For as long as there have been human relationships, we have struggled with the overwhelming nature of grief following the death of a loved one. Poets, writers, and artists have given us moving renderings of the almost indescribable nature of loss, an amputation of a part of ourselves, or an absence that weighs on us like a heavy cloak. As human beings, we seem compelled to try to communicate what our grief is like, to describe carrying this burden.
Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.
Well, in fact, you are not actually walking in this world. Or, more accurately, you are walking in two worlds most of the time. One world is a virtual reality map made up entirely in your head. Your brain is moving your human form through the virtual map it has created, which is why you can move through your house fairly easily in the dark; you are not using the external world to navigate. You are using your brain map to get around this familiar space, with your human body arriving where your brain has sent it.
You can think of this virtual brain map of the world as the Google map in your head. Have you ever had the experience of following voice directions, without fully paying attention to where you are driving? At some point, the voice tells you to turn onto a street, but you may discover that the street is actually a bike path. GPS and the world do not always match up. Like Google maps, your brain map relies on prior information it knows about the area.
To keep you safe, however, the brain has entire areas devoted to error detection— perceiving any situations where the brain map and the real world do not match. It switches to incoming visual information when an error is detected (and, if it is nighttime, we may decide to flip on the lights). We rely on our brain maps because walking your body through your mental map of the world takes a lot less computing power than walking through your familiar house as though it were your first experience-as though you were discovering each time where the doorways and walls and furniture are, and deciding how to navigate each one.
We have even found the location in the hippocampus (the seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain) where the brain map is stored. To understand what the little computer of gray matter is doing, we often rely on animal studies. Animals’ basic neural processes are similar to those of humans, and they also use brain maps to get around.
If someone close to us dies, then, based on what we know about object-trace cells, our neurons still fire every time we expect our loved one to be in the room. And this neural trace persists until we can learn that our loved one is never going to be in our physical world again. We must update our virtual maps, creating a revised cartography of our new lives.
We use brain maps to find our loved ones, to predict where they are, and to search for them when they are gone. A key problem in grief is that there is a mismatch between the virtual map we always use to find our loved ones, and the reality, after they die, that they can no longer be found in the dimensions of space and time. The unlikely situation that they are not on the map at all, the alarm and confusion that this causes, is one reason grief overwhelms us.
The first mobile creatures needed to find food, a basic necessity of life. The neural map was probably developed in order to know where to go to fulfill that need. Later, particularly as mammals developed, another need arose: for other members of the species, to care for them, defend them, and mate with them. These are what we call attachment needs. For the moment, let’s think of the need for food and the need for loved ones (attachment) as similar problems the mammal has to solve. Now, food and loved ones are obviously different. Food is not always found in the same place, but our loved ones have minds of their own and therefore are even less predictable.
Evolution has endowed social creatures with the computational ability to map out their environment, to know where the good sources of food are, and how soon to return to an area after they have eaten there. But evolution is a tinkerer, and when a new need arises, it uses the machinery available rather than develop a whole new brain system. So, it seems likely that the same mapping encoded in neurons to find food would also be used to map where mammals keep their babies, and how to get back to them at the end of the day.
Space and time have been co-opted from dimensions that the brain had been using to find food. Those mammals that applied these same dimensions to their caregivers survived to pass along their genes. The babies who stayed within sight of their mother survived predators, and toddlers who waited where they were until their mother returned with food got better nutrition and grew strong. Attachment developed because the brain applied a solution from one problem to another problem as the new species of mammals evolved.
In addition to carrying around wide-ranging virtual maps, another of the marvels of the brain is that it is a remarkably good prediction machine. Much of the cortex is configured to take in information and compare that information to what has happened before, to what it has learned through experience to expect. And because the brain excels at prediction, it often just fills in information that is not actually there—it completes the patterns it expects to see. For example, people can see faces in everything from clouds to toast, by fling in the gaps. We strive to make artificial intelligence that is as good at pattern completion as human beings are. We can even measure this prediction capacity in our neurons. When the brain perceives even a small violation of what it expects, there is a particular firing pattern of the neurons that can be picked up with an electroencephalogram (EEG). An EEG cap of electrodes on the human scalp shows a change in the voltage when the brain detects that the “wrong” thing has happened, milliseconds after it occurs. When your hip doesn’t bump into the dining room table when you are walking in the middle of the night, for example, the voltage of your neurons momentarily changes.
Source : The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58007238-the-grieving-brain
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Thinking Beyond Science 
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