What Depression Really Is And Why Grief Changes Your Brain | Professor Sophie Scott

0:00It is interesting because we normally think of depression as being an excess of negative emotions. But what if it was a complete lack of positive emotions, like you are without joy? And then think about what that does to the conversations you have with people. Because, you know, if they laugh and you don't join in and you find their laughter irritating and you let that show, that kind of positive spiral of the interaction is not going to get going. and both of you are going to feel less good for the interaction and it's going to push you apart. So it's definitely something that I'd like to know a lot more about in terms of depression because I suspect there's some really quite interesting things we can dig out there.

0:40Yeah, well, I think I can connect to that when I've gone through quite bad grief. And, you know, my dad is naturally just a very funny person. He is just probably one of the wittiest men that I know. He can just just joke after joke. but when I was in a very bad stage of grief nothing it just felt very isolated yeah and it felt like more drawn apart yeah and actually when I came back to myself and I'd got through you know because grief is just a stage of process it's just time and you have to allow that time yeah then I felt life in me again you know and I could actually find these things naturally funny and it's funny when you get to that moment when you feel it again you're like wow I really did feel like I was in a glass box that kind of like nothing was happening and then all of a sudden one day you have that feeling again and you're like oh my gosh I'm back to my natural self because I find grief or if it's depression or whatever is quite fascinating to explore.

1:39Grief is so it's so cognitive it affects how you think it's not I it was my mother's funeral last week and she died a few weeks ago. And it was really, I, and it was similar when my father died. I couldn't remember anybody's name. Yeah. I was just calling everybody the wrong name continuously. And it's, it is, I think, this is going to sound really crazy. I promise you there's a point to this. The Nobel Prize a few years ago went to these scientists, some of whom are at UCL, who found that when rats are navigating space, there are cells in their hippocampus that know where they are in a room. So it likes a corner or it likes a long wall.

2:31And it's sort of mapping you out in space. And they kind of panned this out to this kind of network of brain areas that were sort of telling you where you are and how you navigate. But I went to a really interesting talk which was looking at these same sort of families of cells, but not for space, in physical space, but looking at social networks. And they were finding something similar. There's like a map in various, much as you're mapping out spatial navigation, your social network is like a map in your brain. And when you lose someone from that social network, when they're gone, that's really disrupts the whole thing, I would imagine.

3:10So you probably when I think a lot of our kind of psychological day to day experience doesn't feel like that really is based on like this is what I know to be true about the world, like where I am in space. That matters. And who I am in my social network, that really matters. A lot of my kind of memory and everything's hanging off that. And if that gets disrupted, which it is completely by grief, all this other stuff starts to fall apart. And it's my mom, my father died. My mother says she couldn't read books. you just couldn't read and that's you know that seems ridiculous but I think it's just all these different directions that you're describing that grief is not just sadness no it's not really affecting how your brain is working and I think it may well relate to this massive disruption in the certainty of your social network and then I mean that makes a lot of sense and actually as you're describing that I and this might be completely wrong but I remember when I lived in my old house I had a mice problem and I remember it always used to be the same circuit that they'd go in yeah right and when the mouse man came out he said look they they spray their odor yes and so and I was like oh gosh you're really freaking me out now but he was like they spray their odor so they know the way and basically what happened was when one came back he'd buried up the holes but left one so the mouse kept running straight into the wall it just kept hitting the same space in the same wall constantly because it would just knew that that was the way they were always going yeah and it was so fascinating because he would run back and then hit the wall again yeah and i just watched this mouse like he wasn't going in any other route no it was just this one way yeah and because it was blocked you couldn't figure out what's doing he was getting so disorientated in there yeah and that makes a lot of sense with as you're saying like the mapping in the brain certainty yeah what space means yeah exactly and i'm thinking about that with them with grief yeah right you're these patterns of all of a sudden this well that it's just been it's just gone it's been ripped from you yeah so your brain is automatically going to make that call or think about listening to a voice note or your natural synergy of what you would normally do is all of a sudden just been like derailed so does that then mean that your brain starts trying to push new neural networks like how would that then start to I think um I mean your brain is always remodeling anything when you you're born with pretty much all the brain cells you're ever going to have um so when you learn something new you don't build on a new bit of brain you you you the learning's happening by new connections forming between brain cells or existing connections strengthening and you change that network so anything you and i remember from our conversation today will be because our brain networks has changed again and that i suspect one of the kind of like cataclysmic effects of grief is trying to remodel around around this but the sort of certainty particularly for you know for grief perhaps to someone who's been in your life for a huge amount of time.

6:22So much stuff will be built around that. This is just a silly example. After my mother died in hospital, I was staying in her house and she had this really particular way of handling hand towels. And because of sort of, you know, she'd gone to a care home and temporary, so she was possibly coming home. Anyway, various people had been staying in the house and her hand towels were all not, they were just piled up. So I washed them all and I folded them all up and I put them back into the container that she liked them to be in. And I realised I was doing all this because I thought she was coming home.

6:54Wow. So a whole set of things were going, you know, so a whole lot of things were still working around the fact as if this hasn't happened. And I think that's also a huge part of grief. At one level, your brain is trying to do things normally and it can't, but you find yourself caught in these patterns that you don't even realise you're doing. And so you're like, okay, right, that's why I'm doing this. So, yeah, it's quite extraordinary. It is really, really. I find grief one of the most fascinating things to kind of understand. We've done quite a few podcasts on grief here, but I feel like the only resolution I've found, which is one of the most monotonous answers, is time.

7:34Yeah. Like it is. And it's like you hate to hear it when you're in it. You're like, that feels... Thank you. How am I supposed to do with this? Yeah, that's such an helpful information. I'll just keep feeling this way. but it is you get to this like and I guess it never goes it stays in you but your brain starts operating again in the way that it used to you kind of start feeling back to yourself yeah and then that's I think when the humor I feel that somebody will say something and oh I would have you know gone back to that place and gone oh wow that actually really made me laugh yeah and then And that's such a nice feeling when you come back.

8:11Neurodivergent brains. Do they react differently to humor? I saw you did a paper on this with autistic brains. Yes, yes. I had a PhD student called Sessi Kai and she was very interested in autism and laughter in autism. because people, again, anecdotally, people with autism will often find neurotypical laughter absolutely inexplicable. Why are you laughing at that? That's not funny.

8:43And in fact, the study we did where we gave people a joke and they had to rate how funny the joke was and then we put laughter on the end and we found that putting laughter on the end makes the joke seem funnier and the more spontaneous the laughter, the funnier it makes the joke. That actually, we were doing that because Ceci had done several studies with people with autism where she'd played them laughter and asked them to say, how much does that make you want to laugh or how authentic does that laughter sound? And she says, I don't think this is meaningful. I think it's an odd task. We don't normally ask these sorts of questions.

9:17Neurotypical people get on with it, but people with autism are like, what does this mean? I don't know what you mean. So she did this one with the jokes and then just writing how funny the joke is as a way of kind of looking at the influence of laughter but asking a much more ecologically valid question, like how funny is that joke? Is something people can say that it was or it wasn't funny? And what we find is that everybody finds the joke funnier if it's followed with laughter, and the more spontaneous the laughter, the funnier the joke. Both neurotypical and autistic adults. And the interesting thing, in fact, if anything, because these were terrible jokes, we deliberately told terrible jokes because we were trying to make them funnier, the autistic people rated all the jokes as funnier.

9:55they were more generous towards the jokes and then we um we extended that out to in the brain study where we had people listening we couldn't fit jokes in the scanner because they take too long to tell so we had funny words being said by a comedian like flank and then we add on laughter or not and what we find is that actually this kind of we see a lot of brain areas you would expect to see associated with laughter so contagion effects you see happening this kind of reflectiveness on the joke that the funny word we see happening for everybody the difference between the autistic adults and the neurotypical adults was in medial prefrontal areas running down here which are associated with what's called mentalizing thinking about what somebody else is thinking and you see those very strongly activated in neurotypical groups when they hear laughter because it's not just contagious.

10:47You want to know why is that person laughing? And that's actually something that autistic people can struggle with, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And indeed, they show less of this activation. So they weren't showing this kind of mentalizing response. So there's something interesting going on there. Autistic people laugh and they do find things funny. And there is some other evidence that they find slightly different things funny. So I think a study with cartoons found that slapstick was funnier, certainly for autistic children, than for non-autistic children or neurotypical children.

11:21So we need to know a lot more about this, but it looks like there's some commonalities and some distinct differences, which you would expect when autistic people have got a different cognitive profile. We also did a study with boys at risk of psychopathy. and these are teenage boys and this is part of a study with my colleagues Essie Vidding and Eamon McCrory who study resilience in teenagers but also look at psychopathy and they're at risk of psychopathy because they have two distinct character personality traits. First of all they have conduct disorders so they're badly behaved. They might be violent or indulging criminal behaviours they also score highly in what's called callous and unemotional traits and that means they might hurt somebody and they don't care and that's what puts you at risk of psychopathy that's the combination of personality features that is dangerous for your development and we had neurotypical teenage boys and we also had teenage boys who had conduct disorder but they also scored low in callous and unemotional traits so if they hurt somebody they would feel bad and they are not at risk of psychopathy.

12:34They're not necessarily well behaved, but it's a different psychological profile. And what we found was the teenage boys at risk of psychopathy don't find laughter as contagious as the other teenage boys. And when we scan their brains, we don't see this kind of priming response to join in when they hear the laughter. Now, they're at risk of psychopathy. We don't know it when they're studied, which the boys might develop it, but they're at risk. But if you think about what that means, I mean, it means we can't pull out the direction of the effect. So is there something, given this contagious laughter is something you learn to do, have they never had the chance to learn it?

13:14Were they in an environment where there was no laughter? Or is there something different about their psychological profile that means they don't? But either way, if you become an adult who's not laughing when other adults laugh, you don't join in with laughter, you're both a bit more distanced from people and you're less bonded to people. Empathy. Well, presumably reduced empathy. And certainly it's going to be easier for you to deal with people in a more sort of functional way and get what you want from them without really caring what they think.