A Penguin’s Antidote to Abandonment

How to sail in the icy sea of uncertainty without sinking.

One definition of love may be that the world becomes unimaginable without the person you love. This is what makes the death of a loved one nothing less than world-shattering. But from the vantage point of the brain, a death is simply a sudden and inexplicable absence — the total erasure of the person from the mental model of the living world. In fMRI studies, the same brain circuitry lights up whenever we experience prolonged absence, e...