "pattern" in text that describes something that has not yet happened. It can also be shown that such patterns can be found using ANY book, old or modern, but applying the same pattern search technics. It really is an interesting subject.

So I think that the feelings of lonliness are also a result of that pattern matching. Our depressed brains "filter out" anything positive and only "see" negative things, pessimism, and paranoia. But our brains are still working "behind the scenes" furiously looking for pattern matches as it does during every waking moment.

So while we KNOW that our friends aren't ignoring us, that they still like us, that we are still worthy of love and affection, our depressed brains won't let us BELIEVE that because it subconscioulsy picks out all the patterns that match in our friends behaviour and it equates those patterns to conspiracy, dislike, distrust.

We can't shut that pattern matching function of the brain off. So no matter what we know, when we are depressed our subconcious brains are always on the ball looking for "proof" that our friends no longer like us.

------------------------------------
--http://www.idexter.com