Essentials: The Science & Process of Healing from Grief

This Essentials episode frames grief at both an emotional and a logical level, drawing on neuroscience and psychology. Its central claim, introduced at the outset, is that findings from "just a few key laboratories" suggest we map our experience of other people in three dimensions: space (where people are), time (when people are) and a dimension called closeness. On this account, those three dimensions establish close bonds, and they are also what must be remapped and reorganized, emotionally and logically, when we lose someone.

The important thing to point out is that grief is a process.

The host argues that, like any biological or psychological event, grief has a beginning, a middle and an end. Knowing where you are in that process is presented as useful for more than predicting how long it will last. It can also help you think about the lost person or animal in a way that preserves their memory while you keep functioning in daily life. The episode also separates grief from depression. The two can feel similar and share symptoms, such as loss of appetite, trouble sleeping and crying in the middle of the day for no apparent reason, but they are described as distinctly different processes.

The first myth the episode tackles comes from the work of psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of "On Death and Dying." Her five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The host describes the work as beautiful but says the stages were "sort of taken to be gospel for a long time." Neuroimaging, more in-depth psychological evaluation, and more researchers and clinicians working in the field now show that much of what Kubler-Ross described holds true, but not always.

The evidence offered comes from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which infers which brain areas are more active from blood flow, a measure that correlates with neural activity. According to the episode, these studies show that brain areas and circuits tied to motivation, craving and pursuit are among the main ones activated in states of grief. This point comes back later, when the yearning side of grief is linked to reward and motivation pathways.

To understand grief, the episode argues, you first have to understand how attachments are represented in the brain. Forming attachments and breaking them in healthy ways are both said to be governed by the same three dimensions: space, time and closeness. These apply to a person, an animal or a thing. To illustrate this, the host describes a brain-scanning experiment that could look at activity across the brain "in a very non-biased way," without first predicting which areas would be involved.