[Music] thank you when I'm explaining the neurobiology of grief I like to start with a familiar example but in order for this example to make sense you have to go along with a premise and the premise is that your dining room table has been stolen I'm not sure why your dining room table has been stolen but it doesn't matter for the example to work so you wake up in the middle of the night one night and you realize that you're thirsty so you're going to get up and go get a glass of water so you walk down the hall and it's you know practically dark and you walk down the hall and you're Crossing for the kitchen through the dining room and just as your hip hits the dining room well it doesn't hit the dining room table but you feel it right you feel that space where the dining room table should be now this is actually something that's very difficult for a neuroscientist to explain we understand how sensation works we know there are peripheral nerves and they pick up information from The Real World and send it to our brain and that's when you feel the dining room table what's harder to understand is how does the absence of something grab our attention like that well it's because you're not actually walking in the world or rather you're actually walking in Two Worlds at the same time on the one hand of course you're walking in the world of real furniture that we can all agree on but you're also walking through a virtual reality that your mind makes up over time after hundreds of thousands of days of experience that's how you can walk through the house when it's practically dark doing that means you could think of it as sort of the Google maps of your brain right I don't know if any of you have used Google Maps but sometimes Google tells me to turn right and then I realize oh that's a bike path I can't turn there so the brain is also trying to make sense of what the real world is like and what we expect the world to be like and the error that happens when those don't match no one expects their dining room table to be stolen and no one expects their loved one to die even when someone's been sick for a really long time no one really understands what it'll be like to walk through this world without that person who's so ingrained in our understanding of the world knowing that I've been studying grieving from the perspective of the brain and over time I thought having to match up a world where we believe our loved one should be and the present reality where they have died you could almost think of grieving as a form of learning since I published the first neuroimaging study of grief in 2003 I've often been asked why I've spent so much of my career devoted to studying grief and grieving I think often people are just curious but they may also want to know if they can trust me they may want to know if I too have walked through the Dark Night of grief and loss and I have known grief when I was in the eighth grade my mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer ous cells were in every lymph node that the surgeon cut out so we knew it had already traveled to other parts of her body what I didn't know because I was a kid was that she was only meant to live through the year but I did know that grief came to our house my mother's oncologist described her as his first miracle she lived another 13 years a reprieve from the universe for my sister and I and what that meant was when she died when I was 26 and I was already in graduate school I felt comfortable with people who were grieving when I interviewed people and they cried uncontrollably I understood and then I tried to listen really closely to what they were telling me that they were feeling and thinking and to match that up with the brain images that I was seeing from the neuroimaging scans so the question that has plagued me for much of my career is why does grieving take so long why is it so hard to understand that this person is really gone and that and what that means for our life well the brain is fascinating we can actually listen to two streams of information at the same time even when they can't both be true I call this the gone but also Everlasting Theory on the one hand the brain has a memory system it's got the hippocampus and we may have a memory of being at the bedside when a loved one dies or getting that awful phone call in the middle of the night or being at a memorial or a funeral we know the reality of what has happened but we also have attachment neurobiology and when we form a bond with someone it comes with a deep belief the belief that I will always be there for you and you will always be there for me and that is not something that goes away when someone dies and this desire to be reunited with our loved ones this yearning for our loved ones is so intense as an example you know I was on a trip recently to London with my partner and we actually made a plan right what if we got separated what if one of us got onto the tube but the other one didn't get on what are we gonna do how are we going to find each other again the answer it turns out is to go to the closest Starbucks because they always have Wi-Fi we have two streams of information on the one hand we know the reality we have memories of what has happened and on the other hand we have this deep belief that our loved one is out there this is how we can do things like pick up the phone to text our loved one to sell them something and then realize we can't do that anymore grieving requires us to resolve these two streams of information that can't both possibly be true so where does this attachment enduring Everlasting belief come from well when you fall in love with your spouse or when you fall in love with your baby we actually have to talk about love before we can talk about grief and a lot of what we know about the Neuroscience of bonding actually comes from animal neuroscience and so there are these little tiny voles voles are these rodents that run around the Prairie of North America and what's fascinating about them is they bond for life once one vole has fallen head over heels for the other vole they will prefer to spend time together than with any other Bowl they ever meet research By Zoe Donaldson at the University of Colorado Boulder has shown that when this bonding happens there are epigenetic changes that happen in the brain that means that the genes around the the proteins around a particular Gene are folded differently because they had this Bond that epigenetic change happens in a very specific region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens that's deep in the middle of your head this region it turns out is also important in grief and loss other research by Oliver Bosch at the University of Regensburg has discovered that when you separate these pair-bonded voles you can actually see that there is less oxytocin binding oxytocin is that you know that hormone that we associate with nursing and attachment Oliver has shown that you have less oxytocin binding in the nucleus accumbens when you separate these pair bonded voles in my own neuroimaging study of grief I have asked people who are bereaved to come into my lab and participate in studies and I asked them to bring a photograph of the person who's died when they come in I interview them about what the experience has been like and the kind of Yearning that they're still experiencing for the person who's died I take that photograph and I scan it into a computer and that way I'm able to show it to the person on goggles while they're lying in the neuroimaging scanner this means that I can see the brain activity that's happening as they're looking at their deceased loved one as they're having that wave of grief and interestingly that same nucleus accumbens region is also activated when we look at human grief and in fact the more yearning that they've told me that they experience they're experiencing for their loved one is correlated with the amount of nucleus accumbens activation that we see it isn't the time since loss that's correlated it's that yearning that thirst that hunger for our loved ones who are so important to us I want to really clarify that this attachment bond is so specific to our one and only when you think about it this way it means that that person it's hard to learn that they're gone but usually the brain is very good at learning it can understand when people are gone I teach a psychology of death and loss class and I teach it every fall it's about 150 students and I teach it in a sort of Amphitheater style uh classroom you know how it is when you teach a class or if you've ever taken a class you have the same seat every time you come to class and as a professor we get to know oh this is the student who always knows the answer or this is the student who always talks too much at the end of the semester they all go away and the next fall I walk into that classroom and I never expect to see that student in that seat I like all of my students even the ones who talk too much but I don't have an attachment bond with them and that is not the experience that people who are grieving have the Widow of a dear colleague who died told me you know I just feel like he's gonna walk through the door again it just feels like maybe he's gone on a trip it takes a long time and importantly lots of experiences before we are able to predict their absence more often than their presence so if there is an attachment Bond then it means there will be grief whether that's the grief over the death of your mother the death of a spouse I'm thinking of an example you know when we have that death when we have that experience our brain is also actually set up to transform our relationship with our deceased loved one through something that psychologists call continuing bonds continuing bonds means that we are still in communication with that person I don't know if voles actually speak to each other when they've been separated but I know from research in our lab that it's very common for human beings to do this I'm thinking of the example of the woman who on her ride home from work felt like her deceased husband was DJing the specific songs that came on the radio just specifically for her or another woman who told me she felt like her husband was giving her the words to say after he died when she was having a conversation with their son because he should have been the one there having that conversation our attachment neurobiology enables continuing bonds it also enables us to connect with living loved ones and maybe even to make new bonds an older man who I interviewed for a research study he told me about having fallen in love with his high school sweetheart they had two kids I think there was a picket fence in there somewhere and then he told me that she had gotten sick and he cried when he told me that he had cared for her and that she had died he told me that he'd recently been going to dinner with another woman a woman who he thought was very different from his wife who brought out different parts of his personality but that he was feeling really energized when he had dinner with her and you know he said something to me I will never forget he said the thing is it was really good then and it's really good now and that for me is what our brain enables so if we have this Bond then we know we're going to have grief and we also know that our brain is able to help us through that experience to understand what is life like now so that we can find ways to reconnect to create meaningful activity in our life Neuroscience is not the common way people think about grief and grieving but Neuroscience really is the conversation of our times and I think that the most important thing is that we keep talking about grief I think it's important that I share my grief experience with you and that I ask you about your grief experience this is how we really understand what grief is like if grieving can be thought of as a form of learning then it doesn't really matter how long grieving takes because learning never ends we know that we are going to feel the absence of our loved one as real as the absence of a dining room table this is ingrained in us from epigenetics from Evolution from powerful chemicals like oxytocin and our brain is also able to shift our attention to the present moment and the present moment is full of possibility the present may be full of grief and suffering but it is also the only place where we get to experience love and joy it's the only place we get to notice the really sweet smile of the Barista for no apparent reason or the puppy loping in the park just doing what he does our brain is there to help us to understand what is happening what our life is like now to enable continuing bonds to help us to connect with loving living living loved ones and to restore for us a meaningful life thank you [Applause] [Music]