Object-Trace Cells and the Grieving Brain
Grief is exhausting for many, many reasons: the weight of devastating sadness, the wrung-out feeling after heavy crying, the effort of taking care of life’s business while grieving. Another reason may be less obvious: your brain is working overtime.
We know that brain function takes energy. It’s hard to think clearly when we’re tired or hungry. Playing chess at the most competitive levels burns thousands of calories. People recovering from brain injuries sleep almost constantly while the brain heals. Grief does a number on the brain as well.
The book The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD is one of my most-recommended to clients. Science-enthusiasts and the deeply bereft alike appreciate the clear way the author explains complex neurological processes. She begins with the familiar experience of moving through one’s home at night, carefully maneuvering around furniture that we know is there but cannot see in the dark. We can do this because of virtual maps that our brains hold and can use to direct us through space.
Getting into the science of how these brain maps work, O’Connor describes the work of neuroscientists Edvard Moser and May-Bitt Moser, who sent a rat into a box with a tall tower of blue LEGO blocks. Over and over the rat visited the tower while his headset mapped every individual neuron that fired. They called these neurons “object cells,” because they fired when he was near the object of the tower.
Then they removed the tower and observed that a different set of neurons fired when the rat was in the place where the tower used to be. The scientists called these neurons “object-trace cells,” which, as O’Connor writes, “fired for the ghostly trace where the blue tower should have been, according to the rat’s internal virtual map.” Interesting as this may be, the revelation that we can apply to our grief is this: the object-trace cells continued to fire for an average of five more days after the researchers moved the blue LEGO tower. It took time for the rat’s brain to learn that the tower would not be coming back. It takes time to map a new world.
In her lovely prose, O’Connor concludes: “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. Is it any wonder that it takes weeks and months of grief and new experiences to learn our way around again?”
To this I would only add that doing so takes tremendous effort and energy, as our grieving brains rewrite the map of our world to account for every minuscule difference between Then and Now. May we be gentle with ourselves in this process and allow for the rest we need.
For support on the exhausting journey of grief, I invite you to reach out. Therapy can help ease the way.