Using fMRI scans on 19 lonely fans of “Game of Thrones”, researchers discovered that they processed their favorite characters similarly to real friends in their brains. This suggests that lonelier ...::In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real frien...