Arthur Brooks

destruction of the neurons and the substantia nigra this is not you know we're we're not talking about that what it is is extreme disorientation because permanent became impermanent all of a sudden and that discrepancy between perceived reality and experienced reality leads to this disorientation that we're talking about here yearning longing sadness and and even hallucinations and you'll see this you know i remember this and remember my family lost her mother and she said

that her mother was actually walking around on the roof i'm like what are you talking about yeah she's up there like what with no history of hallucinations it's just common is the way that this turns out now what's the brain's response to grief and the answer to this actually comes if you've been following my work for a long time affective pain in other words sensory pain is the ouch part of something that happens to you physically the affective part is i hate that part

different parts of the brain for the two kinds of pain.

As a matter of fact, that affective response involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex.

Often that's actually narrowed down to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

It's a part of the limbic system designed to make you feel pain and mental pain, sadness.

So, which is weird.

Like why did we evolve sadness?

And it makes sense, doesn't it?

Because we're evolved to have an aversive response to losing things and people that we love.

you have sadness because it's it's supposed to be really really uncomfortable terrible as a matter of fact so that you will avoid the loss when you can't avoid the loss

it becomes an inevitable source of pain is what it turns but but if you can't avoid the loss you will because you don't want to feel sad which is why you know if you didn't have any sadness or you weren't worried about sadness you didn't feel discomfort with your sadness you would say everything that you think all the time to your loved ones and you'd be fired and friendless and divorced in like a week and that would be bad for you so we've evolved sadness so that we will avoid loss

so that we avoid grief is what it comes down to.

And that thing that we've evolved is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is the part of the brain dedicated to that kind of pain.

Now there's also, I'm going to come back to that in a second, but there is also

a set of experiments that that are able to measure grief with respect to skin electrical uh conductivity believe it or not how well your skin conducts electricity will be indicative of how much interior pain you're feeling

It's kind of a physical measurement of how they do that.

There's an article called Behavioral Triggers of Skin Conductance Responses and Their Neural Correlates in the Primate Amygdala.

And why is that?

Because you're amped up.