Dr. Lloyd Minor, Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, explains how wearables and AI analytics are changing medicine. But first, you’ll learn about the strange things that happen in your brain after a breakup.
Dr. Lloyd Minor, Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, explains how wearables and AI analytics are changing medicine. But first, you’ll learn about the strange things that happen in your brain after a breakup.
Here's what happens in your brain after a breakup by Kelsey Donk
Additional resources from Dr. Lloyd Minor:
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/wearables-and-ai-analytics-are-changing-medicine-w-dr-lloyd-minor-and-what-happens-to-your-brain-after-a-breakup
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about what happens in your brain after a breakup. Then, you’ll learn about how wearables and AI analytics are changing medicine, with help from the Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Lloyd Minor.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Romantic rejection can make anybody’s brain go a little haywire. You might cry for days, or obsess over their social media posts. Sometimes, people spam their exes with phone calls and texts, or even show up at their houses uninvited. Why do people do this? It’s because after a breakup, your brain does some really weird things.
According to psychiatrists, romantic rejection happens in two phases: “protest” and “resignation/despair.” The protest phase is when the really weird stuff happens. The dumped person becomes obsessed with winning back their ex; they make dramatic, sometimes embarrassing gestures; they try to get mutual friends on their side. The thing is, as the evidence mounts against them, their romantic passion only intensifies. It’s what Helen Fisher, a neurologist at the Kinsey Institute, calls “frustration attraction.”
Fisher learned what the brain does after a breakup when she and a group of scientists scanned the brains of ten women and five men who’d recently been dumped but said they were still ‘intensely in love.’ What the scientists did to these people might sound like torture to anyone who’s been brokenhearted. The participants had to look at a picture of their ex and think about moments in their relationship. Yeah. Rough.
The participants said the image and memories of their lost loves made them feel despair, anger, and confusion over why they’d been rejected — but they also felt intense romantic passion. Sounds familiar, right? The brain scans bore this out: they had activation in the same motivation and reward regions the researchers had seen in people who were happily in love. There was also a lot of activity in areas associated with reframing bad situations and assessing gains and losses. Makes sense.
But the participants also had elevated levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine — signs that the stress system had kicked into gear. Likewise, there was heightened activity in regions linked to physical pain and distress. They were hurting, and their brains were sounding the alarm.
The rejected people also had activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with cocaine addiction. That could explain some of the obsessive, almost ‘addictive’ behaviors common to people who have been dumped. The participants in the study thought about their rejecter “obsessively” and craved getting back together again.
This won’t tell you how you can get over an ex more quickly. But it could help us understand our friends and family who experience romantic rejection. With such an intense mix of emotions, it makes sense that people behave strangely when they’ve been dumped. There’s no quick fix for heartbreak — but hey, there’s always ice cream. ...and Linkin Park. Lots and lots of Linkin Park.
ASHLEY: You hear a lot about the problems with healthcare these days, but it’s not all doom and gloom. There are some really exciting things in the works to make medicine better than ever. So today, we’re gonna share some optimism from Dr. Lloyd Minor. He’s a scientist, surgeon, and Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine. And earlier this year he published a book titled “Discovering Precision Health: Predict, Prevent, and Cure to Advance Health and Well-Being.” In the book, he gets into how new tools are helping people avoid illness and stay healthy, from smartphone technology to genome sequencing to routine blood tests. And in our conversation, we touched on one particular piece of research: the Apple Heart Study. It was a study designed to improve technology used to detect and analyze irregular heart rhythms. Those can be a sign of serious heart conditions like atrial fibrillation [A-tree-ull fib-rih-LAY-shin], which is a leading cause of stroke. The study collected data from more than 400 thousand people, via their Apple Watches and a smartphone app designed for the study. Not only did that study give a glimpse into what wearable technology can do, but it also shed light on how we use wearable devices in general. Here’s Dr. Lloyd Minor’s point of view on the limitations and possibilities of wearable technology — including how it’s being used right now.
[CLIP 4:06]
CODY: If we use predictive analytics the way Dr. Minor's talking about, we could potentially help people prevent disease before it starts. But beyond that, collecting and organizing the right kind of data could also help doctors personalize treatments to individual patients based on what that data says. This is all easier said than done, but the possibilities are pretty cool to think about. You can learn more about the exciting possibilities for the future of medicine in Dr. Lloyd Minor’s new book, “Discovering Precision Health: Predict, Prevent, and Cure to Advance Health and Well-Being.” We’ll put a link to pick it up in today’s show notes.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s first story was written by Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!