If you loved Ally McBeal, you’ll certainly remember Vonda Shepard’s melancholic What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, with its unforgettable refrain:
What becomes of the brokenhearted,
Who had love that’s now departed?
Most people don’t take a broken heart seriously. Some may even gain a devilish pleasure out of breaking others’ hearts. To a mental sadist, or just a careless or heartless person, a broken heart is just a metaphor, since “mental pain isn’t real pain.” In our societies, taboos exist only to protect against physical violence, but inflicting mental pain is still widely accepted.
Would this change if it became common knowledge that a broken heart does really hurt, physically, and could result in illness among those who are genetically predisposed? Maybe Vonda, unknowingly, was hinting at people with variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1):
Every day heartaches grow a little stronger,
I can’t stand this pain much longer.
Researchers at the UCLA (Naomi Eisenberger, Baldwin Way) claim in an paper to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to have discovered a link between social rejection and physical pain among people with this rare mutation of the OPRM1 gene. Should those findings be independently confirmed, it may (or may not) also explain cases of people dying from grief. In the light of those new findings, an old wisdom may shine in a wholly new meaning:
I am dying from grief; my years are shortened by sadness. Misery has drained my strength; I am wasting away from within. – Psalms 31:10
Update (09/05/2009): The abstract of this article, w/ link to (paid) full text.
May 25th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
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