Grief Is a Learning Experience

Loved ones are wired into our brain. Learning that they’re gone requires rewiring.

BY CLAUDIA CHRISTINE WOLF in the Scientific American

Neuroscience

Why does it hurt so much to lose someone you love? What happens in your brain as it strives to cope? Pioneering psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor worked on one of the first neuroimaging studies of grief more than two decades ago. She and her colleagues found that a loved one’s absence means a major disruption not only to our life but also within our brain.

O’Connor now runs the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab at the University of Arizona, where she tries to tease out the biological mechanisms underlying grief. In particular, she studies prolonged grief, a state in which people don’t seem to heal, instead staying immersed in their loss for years. In her book The Grieving Brain (HarperOne, 2022), O’Connor explains how insight into brain circuits and neurotransmitters can enable us to navigate bereavement with self-compassion. “Grief is the cost of loving someone,” she writes. When a loved one dies, it can feel like we’ve lost a part of ourselves because their presence is coded into our neurons.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American’s German-language sibling publication, spoke with O’Connor about how love permanently changes our neural wiring and what we can do to feel more like ourselves while our brain tries to update its understanding of the world when a loved one is gone.

People who have lost someone often feel like their beloved will walk into the room at any moment, or sometimes they think they’re seeing the person on the street. Why does that happen?

It’s not perfectly worked out yet, but I have what I call the gone-but-also-everlasting theory. We think of the brain as a single entity, but there are many systems in it. On the one hand, you have the memory system, in which, say, we have a memory of being at the bedside or at a funeral. So one stream of information in our brain understands the reality of our loss and can remember that happening. But there’s another stream of information in our brain, and that comes from attachment neurobiology.

To understand what happens during loss, we first have to think about what happens during bonding. When that relationship is created, that bond is encoded in the brain in very specific regions and very specific ways. It comes with a belief that “I will always be there for you and you will always be there for me.”

That is the nature of a bonded relationship. It is what makes us know our partner will be at home when we return after work or enables us to send our children off to school—we know that they will return to us and that we will seek them out if they, for some reason, don’t turn up. The belief that they are out there in the world, even if we can’t see them or hear them, works very well when our loved ones are alive.

That attachment neurobiology, that belief in the everlasting nature of the bond, does not change immediately when a loved one dies. That second stream of information is still telling us they’re out there. We should go find them because they are missing, because they are lost. And so those two streams of information—the memory of the reality on one hand and, on the other, this belief that they are out there—cannot both be true.

Our brain really struggles to understand what has happened. And when we become aware that we have both beliefs, it causes a lot of distress and grief. (continued)