How the Brain Rewires as We Grieve
KEY POINTS
When you grieve for a spouse, your brain can't absorb their absence as your bond is encoded as everlasting.
Your brain requires experience and repetition to update predictions and make sense of your partner’s absence.
This lengthy, intensive redrawing process explains many of the difficult and worrisome aspects of mourning.
In recent decades, neuroscience has revealed fascinating information about our relationships and what happens in our brains when we grieve for a loved one who is dead or gone. Particularly if this loss is devastating and “changes everything,” such as when a devoted spouse dies or a beloved partner unilaterally ends a relationship, our grieving brain has an enormous rewiring job to do.
How the Brain Encodes Our Bonds to Loved Ones
The human brain is hardwired to form attachments. It keeps track of our most important relationships along three dimensions: space, time, and depth of the connection. When we are apart, our brain keeps our bond intact by predicting when, where, and whether a reunion is likely to happen. These dimensions are also described as here, now, and close, referring to our ability, learned during early childhood, to soothe ourselves when separated by calling up a mental representation of our loved one and counting on our reunion.