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August 20 - August 30, 2023
Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.
Having said that, I do not believe that a neuroscientific perspective on grief is any better than a sociological, a religious, or an anthropological one. I say that genuinely, despite devoting an entire career to the neurobiological lens. I believe our understanding of grief through a neurobiological lens can enhance our understanding, create a more holistic view of grief, and help us engage in new ways with the anguish and terror of what grief is like.
Having said that, I do not believe that a neuroscientific perspective on grief is any better than a sociological, a religious, or an anthropological one. I say that genuinely, despite devoting an entire career to the neurobiological lens. I believe our understanding of grief through a neurobiological lens can enhance our understanding, create a more holistic view of grief, and help us engage in new ways with the anguish and terror of what grief is like.
You may have noticed that I use the terms grief and grieving. Although you hear them used interchangeably, I make an important distinction between them.
grief never ends, and it is a natural response to loss. You will experience pangs of grief over this specific person forever. You will have discrete moments that overwhelm you, even years after the death when you have restored your life to a meaningful, fulfilling experience. But, whereas you will feel the universally human emotion of grief forever, your grieving, your adaptation, changes the experience over time.
Why would we engage in our life in the present moment, if it is full of grief? The response includes the idea that only in the present moment can we also experience joy and common humanity, and express love to our living loved ones.
Why would we engage in our life in the present moment, if it is full of grief? The response includes the idea that only in the present moment can we also experience joy and common humanity, and express love to our living loved ones.
Well, in fact, you are not actually walking in this world. Or, more accurately, you are walking in two worlds most of the time. One world is a virtual reality map made up entirely in your head. Your brain is moving your human form through the virtual map it has created, which is why you can move through your house fairly easily in the dark; you are not using the external world to navigate. You are using your brain map to get around this familiar space, with your human body arriving where your brain has sent it.
Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world. This means that for the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the same time. You are navigating your life despite the fact that they have been stolen from you, a premise that makes no sense, and that is both confusing and upsetting.
We know quite a lot about how the brain creates virtual maps. We have even found the location in the hippocampus (the seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain) where the brain map is stored.
If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives. Is it any wonder that it takes many weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again?
A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.
attachment needs.
The first two dimensions are directly related to the same ones we use to find food—space (where it is) and time (when it is good to forage there). The third dimension I will call closeness.
This invisible tether, this bond of closeness, is what British psychiatrist John Bowlby called attachment.4
Thus, the attachment bond tethers them across time.4
The idea that a person simply does not exist anymore does not follow the rules the brain has learned over a lifetime.
The idea that the person is simply no longer in this dimensional world is not a logical answer to their absence, as far as the brain is concerned.
This confusion is not the same as simple denial, although that may be how others describe it. Instead it is the utter disorientation people experience in acute grief.
The fact that so many different cultures have provided a very concrete answer to where and when might be an indication that the strong desire to search for and map the whereabouts of our loved ones (the desire to have them here and now) is biologically based.
Prediction is key to almost all human behavior.
“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Sometimes all this occurs so quickly that it is below the threshold of consciousness, and all we know is that we are suddenly overwhelmed with tears.
Additionally, our predictions change slowly, because the brain knows better than to update its whole prediction plan based on a single event. Or even two events, or a dozen events. The brain computes the probabilities that something will happen.
Abstract knowledge, like the knowledge that everyone will die someday, is not treated in the same way as lived experience. Our brain trusts and makes predictions based on our lived experience. When you wake up one morning and your loved one is not in the bed next to you, the idea that she has died is simply not true in terms of probability. For our brain, this is not true on day one, or day two, or for many days after her death. We need enough new lived experiences for our brain to develop new predictions, and that takes time.
The brain learns whether we intend to learn or not.
Keep in mind that the brain cannot learn everything at once. You cannot go from arithmetic to calculus without many, many days of practicing multiplication tables and solving differential equations. In the same way, you cannot force yourself to learn overnight that your loved one is gone. However, you can allow your brain to have experiences, day after day, which will help to update that little gray computer.
Closeness is a third dimension of how we map where our loved ones are, in addition to mapping where they are on the dimensions of here (space) and now (time). I think of this as a third dimension because I believe closeness is understood by the brain in a very similar way to time and space.
The opposite of closeness is feeling the absence of our partner. Absence sets off emotional alarm bells, revealing the calm and comfort of closeness that we miss.
So even though we are not directly experiencing someone through our senses, we can use predictions, memories, and speculations to imagine the person. These mental representations transcend the immediate situation.
This study provides evidence that the ephemeral sense of closeness with our loved ones exists in the physical, tangible hardware of our brain.
“grief is the form love takes when someone we love dies.”
continuing bonds.
Continuing bonds occur not just through conversations; they may include carrying on the wishes or values of the deceased.
The enduring nature of bonds, such as pair bonds, separates an attachment relationship from a transactional relationship.
In a healthy and mutual relationship, we engage in these behaviors not because something equal will be gained in return, but because these are expressions of love and caring.
Falling in love is accompanied by the rapid expansion of these resources, although we might not consciously describe it that way, and the expansion is a pleasurable and exciting feeling. By the same token, there is a correspondingly intense negative contraction after the loss of a person.
Grief emerges as distress, caused by the absence of a specific person who filled one’s attachment needs and therefore was part of one’s identity and way of functioning in the world.
parasocial grief;
People are represented in the virtual reality of our brains, and celebrities can have very fleshed out lives in our minds.
“Little Earthquakes”
Grieving people often describe having lost a part of themselves, as if they have a phantom limb.
Consequently, the process of grieving is not just about psychological or metaphorical change. Grieving requires neural rewiring as well.
No matter how close we are to another person, we are still able to distinguish between the self and the other.
But we can also extend this to the idea of being “grief adjacent,” or for how we feel when we are around someone who is grieving.
You may be surprised to hear how contagious sadness can be. We can feel the emotions that someone else is feeling, by simulating that same feeling in ourselves.
the brain, the partner goes from a recognizable penguin to the penguin of great importance.
A community recognizes, and shows explicitly in their behavior, that this person is not going to return. It reinforces what the bereaved survivor can only half believe at the time. Afterward, when we have memories of the funeral, these memories may help us a little in untangling our own magical thinking; as hard as it is to believe, memorials are proof that others share our new understanding that our loved one is gone.
Research shows that ambiguous loss, such as when family members are disappeared by a political regime or missing and presumed dead from an airplane crash or in wartime conflict, complicates the grieving process. One reason may be that part of our brain is wired to believe that our loved one is never really gone, and without the overwhelming evidence from our memories of their decline or death, rewiring our understanding may take longer or cause greater distress.
It may be the cruelest aspect of our human nature that we can experience these incompatible mutual beliefs—both that our loved one is gone and that they can be found again.
