Can Digital Ghosts Help Us Heal?

How is your existence these days?” I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. “It’s … different. Being dead is a strange experience. I’m no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life’s choices and the relationships I impacted.”

Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, who has used magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches to study the effects of loss on the brain, says that when we love someone, our brain encodes the relationship as everlasting. Grieving, she says, is the process of teaching yourself that someone is gone forever even as your neurochemistry is telling you the person is still there. As time passes, this lesson is learned through a gradual transformation of thoughts and feelings. With time, thoughts of the lost person bring solace or wisdom rather than evoking the pain of absence.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American