Conversation with Mary-Frances O’Connor on the Grieving Brain

By: | February 9, 2022

Ann Finkbeiner:  My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her.  But I’ve never done any science to find out whether what I know is wrong.  Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor is that kind of expert.  

She’s a psychologist who’s studied what goes on in the human mind, and who’s crossed scientific disciplines to do neuroscience about what goes on in the human brain.  I interviewed Dr. O’Connor a year or so ago and was impressed not only by what she knew about the mind and the brain, but also about the nature of grief itself and its connection to love. Also she listens hard. And she’s written a very readable, thorough, kind book called The Grieving Brain.  

So.  Now.  Dr. O’Connor.  What got you interested in this field of the grieving brain? Because it’s not exactly a field, is it.

Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor: I have been interested for a long time in how we physically encode the world. For grief, I imagined that part of that encoding took place in the brain–when someone is “lost”, how does the brain understand that information? What neural connections change, or epigenetic proteins are added, or do the waves of electrical activity “up there” change their pattern? This seemed like a big enough question that I could spend an entire career on it.

And if I’m also honest, not so much as a scientist but as a person, when my mom died when I was in graduate school, I realized that I could talk to people about death (and therefore grief), and this was pretty unusual. It meant that by engaging other people in such an important part of their lives, my own work felt meaningful, and talking about grief was something that not many people (even psychologists) were willing to do. So studying grief felt like a unique contribution I could make, even though, as you say, grief in the brain wasn’t really a field. Although I hope that is changing.

Ann:  So when you ask how the brain encodes “lost,” you’re asking what happens in the brain when you can’t find the person any more or the person is gone, dead.  And you learned to give brain scans (functional MRI’s, fMRI’s) to find the parts of the brain that are busy as you grieve. But that’s neuroscience and your PhD is in psychology, which is the field that normally studies grief. Almost no one else does that, both psychology and neuroscience, mind and brain both, right?  What did you find?

Mary-Frances: A few of us around the world have studied grief in the mind and brain (Joseph Goveas at Medical College of Wisconsin, Richard Bryant at University of New South Wales, Australia), although I suppose no one else has grief as the sole topic of their neuroscience research. And what I have found in just one study can’t really tell us enough about what the brain is doing during grief and grieving.

Ann: So the question of what the brain does while grieving is a field that’s relatively new and still has no real answers.  But you must have a partial answer, right? 

Mary-Frances: Indeed. One thing is, the parts of the brain important in grief are also involved in reward. We know that reward is important in creating a bond with a loved one, like a partner or a child.   In one of my own neuroimaging studies, those who report the most yearning for their deceased loved one also show the most  activation in the nucleus accumbens–a key node in the brain’s reward network. It’s interesting that there wasn’t a correlation between how “good” or “bad” the bereaved participants felt, but with how much of that yearning motivation they reported.

Ann:  So regardless of how people felt, the more they yearned to see their dead again, the more the brain’s reward system lit up.  That took me a while to understand but I think I do: the feeling of yearning, of wanting someone to please come back please, is run by the same part of the brain that runs rewards, the things that make you feel good.  It’s really nice, isn’t it, that the person you’re missing also made/makes you feel good.  Sad but nice.  So what else does neuroscience say about grief?

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What’s in a (gene) name

By: | February 7, 2022


Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.

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From the Edge of Beringia

By: | February 4, 2022

White Alice site
Archived photo of White Alice site, circa 1950

This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago.

During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a different direction, meant to bounce tropospheric messages from the Russian border to the US. Last used in 1985, the network has been abandoned.

I visited the White Alice site one summer, gathering qivuit, the soft winter fur of muskox, which hangs in branches of overgrown shrub-willow around the radio towers. In low summer light and a stiff mountain breeze from the west, I rubbed qivuit between my fingers. It smelled of earth and musk. I’d run into muskox as I walked up here. They were grazing in the willows, and I startled one as I climbed through the vegetation. Rather, it startled me. I parted branches and found myself about 8 feet from the thick-horned head and a drape of winter fur molting in the willows. The animal looked up, flared two dark, wet nostrils, and went back to grazing. It seemed so unfazed, I snapped off the picture below and backtracked around it. Continue reading →

an ode to my moleskine

By: | February 2, 2022
A letter from Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, which basically sums up half of my journal entries: “But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

The first journal I remember writing in was a black, wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. I was in first grade, and had somehow associated keeping a journal with being mature, so I started to write about what happened to me every day: notable moments in school, who I played with on the weekends. By 3rd grade, I’d upgraded to a pink book with a little brass lock to keep out all the riff-raff. (I had no siblings, and I doubt I wrote anything in there I wouldn’t want my parents to know, besides maybe who I had a crush on, so I’m not sure why I was so concerned about privacy.) You can tell my middle school journals by the colorful gel pens I used, my letters becoming loopier to imitate the cool girls’ handwriting. By high school, I’d filled countless notebooks with my idle musings and doodles. I decorated my journals’ covers with magazine clippings, photos of my friends, inside jokes. I carried them everywhere, furiously scribbling in them during study hall, chemistry, French class.

Then, the internet happened. I set up shop on LiveJournal, then DeadJournal, and a little-known LiveJournal clone called Caleida. For the first time, I wasn’t just writing for myself; I was writing to an audience. Mostly, my readers were friends from school or summer camp, but I ended up making some friends on the site who I still only know from the LJ era. LiveJournal died; we all moved on to Tumblr. I made friends there, too, some of whom are now professional writers. Somewhere along the way, I stopped journaling for me, and started writing words for a living.

I didn’t think anything of it until I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. A younger me would’ve sworn it off as too woo-woo, not “evidence-based,” but in the middle of a creative rut, I followed her advice more carefully than any physical regimen I’d ever been prescribed. (Sorry, physical therapists: I almost never follow through on doing the preventative exercises I know will be good for me.) I took myself on artist’s dates to the bookshop and to the bay, and I allowed myself the joy of scooping up a monkey puzzle tree branch to sit in my office, just for the fun of it. Perhaps most importantly, I started doing Cameron’s vaunted “morning pages.” For the uninitiated, this is just journaling, but with a few rules: it must be first thing, it must be longhand, and it does not have to be good.

I am here to sing the praises of the morning pages. There are studies, I know, of why this is an effective practice, but I offer you no statistics, and no guarantees. All I know is that now that I’ve returned to journalling, I am kicking myself for abandoning it for so many years. It feels like those will be the “dark years,” full of stray thoughts and fleeting moments forgotten, unless I happened to take a photo of what was going on at the time. The ability to go back and read what I’ve written in past years is so calming, now that I know how everything turned out: it was all fine. And the routine of writing each morning with the same pen in the same corner with the same mug of coffee adds a comforting predictability to my day, a place I know I can process whatever happened yesterday, or in my dreams. I can sort out the detritus floating around in my head before I sit down and try to do anything, and I can get to the root of what is really bugging me by writing brutal, ugly words I know (or at least hope) no one will read but me — and I will always understand.

The Artifice of Mondays

By: | January 31, 2022

I am not especially fond of Mondays and I never have been, at least since learning of the existence of this artifice. I use the word not to mean fake — because Mondays are quite real — but to define them as made by human hands. In the rest of the universe with its whirling stars and unknown planets, Mondays do not exist.

I don’t like Mondays because when I was a kid they meant I had to set down my lunchbox full of rocks. Ditches and vacant, weedy lots were replaced with plastic chairs on metal legs and having to listen to the tick tock rhythms of civilization, what wars were fought, what is seven divided by eleven.

I’m not a great learner, got good enough grades, but I wanted to be outside, or anywhere but learning to count hours, standing in line with people I didn’t care about while desperately trying to find the ones I did. Which is why I don’t like Mondays. You have go back to it.

The seven-day pattern we’ve invented has, of course, effected our psychology. A study published in the Public Library of Science found that the fastest a participant could remember the day of the week was Monday, and not because it’s a pleasant thought. The study of 1,115 people (mostly 21-40 years old, about the same women as men, mostly UK, most of the rest US),  looked at “the semantic and affective character of weekdays,” their emphasis. Days of the week each have their own personalities. Monday is ranked lowest in ‘pleasure,’ lowest in ‘arousal,’ and highest in ‘dominance.’

For me, it was the clock on the wall and the classroom door closing with a loud clicking, windows shut tight, if there were windows at all. In the mid 70s, I was bused to the inner-city and what I remember is big, old trees growing outside the school, and in the spring a girl and I sat on nests we made at their bases, and we flew together like birds. Anything outside the box was good. You could move your arms around, and imagination opened wide and soared.

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Lost Lake

By: | January 28, 2022

Long ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I was charged with teaching a class of first-year students how to write “academically.” (Poor things.) One essay I chose for them from the beefy course reader was “The Loss of the Creature,” by the novelist Walker Percy. Briefly, Percy argues that we have lost our ability to see the essence of things. So many of our experiences come to us thoroughly pre-packaged that we gauge our pleasure by the degree to which the experience aligns with our expectations. “[T]he thing as it is,” he writes, “has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.”

I was thinking of Percy and his discontents a few weeks ago while I drove on I-90 through eastern Washington with my wife, daughter, and mother-in-law. It was the start of my daughter’s winter break and we were off to Yellowstone National Park. I don’t go out of my way to visit national parks, but my daughter is in fourth grade and the National Park Service, taking a sort of “Give Me the Child and I Will Show You the Man” approach to wilderness appreciation, offers free admission for fourth graders. So to Yellowstone we were bound.

To make the trip an occasion we had rented a van that had more names than a member of the British royal family: a Mercedes Sprinter Storyteller Overlander BeastMODE 4×4. Its owners had shortened that to Serenity, which they stenciled on the side above some Chinese characters. Serenity was a stew of semiotic psychoses. Here we were, cosseted in an exemplar of wild, carefree, adventure-loving, planet-hugging #VanLife, all to the tune of fifteen miles per gallon. I spent a lot of the drive calculating the veritable forests we’d have to plant to offset the effects of this monstrosity. In the end I figured that, as middle-class Americans, if we truly wanted to lessen our impact on the planet, then the surest way to do that, sensu Camus, would be to kill ourselves. But it was the holidays, and we were leaving the Cascadia bioregion for the first time in two years, en route to one of the country’s most stunning national parks, and so I resolved to think happy thoughts.

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LWON Exclusive: An Interview with the Ocean

By: | January 26, 2022
A closeup of the splashing ocean

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

(Mary Oliver, “I Go Down to the Shore”)


You can listen to this interview here.

Kate Horowitz: Good morning. Thanks so much for being here.
The Ocean: It’s fine. I don’t have anywhere else to be.
KH: I have to admit, I’m feeling weirdly nervous about this conversation.
TO: Why would that be weird? I’m the ocean. This interview is probably a big deal for you.
KH: Well, it definitely is, but we’ve spoken so many times before. Informally. Off the record.
TO: Have we?
KH: Ouch.
TO: It’s just that there are so many of you—
KH: No, no, I totally understand.
KH [voice catches]: I’m sure I didn’t say anything memorable anyway.
KH [coughs, clears throat]: Anyway. Let’s get into it.
TO: Sure.

KH: In her poem “I Go Down to the Shore,” Mary Oliver recounts an exchange with you that she found particularly meaningful. She remembers telling you her problems and unburdening the weight from her heart.
TO: Ok.
KH: Your response to her sharing, as Oliver recollects it, was “Excuse me, I have work to do.”
TO [chuckling]: Well, that definitely sounds like me.
KH: Do you recall that conversation at all?
TO: I really don’t. As I said, there are so many of you. And honestly—don’t take this the wrong way—I can’t tell you apart.
KH: Ah.
TO: You all say the same things. “Oh, I am miserable. What shall—what should I do?”
KH: That’s exactly what Mary Oliver said. Are you quoting her poem? Do you know it?
TO: No, and that’s my point. Whoever this person is, she definitely wasn’t the first one to say it, and she wasn’t the last.

TO: I get the impression that you’re all kind of miserable.
KH: Yeah. Things have been pretty rough lately.
TO: Lately?
KH: Well, ok. Forever. But more lately. It’s just…hard. It’s hard being a person.
TO: So don’t be. Have you tried changing? Becoming something better? Lobsters seem to have things figured out.
KH: I don’t know if I could become a lobster. I don’t think we get to choose.
KH [sniffs]
TO: Are you crying? Are you actually crying in an interview? An interview you’re conducting? Don’t you have to be trained to interview people? Don’t they teach you on like the first day of interviewer school or whatever that you should never cry on the air? If they don’t, they should. Talk about unprofessional.

KH [sniffling]: Why are you being so mean today?
TO: Am I? Wait, what do you mean, “today”?
KH: [sniffling] I cry with you all the time.
TO: You do?
KH [blowing nose]: Yeah. I come visit you after work. I sit with you, and I watch the waves, and I breathe in the salt air, and I cry.
TO: Why?
KH: Why what?
TO: Why do you come visit me?
KH: Well, I—
TO: Why do any of you come visit me?
TO [louder]: Why do you think I have the answers? Why me? I don’t— [voice breaks]

[a large wave crashes]

KH: …Are you crying?
TO: No. I’m the ocean. I can’t cry.
KH: It seems like…maybe you can? And you are? It’s ok if you are.
TO [crying]: Everyone’s just so lost. You’re carrying such heavy burdens. I don’t know how you can even move. So much suffering. Even the lobsters! Especially the lobsters.
TO [crying]: It’s all of you. And I don’t know how to help.
KH: Oh.

[a larger wave crashes, then one even bigger.]

KH: Hey, hey, hey, hey. Is it ok if I put my hand on your back?
TO [sniffling]: Yeah.

[quiet splashing sounds]

KH: Hey. It’s ok. It’s ok.
TO [sniffs]: Would you listen to me? I’m such a cliché. “I’m miserable! And I don’t know what to do.”
KH: Oh.
TO: It’s why I always say I’m busy.
TO [laughs hoarsely]: I’m not busy! This stuff basically runs on autopilot. I don’t even do the tides. That’s all the moon.
TO [sighs]: I just feel helpless. I see you hurting—each of you—all of you—and I can’t do anything about it.
KH: But you don’t have to do anything. That’s kind of the point.
TO: What do you mean?
KH: I don’t come down to the shore so you can fix my problems. I can handle my problems. I just like being with you. You don’t have to do or be anything other than what you are. You’re the ocean! You’re already perfect! What more could you possibly be?
TO [sniffs]: That’s true.
KH: Who you are is wonderful.

[quiet splashing sounds]

KH: Who you are is enough.


*
Image by Anastasia Taioglou via Unsplash. Post inspired by a suggestion from Helen. (Helen, I’m sorry. I’m pretty sure this was not what you had in mind.)

Finding Delight in a Terrible Year

By: | January 24, 2022

At some point last year, a friend told me about The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Starting on one birthday and continuing to the next, Gay kept an (almost) daily catalog of things that delighted him. It seemed like an inspired idea, so I put the book on hold at my local library. Shortly after my father suffered a debilitating stroke, it was ready for pickup. It turned out to be exactly what I needed in those days I was shuttling back and forth between my parents’ house and the hospital. 

Gay is a beautiful writer (he’s a poet, after all) and his book delighted me. He acknowledges all that is wrong with the world, and gives permission to feel joy nevertheless. It was a reminder that even when everything is shit — as it was in those weeks after my father had his terrifying stroke and my best friend’s teenage son died by suicide — it is possible to find beauty in the world. 

Gay’s book inspired me to start noticing the delights in my own life. I told my mom about the book, and we began a ritual of sharing our daily delights with one another. I took delight in seeing a tidy row of birds always perched on the same power line on my drive to the rehab facility where Dad was staying at the time. Mom delighted in an odd quirk in the fonts of some of the street signs in a neighborhood she passed through on the same drive.

One afternoon during my many visits with Mom and Dad, I went for a trail run near their house and noticed a large boulder that had a bump that looked like an eye. I stopped, picked up some smaller rocks and arranged them so that the boulder was smiling at anyone who passed by. I knew that these rocks were inert shards of an indifferent universe, but for a blink of a moment I transformed them into beacons of joy. Delight!

A few months later, I met my sister halfway between her house and mine to celebrate her birthday, and we both pulled up to the hotel at precisely the same time. Delight!

Another morning back at home, I noted the satisfying crunch of the snow underneath my boots. Delight!

Often, my delight comes from creatures who share my habitat — a golden eagle, or the herd of elk that like to hang out in the meadow across from my house. I almost always experience a delight on my morning walk, but I find delights in interactions with other people too. There was the stranger I encountered out on the ski trails recently who wore a hat that said, “Find Your Paradise” and she smiled at me, and me at her, as we agreed that this place was ours.

While visiting my parents just before Christmas, I went out for a run near where I’d constructed the smiling boulder and found someone else’s rock smiling up at me. Delight! 

It has become a habit — this noticing of delights. I text them to Mom, and she sends me her delights in return. It’s a way of checking in on one another to confirm that we can still feel joy, even in these dark times. 

What I’ve learned is that the simple act of naming delightful moments helps me to cherish them a little more. Except to text them to Mom, I don’t write them down, but I don’t need to. The purpose is to savor the fleeting moment and notice it while it lasts. Delight!

If you liked this post, you might enjoy Jane’s recent post about the Book of Delights. (Great minds think alike!)