Essentials: The Science & Process of Healing from Grief

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are going to discuss how we conceptualize grief, both at an emotional and at a logical level. I'm going to teach you about the neuroscience and the psychology of grief, and incredible findings that have been made in just a few key laboratories that point to the fact that we essentially map our experience of people in three dimensions. Just give you a little hint of what those dimensions are. They relate to space, where people are, time, when people are, I'll explain what that means, and a dimension called closeness, and how those three dimensions of space, time and closeness are what establish very close bonds with people and are what require remapping, reorganization within our emotional framework and our logical framework when we lose somebody for whatever reason. The important thing to point out is that grief is a process. Like any biological or psychological event, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I do believe that being able to orient in terms of where you are in that process can be immensely beneficial, not just for predicting how long it's going to last, but in order to conceptualize the person or animal that you lost in a way that allows you to best preserve their memory while maintaining your own functional capacity in life. Along those lines, I want to point out that grief and depression, while they can feel quite similar in certain ways and have overlapping symptomology, loss of appetite, challenges sleeping, crying in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, et cetera, they are distinctly different processes. As we wade into this important topic, I'd like to emphasize some of the common myths and misunderstandings about grief. Some of the myths and misunderstanding arrive from the beautiful work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychologist who wrote the famous book on death and dying. The different stages of grief very quickly are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But unfortunately, those five stages were sort of taken to be gospel for a long time. And we now know based on neuroimaging, based on more in-depth psychological evaluation, and frankly, more researchers and clinicians moving into this area and observing that while much of what Kubler-Ross described does hold true, it's not always the case. How do I know this? Well, I know this because brain imaging studies and involving what's called functional magnetic resonance imaging, FMRI, in which you can evaluate which brain areas are more active than others, according to blood flow, which correlates to neural activity and so forth, teaches us that the brain areas that are associated with motivation and craving and pursuit are some of the primary brain areas and circuits that are activated in states of grief. We understand also on the basis of brain imaging studies that in order to understand grief, we have to understand how attachments are represented in our brain. And it turns out that both attachments and the breaking of attachments in healthy ways are governed by three important what we call dimensions. The three dimensions of relating to someone or an animal or a thing are space, time and closeness. And in order to illustrate each one and how they work together to support relationships and their involvement in the grieving process, I'm going to tell you about an experiment. The experiment involves putting people into a brain scanner that allows the researcher to evaluate brain activity in different areas. In fact, can look in a very non-biased way, not make any predictions about which brain areas are going to be involved. And the experiment is the following.
The person, we should say the research subject, first sees images of things that reside at different distances from one another. So in one case, it's a beach or a parking lot with bowling balls set at different distances from one another.
Their brain is imaged. And as their brain is imaged, they see different pictures of different scenes, the beach, the parking lot, et cetera. Bowling balls spaced in different ways, close together, far apart, regularly spaced, non-regularly spaced.
When one does this sort of experiment, you see a lot of brain areas activated. Not surprisingly, the visual cortex, the area of the brain that is responsible for creating visual perceptions, but also a brain area that seems uniquely tuned to the distance between you and the objects. We'll refer to that measure, that dimension, as we call it, as proximity. Then subjects listen to tones.