How The Brain Deals With Grief, Listening To Noisy Fish Sounds. May 6, 2022, Part 1
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Being a human can be a wonderful thing. We're social creatures. |
| 0:07.2 | We crave strong bonds with family and friends. Those relationships can be the most rewarding part of life. |
| 0:15.0 | But having strong relationships also means experiencing loss. Grief is one of the hardest things we go through in life. If you've lost a |
| 0:24.6 | loved one, you know that feeling. It can be an overwhelming sadness and heartache that reaches deeply |
| 0:30.8 | into the very core of your being. To understand why we feel the way we do when we grieve, |
| 0:37.2 | the logical place to turn to is our brain. |
| 0:41.0 | A new book explores the neuroscience angle to this profound human experience. The author is my guest. |
| 0:47.9 | Mary Frances O'Connor, Ph.D., author of The Grieving Brain, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to Science Friday. |
| 0:55.6 | It's so nice to be here, Ira. It's so nice to have you. Let's start with some of the wordplay here, |
| 1:01.3 | if I might. I'm inclined to use the words grief and grieving interchangeably, but they're actually |
| 1:07.8 | different experiences, correct? That's right. I have found this to be |
| 1:12.7 | really helpful in studying grief and grieving. Grief is that wave that just knocks you off your |
| 1:20.9 | feet, where grieving is how the feeling of grief changes over time without ever going away. |
| 1:29.0 | So what I mean by that is that grief is a natural response to loss. |
| 1:33.9 | And if I, you know, open a drawer, I come across my mom's signature, say, for example, |
| 1:41.2 | 20 years after she's died, I may still dissolve into tears on that day. |
| 1:47.3 | And yet, I know that that feeling of grief is maybe more familiar. |
| 1:52.8 | And so it's not the same as it was 20 years earlier. |
| 1:57.2 | But if we're expecting that we're not going to feel grief anymore, we may start to |
| 2:01.8 | wonder if we're actually getting any better or if we're adapting the way people are expecting |
| 2:08.4 | us to. |
| 2:09.5 | You said when you study grief, how long have you been studying grief? |
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