Mary-Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona where she studies the impact of grief on the brain. Her work helps explain things like why we still expect our dead loved one to walk into the living room and why grief can feel so disorienting. As Mary-Frances explains, grief is a hormonal event, and understanding how it shows up in our brains can help us make sense of our own grief experience. In this episode, we cover how grief is really the brain learning to imagine a life with the absence of a loved one. Our brains know how to grieve. In fact, resilience is the most typical brain pattern of grieving.

You can learn more about Mary-Frances’ work and find her book, “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss,” at https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/

This podcast is produced by Larj Media.