when we were young souls i feel your heartache

The researchers knew which areas of the brain became active during physical pain: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which serves as an alarm for distress, and the right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC), which regulates it. The concept was hard to test in people, however, until the rise of neuroimaging decades later.Ī breakthrough occurred in an fMRI study led by APS Fellow Naomi Eisenberger of University of California, Los Angeles. Panksepp’s findings on social distress were replicated in a number of other species - monkeys, guinea pigs, rats, chickens. The study’s implication was profound: If an opiate could dull emotional angst, perhaps the brain processed social and physical pain in similar ways. The infant dogs cried when they were separated from their mothers, but these distress calls were much less intense in those that had been given a low dose of morphine, Panksepp reported in Biological Psychiatry. APS Fellow Jaak Panksepp, an animal researcher, was studying social attachment in puppies.

Hints of a neural tie between social and physical pain emerged, quite unexpectedly, in the late 1970s. Love may actually hurt, like hurt hurt, after all. The connection is so strong that traditional bodily painkillers seem capable of relieving our emotional wounds. Neuroimaging studies have shown that brain regions involved in processing physical pain overlap considerably with those tied to social anguish. In the past few years, psychology researchers have found a good deal of literal truth embedded in the metaphorical phrases comparing love to pain. The problem is technically known as “stress cardiomyopathy,” but the press likes to call it “broken heart syndrome,” and medical professionals don’t object to the nickname.īehavioral science is catching up with the anecdotes, too. A few years ago a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University reported a rare but lethal heart condition caused by acute emotional distress.

Truth is you don’t have to be a sentimentalist to believe in broken hearts - being a subscriber to the New England Journal of Medicine will do. In one example from early 2012, Marjorie and James Landis of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who’d been married for 65 years, died just 88 minutes apart. Old couples frequently make the news because they can’t physically survive without one another. At the same time, life often presents a compelling argument that the two types of pain share a common source. We agree that “love hurts,” but we don’t think it hurts the way that, say, being kicked in the shin hurts. Most of us see the connection between social and physical pain as a figurative one.

When we were young souls i feel your heartache