THE HEART

There is a third contributor to the dual ends of encouraging neurogenesis and preventing grief from devolving into depression. It brings us right back to where we began: the importance of the right kind of companionship.

According to Princeton researchers Alexis Stranahan, David Khalil and Elizabeth Gould, "in the absence of social interaction, a normally beneficial experience can exert a potentially deleterious influence on the brain." One of their studies found that even exercise could not encourage neurogenesis if the subjects were living in isolation. In other words, both exercise and social interaction were required for neurogenesis to take place.

This only confirms what humanity knows instinctively: people need other people. Klein believes science has contributed to our innate understanding of this by providing the solid proof that "a well-functioning communal structure benefits even physical health. . . . People live better and longer when they are socially rooted."

James Coan is a University of Virginia neuroscientist who has found that people need more than simple social roots, however. The most tangible benefit of a solid support structure may be the increased likelihood of being touched. Coan conducted what he believes to be "the first study of the neurological reactions to human touch in a threatening situation, and the first study to measure how the brain facilitates the health-enhancing properties of close social relationships." His method? Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to monitor results, he applied electric shocks to create stress for his subjects, who were all married women. By turns they endured the shock alone, while holding a stranger’s hand, or while holding the hand of their own husband. Predictably, the MRI showed that the women responded with the least anxiety when their husbands held their hands, and the most anxiety when there was no human touch at all.

Though it seems an obvious point, this is still significant, because high levels of stress hormones are strongly linked to clinical depression. Could physical touch be biologically crucial to those who are working through bereavement? If so, it’s one aspect of the recovery process that the bereaved cannot manage for themselves. Again, though self-evident by common sense, this has been biologically established by British neuroscientists in a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track neural responses to touch. The study reports that "more activity was found in somatosensory cortex when the stimulus was externally produced." Speculating as to why this occurs, researcher Sarah-J. Blakemore and her colleagues propose that "our sensory systems are constantly bombarded by a multitude of sensory stimuli, from which we must extract the few stimuli that correspond to important changes within the environment. One class of stimuli that are in most circumstances unimportant, and therefore can be discarded, are those that arise as a necessary consequence of our own motor actions."

Clearly this would also apply to the kinds of touch that, as other scientists have established, reduce anxiety and ease sadness. There are some forms of comfort that can come only from others.

As for giving sorrow words? One doesn’t like to contradict Shakespeare, but experts say some people simply don’t need to talk about their grief. That doesn’t mean they don’t have other grief-related needs, however. We just may need to step away from our mobile phones and e-mail, and reach out to touch someone in the old-fashioned way instead. For if there’s one adage that applies to the bereaved and their supporters alike, it would be the tried and true "Actions speak louder than words."

Page 5 of 5 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 3 4 5 | Next