The Science & Process of Healing from Grief | Huberman Lab Essentials
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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, [music] 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. Let me 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, etc. , 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 with 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.
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, etc. 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.
Those tones also are spaced from one another. So, it could be something as simple as my hand uh meeting the table top that I’m happening to be sitting in front of, so it’s They image the brain. Of course, areas of the brain that are associated with auditory perception are active, not surprisingly. But as they evaluate different types of sounds and patterns of sounds, for instance they can start to parse brain areas that seem uniquely tuned to the spacing of sounds independent of what sounds are coming in. That is, it becomes active specifically in response to changes in the spacing between sounds, much in the same way as they could identify brain regions that were only activated when there were changes in the distance between objects, such as the bowling balls that I used in the previous example.
And then the subjects saw a different set of images. The images that they saw were of people and of faces. And some of the images that they saw were of people’s faces right up close. And other images were of people at a distance where you could see the whole body of the person. Now, they also varied the emotional relationship to those people.
That is, they were able to get photographs from these research subjects’ lives so they could show them pictures of, for instance, their sister or some random person off the street. They could show them pictures of a parent or of a neighbor or of a celebrity that’s well-known or of somebody that they didn’t know at all. So, they were able to vary both the position of the person, close or far, and they were able to vary the emotional distance to the person, which is this dimension that I’m referring to as closeness, which is not physical closeness, but how attached or how well you know somebody. Now, this is maybe sounding like a somewhat complicated experiment, but the takeaway from this experiment is exquisitely simple and exquisitely important. The result was that in all three conditions, changes in the physical spacing of these objects, changes in the temporal, that is, the time spacing of these sounds, and changes in the emotional distance between the subject and different people, the same brain area was uniquely activated.
And that brain area, it turns out, is a brain area called the inferior parietal lobule, the inferior parietal lobule. Now, you don’t need to know where the inferior parietal lobule is. In fact, you don’t even need to know the name of this brain area. What you do need to know, however, if you want to understand grief and how to move through grief, is that your map of people is not a map of emotional closeness per se. It is a map of emotional closeness what we call attachment that is interwoven, that is braided in in a very intimate way with your map of where they are in physical space and where they are in time.
When you saw them last, when you’re likely to see them again, and if you were to want to see them, how much time it would take to reach them or for them to reach you. Now, earlier I said that one of the key functions of our nervous system i