The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment
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Welcome to the huberman la podcast, where we discussed science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and am a professor of neurology, gy and opto ology at stanford school of medicine. Today we are going to talk about the psychology in the biology of desire, love and attachment.

Today happens to be valentine's day twenty twenty two. However, the themes we are going to discuss pertain to desire, love and attachment on any given day. And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss, almost certainly were at play thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, and no doubt will still be at play in our minds and in our bodies and in our psychologies for the decade, centuries and thousands of years to come.

Indeed, today I want to focus on core mechanisms that lead individuals to seek out other individuals with whom to mate with, with whom to have children, with or not, with whom to enter short or long term relationships with. And perhaps two in those relationships were to seek relationships on the side, so called infidelity. I'm certains not going to encourage or discourage any of these behaviors are simply going to cover the peer reviewed scientific data on all these aspects of desire, love and attachment.

I'm going to discuss how our childhood attachment styles, as they're called, influence our adult attachment styles. Yes, you heard that right. How we attached or did not attach to primary caregivers in our childhood has much to do with how we attach or fail to attach to romantic partners as adults, because the same neural circuits, the neurons and their connections in the brain and body that underlie attachment between infant and caregiver, between toddler and parent or other caregiver and during adolescents in our teenage years, are repurposed for adult romantic attachments.

I know there might be a little ery to think about, but indeed that is true. Now the fortunate thing is that regardless of our childhood attachment styles and experiences, the neutral circuits for desire, love and attachment are quite plastic. They are amenable to change in response to both what we think and what we feel as well as what we do. However, all three aspects that were discussing today, desire, love and attachment, are also strongly biologically driven.

We are going to talk about biological mechanism such as hormones, biological mechanisms such as neurochemical, things like dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin, and neural circuits, brain areas, and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain, that control whether not we desire somebody or not, whether not we lose or increase our desire for somebody over time, whether not we fall in love, what love means, and whether not the relationships we form continue to include the elements of desire and love over time or not. In order to illustrate just how powerfully our biology can shape our perception of the attractiveness of other people, I want to share with you the results of a couple of studies. Both studies explore how people rate other people's attractiveness, and in both studies, the major variable is that women are at different stages of their menstrual cycle.

Now in the first study, men are rating the attractiveness women according to the smell of those women. Now they're not smelling them directly. They're smelling clothing that women war for a couple of days at different phases of their menstrual cycle. And what they find is that men will rate the orders of women as most attractive if those women wore those shirts, that clothing, in the previous latent phase of their cycle. okay.

So this is not to say that men do not find women attractive at other stages, other cycle IT is to say that men find women's oders particularly attractive if those orders were worn by women that are in the pro ilyats phase of their mantra cycle OK. Now there was also a study that was done where women at different stages of their mantra cycle are rating the orders of men. And a similar but myr symmetric result was found such that women who are in the priebke latent phase of their master r cycle will rate men's orders as more attractive than at other stages of their cycle.

So the simple way to put this is that there seems to be something special about the pro hillaton phase of a woman's mental cycle that makes men rate them as more attractive during that time and women rate men as more attractive during that particular time as well. So this is a by directional effect. The way that the second study was done where women are rating men was not just to smell the orders of those men on t.

shirt. They did that. But they correlated that with whether or not the shirts were worn by men that were particularly physically symmetrical and SHE had these men divided into groups, there was a more of a continuum rather raided according to body symmetry and face symmetry.

And women preferred more symmetrical men when they were doing the preference test during the pro ilyats phase of their cycle. So again, the point is that that prevent laty face cycle seems to create a by directional mutual attractiveness. Now also extremely interesting is that this effect does really seem to have something to do with emulation, because in both studies, they had women that we're taking oral contracts tion or not.

And what they found was if a woman is taking oral contracts tion, IT prevented that peak and perceived attractiveness by the men, meaning men no longer perceived a woman to be more attractive at a particular phase of their cycle. And also women taking oral contracts tion no longer preferred the others of more cermets ical men during the prevAiling tory phase of their cycle. I want to make sure that it's especially clear that this is not the case, that oral contracts tion reduced the perception of a woman is attractive.

That did not happen in these studies. IT reduced the further increase in a male's perception of her as attractive. And if women took oral contraction, IT prevented them from preferring more symmetrical men based on the orders of those men.

Now I realized there are a lot of variables here. We've got orders. We ve got symmetry. We've got mentor cycle privata non private tory. And we have, uh, whether not people are taking contracts tion or not.

But the basic finding is that depending on where women are in the rental cycle influences both men's perception of them as attractive and their perception of men as attractive, and oral contraction eliminates that effect. So I share with you those data to illustrate that we often think that somebody who's attractive or not, based on, I know how they look, their skin, their hair, is set up. But IT also illustrates that their older is a powerful queue for some people.

More than others, you know, some of us tend to be moral factory driven than others. Although if you watched the huberman lab podcast episode that I did with professor David bus from the university of texas, Austin, whose a luminary in the field of evolutionary psychology and has studied make choice and make selection bias over decades, he's really one of the founders of that field. He emphasized findings that older for many people is a maker or a deal breaker, meaning there are some people that even if somebody has all the characteristics s that they're looking for in terms of kind and attractiveness and values and other features that would in should be a very high priority.

And selecting a mate that if they if someone does not like the way that person smells, they're nate body OTA independent of colones and perfumes and soap sea that that's often a complete and total deal break. Er i'm sure there are some of you that can relate to that, and there's some of you perhaps for which that is not the case. And you can't even imagine that being such a powerful variable.

And yet the data suggested indeed is a powerful variable for many people out there. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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Of course, these are topics that grab tremendous interest, so it's worth us defining our terms a little bit before going any further. Of course, we can have many different kinds of loves. There's romantic love.

There is love of family, so called familiar love. There's love of pets. We can even love objects where we can feel as if we love objects.

We can love certain activities, we can have friends that we love, and so on and so forth. The word love is used to encompass a lot of different types of relationships. Today, we are mainly going to be focused on romantic love and the neural mechanisms of romantic love.

I want to acknowledge here at the outset that most of the studies of romantic love have focused on monogue's heterosexual love, and also if when we talk about studies focused on desire and attractiveness and attachment, that's also the case, and that simply reflects the general bias of the literature over the last fifty, two hundred years. IT does, of course, not rule out that similar or different mechanisms could be at play in non monogamous relationships, in homosexual relationships or in relationships of any kinder variation. It's also worth us defining our terms around desire.

IT can mean lost. IT can mean the desire for long term partnership. So we need to define our terms. And throughout, I will do my best to very carefully define what I mean by desire, what I mean by love, and what I mean by attachment. The formal study of love and desire and attachment goes back to the early one hundred hundreds.

One of the classic studies on this is entitled love and desire was published in nineteen and twelve and really focused on two opposing themes within romance. One is love, which in that paper was really meant to include attachment, independence or interdependence between individuals, right? And the other end of the spectrum being desire, or the sexual desire for another.

And romance was meant to encapsulate both those things, love and desire. And for much of the one thousand nine hundreds, IT was thought that love and desire were on sort of opposing ends, or in kind of a push pool. And IT was the dynamic pushing pool between love and and desire.

That one could define romance. And that actually had too much of what's out there in the psychological literature today we are going to explore some neurobiological studies. Some studies of the indecent system mean the hormones stem that actually support that general model.

And i'll point you toward a what I think is a very useful book in thinking about how relationships can both form and last over long periods of time and how those relationships can include both desire and interdependence. I'll also talk about some studies that have really focused on why relationships succeed and why they fail and how that relates to whether not there is sufficient amounts of attachment and desire. So today, we're going talk about the science and individual also get some tools.

Those tools should be useful to you, whether not you happen to be in a relationship or not, whether you're seeking your relationship or not. I'd like to begin with an anecdote, and this is not an anecdote about my relationship history. It's an anecdote about my scientific history.

When I started graduate school, the chairman of the department I was in at the time said to me, you know, most phds last longer than most marriages, and indeed, he was right. And also most marriages in this country and in divorce, I think it's about fifty percent with a slight skill toward more ending in divorce than persist until death do them part. But nonetheless, it's about half.

And most marriages end before the eight year period is up. Most phs take anywhere from fourth and nine years. So there was a bit of smearing of averages there.

But the point he was trying to make really landed home for me. IT did not scare me of out of relationships, or did IT scared me out of a PHD? Obviously, what I did illustrate was that there's something about our attachment machinery that can be very, very compelling such that people take on tremendous levels of commitment.

I have to imagine the most people enter marriages, assuming that they are onna, stay in those marriages. I don't think most people enter marriages thinking they are going to get divorced, but that if fifty percent of those commitments and in divorce, there must also be mechanisms by which our attachments can break. And today, we're going to talk about both the forming of attachments and the breaking of attachments, what can prevent those breaks in attachments, and indeed, what can lead to reattachment.

There are biological mechanisms to desire, love and attachment that's abundantly clear. Now there is a robust and very large literature in animal models. What I mean by that are field studies in laboratory studies in primates of different kinds, such as macc monkeys, are bonos.

People have looked at these sorts of things, believe are not in ducks, in laboratory mice, in different types of birds eeta. And if you look at that literature, you can essentially find biological examples in the animal kingdom for just about any behavior that you can easily map to human behavior. So for instance, there's a species of animal called the prai wall in one portion of the united states.

This rival species is monogamous. They only made with one other party wall, only raise Young with one other party wall for their entire life. And in another region of the united states, the same species of animal the preval will meet with many individuals are non.

And the major difference, at least as far as we know, between the party VS in one location. Another location is the levels of a molecule called the VISA present in the brain and body. VISA present is present in humans.

IT has numerous biologging roles, is responsible, for instance, for controlling the amount of year and that you had greet out of water that you retain, and for sexual desire as well as mate seeking. Levels of these oppression in pary walls are strongly determined of whether or not a praise wall is going to be monogamous or non. Why do I raise this? Well, I raise this because the literature on prey balls is quite beautiful and has been discuss quite a lot in the popular press.

You can look IT up with an even easily just, uh, website and search. You'll find lots of information about this, lots of news articles about this, and lots of interpretations as to how VISA present might be involved in similar, different mechanisms in humans. Now I don't have a problem with mapping animal studies to humans.

I think they're certainly a place for that. But if you we just sort of lean back and look at the giant mass of studies and animals and their a mating behavior, and they made selection behavior, you can essentially find examples of anything. You can find examples of uh polygamy, you can find examples of um cheating you of infidelity, you can find examples of all sorts of different behaviors that in your own mind you can map a human behavior.

But it's really hard to make the leap from animal models to humans in any kind of direct way. And so thankfully, there's been tremendous work done in the last mainly twenty years or so looking at human mate selection, human desire, human love and human attachment. So we're mainly going to to focus on those studies today, and we're appropriate we will map those findings back to the findings and animals to see if there are some universal truth or some universal principles about how the neural circuits and biological mechanisms work.

But biology were going to focus on human studies today. So unless I say otherwise, the data are referring to today are entirely from human beings. So let's talk about attachment and attachment styles. This will offer you the opportunity to answer some important questions for yourself, such as, what is my meaning, your attachment style in relationship? One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology is this notion of attachment styles.

And this was something that was discovered through a beautiful set of studies that were done by mariana's worth in the ninety eighties, in which he developed a laboratory condition called the strange situation task. Now, the strange situation task has been studied over and over again in different cultures, in different locations throughout world. And in preparing for this episode, I actually spoke to three different psychologist.

I spoke to a psychology alyse, I spoke to a cogent behavioral psychologist, and I actually go to a psychiatrist, excuse me, not psychotic, but a psychiatrist with a medical degree, and ask, is the string situation task and the very attachment styles that emerged from that task? Are those still considered valid? And indeed, all three of them said, if ever there was a literature psychology that is absolutely temped down and has a firm basis in both data and real world principles and real world examples, is this notion of attachment styles.

So what is the strange situation task? The strange situation task involves a parent, typically a mother, in the studies that we're done, but a parent or other caregiver bringing their child, their actual child, into laboratory. And there is a room with a stranger, and the mother enters the room with a child, and there are some toys in the room.

And typically the mother and the stranger will talk. Obviously, the stranger, as part of the experiment, is not just some random person off the street, and the child is allowed to move about the room. They can observe the mother interacting with the other person or not. They can play with toys or not. But then at some point, the mother leaves, and then at some point later, designed by the experimenter, the mother comes back.

And what is measured in these studies is both how the child, the toddler, reacts to the mother leaving, and how the child reacts to the mother returning at the end of the experiment, and often times this will have two or three different phases where the mother will bring the child in, then leave, then come back in and leave. There are also studies in which the behavior of the child with the stranger is also examined, so there are lot of variations of this, but the basic findings are that todgers children fall into four different categories of attachment style, and that these attachment styles can predict many features of adolescent, teen, Young adult and even adult attachment styles, not in strange situations of the sort that I just described, but in romantic attachments. I should mention also that attachment style is plastic, meaning IT can change across the lifespan.

So as I described the results, I describe the different attachment styles that are out there. And if any of those resonate with you or bring to mind certain people in your life, please do not assume that those attachment styles are rigid and fixed for the entire lifespan. There are also terrific data that indicate that through specific processes, by psychological and some biological adjustments, that people can change their attachment style, and that indeed, people who have different attachment styles can change the attachment styles of others.

But just to make very clear what the results of the study were, I want to review what the four different attachment styles are. And typically people fall into one group or another, but not several. So the four patterns of attachment that were revealed by these studies, again, were revealed by examining the behavior of the child in response to the mother leaving and the mother returning, and the child's response to the stranger, that is, in the room with them. The first style is the so called secure attachment style.

In the nominal crature of this kind of study, these are the social b babies, as in the letter b bulldog b not forbid dogs, but just to design this category, the secure attachment style is one in which the child will engage with the stranger with the experimenter while the parent is present in the room, but that when the parent, typically to a mother, but when the parent or other caregiver leaves, the child does get visibly upset, they might wine, they might cry. They might even tank from a bit. However, when the caregiver, meaning the mother or father other caregiver, returns, the child visibly expresses happiness that the caregiver has returned.

Okay, so that's the hallmark of the secure attachment style. And again, this is all preferable. This is happening long before the child can express how they feel with words.

And the interpretation of this is that the secure child feels confident that the caregiver is available and will be responsive to their needs and their communications, so that when the child wines and or you distressed, the parent doesn't come right back into the room. But at some point they do. And they seem to have a sense of trust that if the parents or caregiver reliefs, that the parent will come back and that they're happy that they do.

These children are also very good at expLoring novel environments after the parent is gone. And while the parent is there, and almost always when the parent is there, they will explore more broadly, literally, in space. They'll venture out further than they will when the parent is gone.

They also tend to engage with the caregiver in a way that's not immediately incompletely trusting, but that, over time seems to evoke from one in which they're kind of suspicious of this person to one in which there at least somewhat trusting. okay. So these are the general content res of the secure attachment style, unfortunately, nowaday.

Their philological studies measuring things like heart rate and breathing and other measures that corporate with the subjective assessment of what these children are feeling OK. So first category secure attached. The second category is the so called anxious avoided or insecurity attached, which are the category a uh, babies, the the children with anise.

Avoiding insecure tached patterns generally tend to avoid or ignore the caregiver, right, meaning the parent, and show very emotion when the parent leaves or returns. So this is the reason they call them avoided or anxious, avoided and kind of insecure. There isn't this happiness or joy that the parent is back.

They don't seem to express that they do not exhibit distress on separation, and they generally tend to have some tendency to approach the caregiver when they returned, but IT. But there doesn't seem to be in a general expression of joy. And again, physiological measures support that as well.

Things like changes in heart rate tend to be less dramatic in the anxious, avoided and insecure attachment style than in the secure attachment style OK. So that's the second one. The third categories is that so called anxious, ambivalent, slash resistance, insecure category. I didn't name this category, so you have to blame others.

In this one instance, everything else blame me, but in this instance you have to blame the psychologist that that named this category, the interests ambivalence, lash resistant in secure category, also called the sea babies for the letter, see, just as a categories zone, the anx, ambivalent, resistance, insecure todgers really shows distress even before separation from their mother or other caregiver. And they tend to be very cleanly and difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns OK. So they're distressed even before the mother leaves the room, and they want to be very cleanly and really hard to calm down when the mother returns.

They tend to show either what seems to be resentment in response to the parents of absence. We don't really know what they're feeling or some sort of helpless passivity. And there is actually sub categorization that the psychologists have come up with with c one subtypes and c two subtypes we enough to get bogged down in that.

But just know that there isn't one absolute measure ah that says all well this a person is anxious, ambivalent, resistant and secure. They could be somewhat passive um or they could be some somewhat at the caregiver, but the basic ideas that before and after the separation, they are cleanly and difficult to comfort. They just can't seem to calm themselves down.

Emphysema gc measures of heart rate and hormonal measurements such as court also support that statement. And the third category of attachment style is the so called disorganized or distributed or d for the letter D A babies. This is a category ation that was added later to this strange situation task that is a real hallmark of developmental psychology studies.

IT was developed by um marianne worth graduate student mary maine, who actually had a great fortune taking course from and learning from when I was a graduate unit berkeley many years ago. And this fourth catte's ization was controversial for a while but now is generally accepted. The key feature of the disorganized disoriented category is that the talkers tend to be tents, and they tend to encompass S A lot of kind of odd physical posters.

They tend to hunch their shoulders. He'll put their hands behind their neck. They'll cock their heads to the side. For those of you listening, doing this on the video version, it's not um where you don't have to go see that but for those of you that are watching this on video, they tend to kind of constrain their their body size a bit and going to odd posters that they Normally wouldn't do anywhere else.

Um so this is why it's called the disorganized or oriented category IT seems like these children just don't really know how to react to a separation and they just start to manifest behaviors and emotional tones that aren't observed in other situations. okay. So we've got our four categories.

I'll try to use the shortest possible names for reach category. We've got category one, which is securely attached. We've got category two, which is insecurity attached, also sometimes called anxious avoided. Then we've got category three, which is the resistant insecure category, which is anxious, ambivalent, ent. And then there's this fourth category, the disoriented category, where the so called d babies. Now what's interesting about this from the perspective of desire, love and attachment is that the categories of children into one of these four different categories as todgers is strongly predictive of their attachment style in romantic partnerships later in life, which is, to me, both amazing and surprising and not surprising all at the same time, amazing because IT means that, uh, first of all, we are relatively hardwired for attachment.

I think that that's incredible and beautiful that we have designated neurons, nerve cells and hormonal systems that are there to ensure that we have some sort of response to a caregiver being there or not being there or returning or leaving, but also that the same neural circuit, aries, the same hormonal responses, are at least in some way, repurpose for entirely different types of attachments later in life. So when we hear the psychologist talk about how you we formed a template early in life based on experiences that were even preferable before we had language. And those templates are superimposed on our relationships, or we should say, our later relationships are superimposed on those templates.

There really is a basis for that. We now have neural imaging studies to support, for instance, the work of of alan shore from U C, L, A, showing that when a mother and child interact, either throw very suthing interactions like bottle feeding or breast feeding or singing to one's baby are putting them to sleep, that the brain of the child and the brain of the mother are entering a ordinated state of relaxation. And it's not one direction.

Mother to child, the child is also coming. The mother. Typically, these studies were done with mothers, again, sometimes with fathers, but typically with mothers. And in addition to that, when the mother or other caregiver x very excited and raises, that their voice are put a lit in their voice are widened their eyes, that the child will do the same.

And again, there's a by directional interaction in that case of excitement and there's the release of neurochemicals like dopamine into the bloodstream, where as in the relaxation scenario and the two things scenarios, we know the the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin. So the neural systems for attachment and the neural systems for what we call audio ic rosal for being alert and calm, don't act in a vacuum. They are tethered to other people in our environment.

And of course, we know this, right? We sometimes hear the statement. No one can make you feel anything.

I've always a little bit of a problem with that statement um I don't think i'm uh contradance anyone in particularly but you hear that a lot. No one can make you feel anything indeed. They care, right?

A physical injury can make you feel something. If somebody says something that you very much like, IT can make you feel something. And if somebody says something that you very much dislike, IT will make you feel something.

So the idea that no one can make us feel anything isn't actually true. Our nervous system. Is tethered to the nerve systems of others. And that is true from the very earliest stages of our lives. And in this case, we're talking about how are templates for attachment in romantic relationships, how we find them, how we maintain them and indeed how we break them and reform them is based on a template that was established through an entirely different set of priorities, which was how we feel safe and secure in novel environments, depending on whether not our primary caregiver is there or not.

Neuroimaging supports that when I say neuroimaging, I mean brain scan support, that measures of hormones in the body and brain support, that measures of neo chemical support, that there's simply no way around this truth, that we have a set of road maps in our mind that are reused for entirely different promises later in life that is vitally important. understand? Because if one is successful, informing romantic attachments, maintaining them at sara or not does in fact, reflect the earlier templates that you've created.

But as i've mentioned before, the good news is that these temples ts, can shift over time. And one of the more powerful ways to shift those templates over time is purely by the knowledge that they exist and the understanding that those temples are malleable. They can change through the process of neuroplasticity.

Again, neutral plastic ticket is just a rewiring of neural connections that is very much present in childhood, but also very much present in adult hood. So if you are somebody who you think falls in the category one, two, three or four, or you know, somebody or involved with somebody who falls in the category one, two, three and four, the mere knowledge of that can be very useful. But you might ask, what what do I do with that knowledge? Well, fortunately, both psychologists and biology have started to leverage that knowledge toward establishing Better, more secure bonds in adult romantic relationships.

And there's a book that has really tapped into this, I think, is the first book has really addressed this head on and that book comes from two uh colombia professors um and the title of the book is attached the new signs of adult attachment in how I can help you find and keep love that the authors of this book are a mire levine and Rachel heller um again, both of them are skilled academics and researchers who have really taken the literature that had described on the string situation task and mapped IT to adult attachment styles and also they've mapped out ways that theyve observed in their clinical practice. And that is laboratory supported for, for instance, people that have an anxious, ambivalent or what we call insecure attachment style, or for people that fall into the gani zed or destined to attachment style, how they can modify that attachment style in or out of relationships in order to establish what I think everybody wants, which is secure attachment. Why does everybody want that will secure attachment allows people to be both in relationship, or if they choose to be on their own, or to be in relationship, but physically separated from somebody else, or even emotionally separated from somebody else, and maintain what we call a stable, automatic equilibrium, the ability to remain calm, clear headed, you might not like what's happening, but you're able to navigate that with some sense of clarity and not excessive discomfort.

So is there a goal in all of this stuff about love, desire, attachment in? Indeed, there is. The secure attachment style is the one that leads to the most stable and predictable long term relationships.

Put differently, babies, todgers, adolescence, teens and Young adults that have a secure attachment style are more likely to find, inform long term relationships. There are people in the other categories, but people in other categories can learn and eventually migrate into the secure attachment style. And I think that book attached, I have no affiliation ation to the authors or or the book itself. I should just mention that attached, the news science of adult attachment and how can help you find and keep up really IT sounds very pop psychology as, but IT is really grounded in the research psychology literature. And there's also some interesting biology there.

Another point to make about attachment styles is that IT is possible, and some of you may be familiar with circumstances whereby people who are securely attached, either because they grew up in an environment where secure attachment was cultivated, or because they developed that on their own, can also migrate out of the security attached category into insecurity attached or into avoided types of attachment styles as teens or as Young adults, or as adults of at any age or any stage of life, by virtue of being with somebody who has a different, perhaps less, adaptive attachment style. right? What this means is that if you have or you develop a secure attachment style, it's vitally important to protect that attachment style because IT is possible to become anxiously attached even if you grew up in a stable attachment framework.

And again, this can happen at any stage. So you are interested in attachment styles and how they influence adult romantic attachments. And certainly if you are a parent um I would encourage you to check out um the book attached.

Again, it's quite good. And I think that IT offers a number of actionable tools to both form and hold on to secure attachment styles. So I mentioned that the neural circuits for child, parent or child caregiver attachment, or repurposed for romantic attachment later in life.

But what are these neural circuits? What do they do? I mean, it's so attractive, if you will, to think about a brain area that controls love, or a brain area that controls desire, her brain that controls attaching. But IT simply doesn't work.

That, as i've talked about before in this podcast, and I will say again and again, because IT will persist to be true long after i'm gone, is that no one brain area can give rise to anything as complex as desire, lover, attachment. Instead, their multiple brain areas that, through their coordinated action, create a sort of a song that we call desire, or a song that we call love, or a song that we call attachment, not A A literal song. Although there are songs about desire, love and attachment, of course many songs, some good, some not so good, but rather different brain areas.

Being active in different sequences and with different intensities can make us feel as if we are in the mode that we call desire, in the mode of lover, in the mode of attachment. But beneath all of that is this element of automation ic alisal. And I want to focus on automated ic alisal just for a bit longer, because IT really is one of the three core elements by which we form and maintain loving attachments, and by which we break loving attachments.

The automatic nervous system, as the name suggests, is automatic. In fact, that's what automatic means. Now it's actually the case that we can control our automated ic nerve system to some degree, another, but the automatic nervous system controls things like digestion, are breathing, whether not we're conscious of that breathing or not. IT controls things like how alert we are, how sleepy we are. And the autonomic nervous system, as I just briefly described earlier, is really something that we come into the world with its hardwired.

All the elements are there, but through interactions with our parent, either soothing interactions or fun, playful interactions, or, there I say, scary interactions, our automated ic nervous system gets tuned up, meaning we each develop a tendency to either be more alert and anxious or more calm, or kind of a baLance of alert. And now, of course, these changes across each day, and depending on tired, we are late in the day. If we've been awake for a while, we tend to get sleepy early in the day.

We're very arrested. We tend to wake up and feel very ert. So the way to think about the automatic neural system is that kind of a sea saw.

We go back and forth between being very alert. We can be alert come, we can be very, very alert. We can be in a state of panic.

We can be fast asleep. So we can be extremely calm, or we can just be kind of sleepy, semi calm and but still also alert. So think about IT, like a sea saw.

And that sea saw has a hinge, and that hinge defines how tight or loose that sea, says, how readily IT can tilt back and forth. Our automated ic tone is how tight that hinges and their biological mechanisms to explain this. But here I just want to stay with the analogy of the sea sofa. Now, the interactions between child and caregiver early in life take the child and the caregiver from one end of the sea saw to the other, from being valued in a state of play, for instance, to being nursed and being very suit until we go asleep. And of course, we have a seat, or the parent and the child has a seas on their interacting.

What do I mean by that? Well, there are beautiful studies, and beautiful, not in the sense that they focused on a pleasant topic, but beautiful because they were done so beautifully well that looked at, for instance, the response of mothers and their physiologies and the response of children and their physiologies during the bombing of cities during world war two. So an unpleasant situation.

But what was revealed during the course of these studies was that if the mothers were very stressed during an onslaught bombing of the city, the children's physiologies tended to be stressed also and persisted in being stressed long after that stressful episode was done. They actually followed that these children well out for many decades afterwards. Conversely, if the parent, in this case, again, IT was mothers, that that were explored in these studies had turned this whole business of going into the bomb shelters into somewhat of a game, alright, taking IT seriously, but essentially telling the children, okay, ay, it's time to go, but not expressing much stress or distress.

The children also didn't developed much stress or distress or trauma. Now there were exceptions to this, of course, but in general, that was the rule that the automatic nervous systems of children ten to mimic the automatic nervous systems of the primary giver, and the mechanisms by which this occurs has been explored. And again, I just refer to the beautiful work of alan shore at university, california, los Angeles.

I mean, his name is is short spell S C H O R E M. Looking down briefly before here because I just reach for the book. He has a wonderful book called the right brain psychotherapy. It's a little bit technical, but if you're interested in some of the studies, this book, right when in psychotherapy, details how everything from nursing of children to play time behavior to strange situation type task behavior that we talked about before, which of course, occurs when children get dropped off at daycare and nursery school or with babysitters at a, and indeed, all types of caregiver child interactions tune up that economic nervous system so that the child ends up with an autonomic nervous system that either tends to lean more towards alert, anxious, or can be very alert but calm, or can be very calm and hard to budge. Again, it's the tightness of that hinge.

That really underlies these attachment styles that we were talking about earlier and not on this episode of the human lamp podcast, but on many other previous episode des, such as the master stress episode or some of the optimized health episode. You can find these if you want a huberman lab 点 com。 A lot of the tools and techniques that are recommended there have to do with the adJusting the autonomic nervous system in delivery ways.

As an adult, again, I won't go into the specific tools, but for instance, that the physiological sigh, this tool that i've talked about extensively of two inhales through the nose as deeply as you can on the first one, sneaking in a little bit more air on the second one, and then a long x sale through the month, is a way of adJusting that atomic sea saw IT tends to make us more calm IT activites. What we call the parasympathetic ARM of the automated ic nervous system, which is just fancy nerd speak for. It's a quick way to calm yourself down, right? Things like ice spas, or cold showers, or cold emersion, or hyde's berate hiper ventilation, by contrast, or ways in which we can deliberately increase the level of our so called sympathetic ARM of our atomic university to make ourselves more alert.

Why I would you want to do that? Well, you can do that to be more alert, to be more awake, if you like, or as a form of self induce stress inoculation, to be able to tolerate higher levels of a janine by making IT a practice that you self direct. The reason those tools are out there is because many of us, for whatever reason, we don't have to blame anyone, but because of our childhood templates, because of things that happened and didn't happen in terms of our interactions with caregivers, have atomic nervous systems that are tilted to one side or the other more than we would like.

Or in which the hinge that i'm talking about in this analogy is too loose or that is too tight. And we're sort of stuck in a mode of anxiousness or stuck in a mode of lack of energy. That's what those tools are really about.

But at a deeper level, the autonomic nervous system is really the system that govern how we will react in response to a romantic partner being present or leaving. And I don't necessary mean leaving the relationship entirely, although I could mean that right. We know people. I'm sure you know people that upon the end of a relationship that they wanted very much are absolutely crushed. And actually in researching this episode um I discovered there's an extensive literature finding that the feelings that one has after a break up are very much like a clinical depression in many cases.

But are individuals that can look at a break up as a transition interval that they don't interpret as going to mean so much for all aspects of their life or reshaping their view of themselves? Why will we have different levels of automatic function? And depending on where are see, saw is, if you will, some of us become extremely disturb and can't recollect, ate ourselves, can adjust ourselves down from stress to calm or can't take ourselves from exhausted to more alert if we need to do that on own.

And so that's why tools for doing that exist. But attachment itself is about where our automated ic nervous system resides. So if I would offer a set of tools around these topics of desire, love and attachment, I would say, first of all, you might want to think about whether not you fall into the secure and secure or other attachment styles.

Second, I think IT is vitally important for all of us, but certainly for people that are in relationships, are seeking relationships to be able to at least have some recognition of where our automated ic nar system tends to reside, both in terms of when we are with somebody and when they leave, when we are apart for long periods of time, can we call on ourselves? Can we self suit? Or are we very much dependent on the presence of another in order to feel suit? Now I absolutely want to opposition that there is nothing wrong.

In fact, there's everything right with feeling great in the presence of somebody else that is actually A A hallmark of of strong and quality attachments. These days we hear that the term codependent a lot. This was A I believe the term was first one by PMI.

And IT actually does occupy an important role in the world of trauma. Trauma healing, so called trauma bonding. Topics of another episode actually did episode on fear and trauma.

And we will do one all about trauma, a bonding with an expert at some point in the future. But code dependence and code dependency, the term can sometimes be misinterpreted as any dependence on another isn't good um interdependence a healthy interdependence, of course, is good. IT is the hallmark of healthy child parent relations, sibling relations and romantic relations. But a key element of healthy interdependence is that, yes, our automated ic nervous system is adJusting by the presence of another, but that also that we can adjust our own autonomic nervous system even in the absence of that person.

That if the person goes away temporarily or permanently, that we can still regulate our own automation ic nerve system, both from states of stress to state of calm, both from states of exhaustion to state of more um alertness and of course we all need sleep to go from exhaustion to alertness but what i'm referring to hear the ability to regulate when distorted or regulate when fatigue um or feeling depressed and that is and is all about the automatic nervous system. So as we talk about attachment styles and we talk about infant and toddler and adult attach myself, what we are really talking about is a complex set of neural circuit ries. And one of those neural circuitry, which is absolutely crucial, is this automatic nervous system.

So if the automatic nervous system is one key component of desire, love and attachment, what are the other two? And what i'm going to tell you next is largely the pioneer work of Helen Fisher, who is really an anthropologist who's become a bit of neuroscientist and is collaborated with neuroscientist to establish brain areas and neural circuits that are associated with different aspects of attachment, love and desire. I think the first really high quality study of neutral circuits associated with these themes was a paper polishing in two thousand five, in a very fine anatomical journal, perhaps the best neuro anatomical journal, which is the journal of comparative neurology.

The journal of comparative biology has been around for more than one hundred years and is considered the archival location for placing um really high quality anatomy. They have tremendous ly high standards. And the study that i'm referring to is entitled romantic love and fmr, meaning functional magnetic resonance imaging study of a neural mechanism for mate choice and a doctor Fisher is um a author on this paper as as Arthur iron and Lucy Brown.

So all very fine researchers and this study, as well as several other studies using magnetic resistance imaging, things like eg natomy tracing, IT setter, have identified a large number brain areas that are associated with different aspects of desire, love and attachment. I'll just throw out a few names of those brain areas in what they control, and then i'll tell you how those anchor to the other two categories of neural circuits, a special for desire, loving attachment. So not surprisingly, the dopamine system in the brain is associated with desire, love and attachment, and mainly with desire.

Although to some extent love dopamine is a neurochemical, sometimes with reward, but as some of you've heard me say before, IT is mainly a molecule of motivation, craving and pursuit. And that motivation craving, a pursuit that relates to pine, is not unique to attachment or love or sex or made at sea. IT is a universal generic currency in the brain for pursuing something, food when you're hungry, uh, a mate when you want one to mate when you want to, warmth when you're cold at at Sarah okay.

So it's not for one specific purpose, but the brain areas associated with dopa amine involve, for instance, the venture al tegmental area, the substantial, neither a areas that sort the basal ganglia. You don't need to know these names, just understand that these are networks of neurons that tend to put the person you into a state of forward action in pursuit and craving and motivation. They are not about being quiet and relaxed at sea.

The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation are most associated with love and attachment, not surprisingly. And they are the neurochemical. Serotonin and to some scent are the predominant neurochemicals involved.

And those are released from brain areas such as the rafa nucleus. In the back of the brain, you may have heard that the majority of serotonin, your body, is made in your gut. And indeed that's true.

But I hate to break into you. The serotonin, your gut is not responsible for your feelings of love and attachment, at least not to a high degree. That's mainly going to be the reflection of neons in your brain that make serotonin. And there are other areas of the brain that make serotonin as well and oxytocin as well, but they tend to be associated with the kind of warmth and calm and um the shooting that we feel in the presence of another. And again, these are not strictly divided circuits.

We can have dopamine and tone in present in our brain body at the same time to equal or or different degrees and we return in a little bit to what happens when levels of dopamine are very high level of certa or law and advice for son so on, including in states of um uh neurochemicals modified states um as IT were and when we talk about things like m dma so called extacy. But in the meantime, I wanted just discuss the two neural circuits that use dopamine, that use serotonin and oxytocin, and that collaborate with the autonomic nervous system to drive what we call desire, love and attachment. And the three circuits are economic service system.

We talked about that one. Then there's the nervous system components are the neural circuits for empathy, for being able to see and respond to an indeed match the emotional tone or the automation ic tone of another. And then there's the third category, and this might surprise some of you, is certainly surprise me, but the data point to the fact that the third neural circuit that's very important for establishing bonds is one associated with positive delusions.

So given that the neural circuits for empathy are absolutely crucial for falling in love and maintaining stable attachments, i'd like to talk about those neural circuits and what they are now. Often when we hear empathy, we think, oh, empathy is really about listening to and really understanding what somebody else is feeling, maybe been feeling what they're feeling, and that's the case. But what do we mean by that? right? What is IT to feel? What other feels? Well, what that means is that their sea saw is driving your seas, or your sea saw is somehow driving their sea saw that there is a match in terms of the tilt of those c saw.

No, doesn't have to be an exact match, right? If someone that you really care about is very, very stressed, you could also become very stressed. That's a form of impacted matching. And there are indeed neutral circuits for that all describe what those neural circuits are in a moment.

But sometimes the best role for us to take is actually one in which we are calm when the person that we care about her that we were romantically involved with is very, very anxious. And in a few minutes, i'll talk about how matching of emotional tone can be good or bad for the stability of a relationship, and complimentary of automatic matching can be good or bad. In other words, sometimes it's beneficial for a relationship to go in to the same state as the other, and sometimes it's more beneficial for us to not go into the same state as the other.

But the important feature here is that when we talk about emotional matching or empathy are going into the same state or not going into the same state, what we're really talking about is whether not the automated icc saw of one individual is driving the automobile, c saw of the other individual. And this is a vital principle for how we fall in love and form attachments. And it's actually part of the desire and mating process itself.

I would go so far as to say that one of the prerequisites to the propagation and expansion of our species is this notion of automatic regulation and to some extent, matching of automation ic nervous systems. Let me explain what I mean. Last I checked, the only way that new humans can be created is by way of sperm meeting egg, either in body or in dish.

Um but sperm meets egg, and then typically nine months later, we have a human baby. The process of bringing sperm to egg, right? Mating behavior, sex behavior in humans is one of automatic regulation.

And what I mean by that is the process of finding a mate, and in this case, I mean, actually someone to meet with. Typically, while scenarios very typically is one of elevated automation ic arousal, meaning increased activation of the so called sympathetic nervous system, this is related to dopamine release and its related to epa release. There has to be a pursuit, or at least there has to be a mobilization to arrive in the same location, where by one can make right that that almost always is the case.

However, the sexual arousal itself is in both males and females, is actually driven primarily by the very sympathetic ARM of the autonomic nervous system. So while pursuit is one of alertness and sympathetic drive, as we say, against sympathy, is not really what's play here, that the word simple means together and the activation of the autonomic system told more alert state is because of a sympathetic nerve system, mean the co activation together of many neurons in the brain and spinal cord. But then the actual physiological arousal state that we call sexual arousal is predominantly very sympathetically driven okay um to be quite direct about this, if the sympathetic nervous system activation is too high, the sexual rosal response cannot happen in either males or in females, is inhibited.

However, the orgasm and evacuation response, which if you think about IT, is required for sperm. To me, egg is sympathetic, driven. And then after orgasm and ejaculation, the very sympathetic nova system kicks back in and there's a coming and relaxation.

So the ark of mating involves sympathetic arousal, okay, not sympathy, but alertness, and arouse for pursuit. Then a till of the sea saw, at least to some degree, for arousal of the sort that we typically hear of of sexual arousal. Then, at the point of orgasm and ejaculation is back to a sympathetic response.

And how can I say that? How do I know that the sympathetic nervous system, meaning neurons within the sympathetic ARM of the automatic error system, or what drive ejaculation and orgasm? And then afterward, there's a return to increased parasympathetic activation.

And we don't for sure why that happens, but it's thought that in species that are bond, humans generally pair about n not always there. The return to more parSimonious tic activation after orgasm ejaculate is thought to increase the exchange of fermont orders, orders, excuse me, and to increase pillow talk and are bonding of different kinds. Okay, so that the, the, the seesaw going back and forth is actually built into the process by which our entire species propagate.

So in some ways, every human is required to navigate that process if they want their offspring to persist. And of course, in out is there are technologies like a beta feriz ation intriguing insemination. The variety of ways that technology is allow people to circumvent the actual physical mating process in the way that I described.

But by and large, that's the way it's done. And certainly, that's the way IT was done historical for, if not tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands years. That process is also what happens in all my malian species that mate OK. So i'm overlooking an entire literature of um animal studies um that classic studies of this were done by two individuals are just briefly mention them in case you want to look at the the literature there is a guide the rockefeller versy named Donald fah P F A F F who has done beautiful studies identifying the neural circuitry what's called the lord sis response.

Unlike in humans, the mating behavior of animals is rather stereotyped in terms of the positions that they occupy and the lower doses responses, a kind of A U shaping or a bending up of the high quarters of typically of rodents, but of other animals, well, the male, the male mounting is almost always from behind, except in some species of primates. And that lord sic's response is only going to occur during particular phases of the astra cycle. The astro cycle is sort of the analogue to the install w cycle, but it's not twenty eight days as its four days or some other duration.

In other animals, depending on the animal, the lord sis response is strongly regulated by oders, by contact, and is estrogen and testosterone controlled. And then the male portion of of the mating h sequence in animals and the mounting and thrusting and ejaculation, as that called mounting, trusting, intramodal ejaculating those are the four scientific categories that have been described um that's presence in rodents and also in in dogs where IT was primarily studied by Frank beach who was um at university called when you're berkely for a long time and the entire literature around the neural circuitry for sexual mining behavior in animals largely stamped um from the work of Donald foh and france beach and their scientific offspring not there are actual offspring. You can look at that literature if you like.

There have been human neural imaging studies of the process that I described a few minutes ago believe IT are not of people in brain scanner, not necessarily meeting with other people, but going through that arc of arousal, uh, sympathetic activation during organ rejection, lation in the post ejaculatory or or orgasmic face in both men and women and the brainer is associated with those have all been mapped out now um the spinal court areas that control um things like uh um erection, vagon, inal, lubrication, evacuation and orgasm. Those have also been mapped out and this has all been explored from the perspective of of both basic science just to get an understanding of our species has sexual interactions and reproduces, but also from the perspective of for instance, um trying to repair uh sexual function after spinal court injury, which um is you know a prominent concern for a lot of people depending on where they have their injury. But in um in a number of people that have spinal cord injuries.

So this is both vital biological and clinical data. The neural circuits for everything that I just described reside in the automatic nervous system and are ordinated with the neural circuits that are associated with empathy. The neural circuits for empathy, again, there are many, but mainly two structures that you should know about, the prefrontal cortex, which is how we perceive things side of us and make decisions on the basis of those perceptions, how we organize those decisions.

And an area of the brain called the insula I N S U L A, the insula is a really interesting brain area that allows us to interrupt, to pay attention to what's going on inside our body and to split some of our attention to exter accept and the mating dance, whether not it's um the dinner and date portion of the mating dance or the actual physical dance part of the mainly dance or actual meeting, sexual behavior, kissing or otherwise. That is coordinated activity of two bodies typically too realize sometimes it's more, or sometimes it's only one, but typically it's two a bodies in the, at least in the framework, are using here. That coordinated dance is one in which the automatic nervous system of one individual, in general, is ordinating with the automation ic nerve system of the other individual.

And the insula is essentially splitting ones between how we feel in ourselves, how our body feels, what we're thinking with the thinking and the body bodily sensations of the other and that can be communicated obviously through words I can be communicate through sounds that can be communicated through touch and IT can be communicated through a number of um of kind of more subbed cues like puple size or whether not um certainly in cases where we recognized the person and we kind of know their responses, their automatic responses and there are different conditions we can assess IT. Is the person comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they are they more focused on mor on themselves? This is the coordinated silent dance that if we look at in neurobiological terms, we can really see is all about the automated ic nerve system whether not um it's time to tip the sea saw to IT to one side or the other depending on whether not the other person sea saw is tilted higher or lower than the other OK.

We have the automatic nervous system and then we have this thing that we're calling empathy, which is really about automatic matching. And again, the insurance, the preference to cortex are neural circuits that are crucial for automatic matching because they allow us to say, what's out there and do I want to match to IT or not? okay.

And then the third category of neural circuit that Helen Fisher and others have found to be important for a desire, love and attachment, is the neural circuit associated with self delusion. What do we mean by that? Well, first of all, self delusions implies a kind of cynical m about loving attachment. And I think I was George bar. Shaw that said, love is really about over restitution, the differences between individuals. Actually when I hear that and as I say that I really don't like that quote, i've no bone to pick with George on our shaw but what he suggests and I think what he meant was that um you know in love and attachment we tend to put so much value in the other that we forget that many of the process that are going on in our brain and body actually could be evoked by many other people too but I think that someone overlooks the enormous power of attachment in the ways in which. Somebody y's smell, somebody's voice, somebody's um everything or somebody's particular thing or things can really become so vital for our automated ic nervous system to feel suit and to feel ellam at sea.

So I think that um while the quote um is accurate in the one sense, I think that does overlook the neural circuits for attachment and just how deeply wire those can become for us so I will baLance that quote with an enormous number of other quotes that I I won't mention but that you can find out there there are really point to you know how incredible um the person is that one tends to be attached that there's really only one or or several of people that could ever exist that could evoke those feelings from us. And of course you can read your poetry and here you can find these things all over the place in music and poetry and writing. So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits being generic could be activated by anybody, I think you'll find a an ample number of uh, opposing quotes that these neutral circuits can only be activated by that special someone or that particular person, or may be just a small set of those people.

So what of delusion? Well, the work of Helen fish and others has really pointed the fact that desire, love and attachment are three separate phase ses of what we call romantic relationships that typically, not always, but typically desire tends to come first or false in the early phase, that the process of romantic slash sexual interactions IT doesn't necessary have to be sex itself, but certainly something that involves intimacy of some kind, right? And generally touch of some kind eventually transitions into what we call love, which eventually transitions into what we call attachment.

And I should just mention touch, because touch is a fundamental aspect of this whole process. There's a in article, a research to go, should say the title of IT is relationship specific encoding of social touching, semantic sensory and insular cortex cortex, cortex. Cortexes is plural courtesy.

And again, there's our friend insula. So this is a study that explored what brain areas and what body areas are activated by specific forms of attachment and social touch. And what they found, not surprisingly, is that the areas of the brain that associated with touch, the semantic censors, but more interestingly, the insular cortex, are strongly activated by touch.

So touching, the amount of touching and proxy mity and skin contact, not surprisingly, activate its brain areas associated with SATA sensory touch, but also the insult cortex, which again, is this brain area that links the internal, are feelings about what's going on inside us and at the surface of our skin with events external. And they found activation of number of brain areas, the amygdala over the front cortex, and so on and so on. That's not as essential as just understanding that the insula is the place in which we start to take our experience of our internal landscape, attach that to our perceptions of the external landscape and then assign that of value or assign that some sort of interpretation and positive delusion is predictive of long term attachment.

What do you mean by positive delusion? Positive delusion is the contradiction of that George bernard shock vote. It's the belief that only this person can make me feel this way. This other person holds the capacity to make me feel this way, physically or emotionally or both.

And so as we move from desire to love to attachment, our brain circuitry is literally getting tuned up such that that individual that we happen to be attached to, again here, are thinking about monogamist relationships. But I guess for nominal, this relationship, be individuals is in all the way in which our automated ic nervous system can be regulated. They actually get access to our control panel.

So it's our automated ic nerve system. Empathy and this positive delusion. Now positive delusion is critical. If you look at the stability of relationships over time, something that's been extensively studied mainly by psychologists, but now also buy nearby logic, what you find is that there are some key features of interactions between individuals that predict that a relationship will last. And those are many, but mainly fall under this category of positive delusions.

I'll return to those in what those exactly look like, but there are also just a handful of things that predict that a relationship will fail over time. This is largely the work of the gotland is actually a husband and wife team up the university of washington in seattle. The gotland have run a laboratory in the department psychology for a long time.

They've also done a lot of public facing work around relationships. And we've talked about um the various aspects of relationships and interactions between people that predict either staying together or breaking up so much so that they've established a method by which they can look at video interactions between couples and with very high degree of certainty, predict whether not those couples will stay together or break up over time. They've identified what they call the four horseman of relationships.

These are things that um essentially almost always predict that a couple will break up. And I think the number on this is that god man can predict divorce with ninety four percent accuracy, which if we think about is pretty remarkable. So even though these are purely psychological studies, i'm not aware of any analysis.

Wonderland physiology, there are some things that they can observe between couples that can lead them to predict whether not a couple stay together or break up with ninety four percent accuracy. So what are those things? Those four behaviors, what they call the four horseman of the apocalypse, for relationships or one criticism to defensiveness, three stonewalling and four contempt with contempt being um the most powerful predictor of uh breaking up.

Um criticism of course does not mean that there's a no place for criticism in stable relationships, of course there is. I has to do with how frequent and how intensely that criticism is voiced. Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness.

Uh, we know as the sort lack of ability to hear another or to adopt their stance. So lack of empathy, I think, is, is a one way to interpret defensive veness stone walling, which is actually another form of lack of empathy. It's a turning off of this neural circuit that's so critical for desire, love and attachment.

The stonewalling essentially means, uh, the emotional response or the request of another is completely cut off. So it's it's I don't think there's been brain imaging of this, but we I think we can reasonably imagine that IT involves untethering your inside of response from the other and what they're dealing with and focusing your insular response. No one intended on your own internal state or perhaps the state of someone else entirely talk about infidelity in a moment.

And then contempt and contempt has actually been referred to as the sylph eric acid of relationship. I didn't say that, but god, man and colleagues have that IT is such a powerful prediction of divorce and break up in the future. And contempt, of course, by definition, is the feeling that a person or thing is beneath consideration, worthlessness or deserving scorn.

And apparently they can identify this in the videos of a couples having discussions interacting by um very aba ee roles by expressions of anger in one individual when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm, excitement about something it's the uh yeah you would say that or um or deep seated resentment toward the other so much so that it's apparent that one kind of actively dislikes the other partner. So contempt, disregard for something that should be taken into account is the other way to think about IT that runs counter to all of the neural circuits, all three of the neural circuits that we talked about before. IT certainly is um IT is the antithesis of empathy.

IT is anything but a positive delusion. It's really looking at the other individual, either accurately or inaccurately as somebody that you kind of despise. And then IT is an absolute version of the automation ic sea saw matching that I was talking about before.

It's a associating of your sea saw from their see saw. They're very excited about something you're unexcited by IT. In fact, it's an inversion of their c saw where they're excited, you're down, they're down, you're up.

okay. So it's it's a basically an inversion of all of the neural circuits that HEllen Fisher and others have identified as critical for desire, love in attachment. And therefore, it's we not surprising that is so strongly predictive of break ups.

And in the case of merry couples of divorce, for those of you that are interested in the work of the gotland and similar work, they've written several popular books. They're very easy to find. We can link to one of those in the caption, but they've also developed quite interesting online resources um in their so called love lab.

I guess it's fortunately that they didn't call IT the hate lab or the break up lab because they focus a lot on what predicts break up. But they have also um written extensively and researched extensively in peer reviews, studies, uh what makes people find appropriate partners for them and uh to maintain those partnerships over time. So you can go you can search for love lab, university, washington, god, men h or any number of their various books.

I think you'll find some, some useful resources there. I want to shift back to the work of Helen Fisher. She's made some very interesting statements and some very interesting observations that, at least to my mind, map very well onto the knowledge of neural circuitry, both in humans and and non human primates and in other species. I realized that she's the only name in the game um but she's made some observations that I think are are very, as we say, parSimonious, meaning they allow us to organize a lot of this stuff into some distinct frameworks.

Now she's also done some really beautiful studies uh that involved data from millions or even tens of millions of individuals on dating site so i'm going to are those with you in a moment but before I do that I just want to um uh periphrase um doctor Fisher um who said that um sex drive or desire that the pursuit of someone to mate with meaning to mate the verb um not necessarily to find a mate uh maybe he didn't say definitely ly but maybe a way to forage for potential love partners that the the arch of this a whole business is really the order that we're describing IT. That its desire then love and then attachment and that often times people can get confused. Um you may know some of these people, you may be one of these individuals who might confuse desire for attachment or might confuse love for attachment, but that there's a sequence of recruitment of these neural circuits that established first from the pursuit of someone to make with.

And she's places in the context of kind of more modern dating things, things where depending on culture, people might explore um several, maybe many, many individuals before quoting court, settling down with with somebody at least for some period of time. Um I think it's an interesting framework uh because IT circumvents a lot of the um Frankly unanswerable questions. About whether or not um you know humans were meant to be monogamous or whether not they weren't.

Those are conversations that hold cultural context, that hold um all sorts of context that really can't be addressed in a laboratory setting. But this idea that um sex drive is a way to forage for potential love partners and that love is A A kind of a limit test for whether not longer or term or deeper attachments can and will form is one that at least make sense to me later in the episode will talk about this notion of a sex drive and desire. Actually talk about some tools that are that have very strong data really to support them in terms of things that people can do or take to increase lambda, both men and women.

Um because there's actually quite good date on that now. But in the meantime, I want to talk about some of the work that doctor Fisher has done in terms of categorizing people into again, we have four groups. Um these are distinct from the A B C N D attachment styles described earlier although as I describe them, you might be able to map them somewhat on to those. And these four groups, a are groups that were defined through her studies of people that were or are I don't know if they were or they are still on match dot com, but a very extensive data set.

So again, millions of, not tens of millions of individuals, the number I heard her quote, and I forgive me if this is not accurate, is that in upwards of forty million individuals, in terms of whether not their neurochemical and hormonal systems are tuned toward particular types of behaviors, what do I mean by that? Well, both men and women, males and females, have both testosterone an exigent. typically.

Again, these are averages. But typically men have more test aste rone than they do estrogen. And they have more test aste rone than do women, and less estrogen than do women.

Typically women have more estrogen than they do test host tron again averages um and they have less testosterone the men, more estrogen the men and so on and so forth. But both hormones systems are active in both sets of individuals, and of course, all humans, as far as we know, manufactured by dopamine and serotonin. Doping, as I mentioned earlier, has a number of affects in the brain body. But one of the primary effects is that IT places us into states of motivation in pursuit for various things.

There is a somewhat close relationship between the dopamine system and the test postern system um in the hypothenuse this brain area above the reference auth in the petite tory gland which is responsible for making hormones that make the overs and or tests secret testosterone on staging so there's a lot of signaling that occurs such that dopamine test astre one tend to Operate as kind of close cousins in a system of pursuit and conversely the serotonin system tends to on average collaborate with the estrogen system to impart certain physiological functions and behaviors so these aren't hard and fast um or Better stated, these aren't strict black and White categories but I think those general teams hold when you look at the animal and a human data. So doctor Fisher has taken some some liberties, but I think they are what I would call logically and scientifically and neurobiological ally grounded liberties in classifying individuals who are on these dating sites according to the types of things they report about themselves and the type of people they tend to match with on these dating sites. And created these four a category.

Um the four categories are um SHE calls one the doping um category. These are people who would have high doping and um again, that's just a name. IT doesn't mean they have low anything else, but they are high on the dopamine scale.

People who rate high on on the dopamine scale tend to be what the scientists and psychologists call high sensation seeking seeking. They like new things. They like spongy. They tend to be very adventurous.

And I think that's largely true if you look at the conditions where doping is super physiological elevated beyond Normal levels um things like mania um or when people take certain drugs of abuse like cocaine or evade that really raise doomy levels up very, very high for some period of time. They do tend to increase energy, energy, motivation and novelty seeking. And of course drugs like ef demand cocaine have all sorts of delicious effects.

Um I don't need to go to hear, but worth pointing out. But they don't tend to make people calm and relaxed and seek uh suing h interactions. Conversely, the group that uh doctor Fisher calls the serotonin group tend to be more grounded in soothing activities, quiescent type activities.

They actually tend to be on average, they tend to like les and follow rules they can to be homebodies um this sort of thing. They are really uh you can imagine them the sort of stable types, but they really like stability. They're not really in respondents as much.

Again, averages and then SHE h created two other categories. The testosterone category of high testosterone, this again could be males or females. And then the estrogen category again could be males or females.

And he gave these different names um that I won't go into here. You can look up her work online but SHE you know names like the director and and the follower and things like that. But I don't really want to use those as much as I want to stick to the biological terms.

So we have dopamine, serotonin, testosterone one and estrogen. Now that might seem like an unfair um kind of over generalization but what's interesting is not necessarily the name of the arrow chemical system, right those could have just been called category one, two, three and four for all that that uh matters here. What is interesting is seeing how those different groups of individuals that he absolutely can categorize based on their self reported preferences about behaviors and certain kinds of interactions, how those groups tend to pair up with people in the same or opposite categories.

So what her studies reveal is that people that fall into the high sensation seeking, novelty seeking sponge category, the one that he calls the hyde pome category, tend to pair up with, at least in the short term, tend to pair up with people who are also in that dopa energy c category. So um these would be people that would spontaneously take a trip or explore something new or new restaurant. They tend to be uh creative and exploration types.

Uh so that group on average tends to date and mate and potentially form long term relationships within category. Again, averages individuals that he placed into the serotonin group or the what SHE hypothesized will be a high serotonin group, they didn't measure serotonin, but people that tend to place value on stability, on rules, on certain forms of kind of traditional organization at home and in relationships. Those people also tended to pair up with select date we presume mate with um in form stable relationships with people in the same category.

Now individuals in the other two categories, the high testosterone group. And again, testosterone wasn't measured, but he called IT the high test astern group. But these are people that um tend to be uh very directive. They tend to know what they want and are comfortable telling other people um what they want and from them these are individuals that um in her studies and in other studies tend to be a little bit chAllenging, meaning they not necessarily chAllenging to be around, but they tend to chAllenge other people um kind of push them in order to um expand their boundaries either for sake of the relationship or just in general and the people they tend to push out the people that they uh pair up with, which are the people in the estrogen category which he called high as rogen again they didn't measure but the people in extradition category um where the ones that described themselves and their choices in life and their preferences as being nurturing, they actually seem to like IT when someone else um is making uh the major decisions, not every decision.

They certainly like to be heard, of course, in terms of their preferences but that those two types the um what he called the testosterone in the estrogen type ten to pair up so why are these categories in these averages interesting to me, at least interesting enough to convey e you the reason they're interesting to me is, again, not because their names. These molecules were not measured in these individuals, but that they once again bring us to the themes that we addressed before, which are the automation ic nervous system, in whether not IT tends to be shifted more towards alertness and action, or more towards kind of a stable, equal librarian or more towards kind of calm, and whether not individuals are selecting for people who have automated ic nervous systems that are more less like theirs before they even meet. right? So uh, again, going back to the sea saw analogy, it's almost like people who have the kind of flat season alert, but calm, but not extremely alert, not extremely uh overly calm in situations, but kind of in the middle seem to be seeking out people that are also at that kind of atomic equilibrium.

Uh, people in the what he called the dopamine in category, which really can just be describe as high sensation seeking, novelty seeking, they seem to want to pair with one another. So there's a selection for similar in two of the groups, automation, ic tone. I find that very interesting because in that decision or that preference for similar autonomic tone IT essentially eliminates a lot of the uh the requirement for uh, figuring out how to match ones auto omy err system to another.

They simply find someone with a similar tendency, okay, wherein the other two groups that he called testosterone and ester's en, the director type and the nurturing kind of somewhat follower type, there's a establishment of baLance, but not in the between two individuals as a match, but rather on the whole in the relationship. One person is kind of driving the novelty seeking in the course of decisions and actions, and the other person is essentially agreeing to those. Now assuming that those, uh, decisions are good for for both people.

And I emphasized good for both people, because one of the themes that doctor Fisher underscores that i'd like to underscore here as well, is that IT need not be the case that people pair up exactly according to these categories that i've described, dobin with tony, stone with asteria so on. What is important is that there be a recognition in a respect for the other types, or a recognition in a respect for the fact that both are of the same type. You could actually imagine, for instance, that two people of this high sensation seeking, novelty seeking um could have a terrifically exciting relationship.

But that IT actually might be a relationship in with in which the financial stability isn't quite there or in which the basic stability isn't there. Um you could imagine, for instance, A A situation in which a relationship between two people of uh what he called the hystero toni um preference. Would have a relationship that was actually kind of dull in which both of them found themselves kind of bored at some point or um in which there wasn't enough of of the dynamic tension um that sometimes is required in order to keep this cycle of desire, love and attachment going. Something that we will talk about in a moment.

So the point here is not that one should necessarily pair up according to the are these arrangements that described? The point is that on average, that's what tends to happen and that through a recognition that these categorization exist, similar to the recognition that the type A, B, C and d infant and towler type attachments exist, that we can gain Better self awareness of who we are and how we tend to show up in romantic attachments and thereby navigate healthier made, seeking healthier break up if if that the case um dictate IT and in some cases healthy long term relationships by understanding that the other person can either be similar or complimentary to us. One is neither Better than the other is simply the case that in all romantic attachments from the initial inception of the romantic attachment, desire, love and attachment, there is an automated ic coordination.

And of course, there is coordination of all sorts of other things like food, sex and sleep and finances, and where people are going to live in many other features. But that at the core of all that is a seeking of either automation ic, lightness ss or automatic differences. And I think that recognition can be extremely valuable in thinking about tools to enter and maintain relationships if one thinks about their automatic nervous system, not simply as something that is driven by external people and events, but that we can actually gain some control over through techniques of the sort that I talked about earlier in on previous podcast.

But also generally, if we are able to adjust our autonomic nerve system in order to at least appreciate or get some empathy into what someone else is experiencing, then we gain actual cognitive empathy. And this episode isn't about empathy per say, but the thing keeps coming up again and again. And I think it's worth mentioning that when you talk to psychologist, or whether or not their psychology alyse, or from another source of training, what you find is that they don't talk about empathy as a general term.

They will talk about emotional empathy, talk about cognitive empathy. And what i'm talking about here today is that yet a third category that is very strongly determined of relationship dynamics, and that's automation. Ic, empathy. I'm a biologist, i'm not a psychologist, so I love mechanism. And fortunately, there are studies that have been done recently using modern techniques to look at neural mechanisms of romantic attachment.

I mentioned earlier some of the brain imaging studies that have been done on child and mother literally imaging the activity of neurons in the brain as child is nursing or as a mother soothing baby. And as you learn, and earlier, baby is suing mother as well. Those are remarkable stays.

You may have seen some of these pictures online. You can see the kind of silt of the infant and mother and their brains and events on the brain activation patterns. Really beautiful studies.

Similar studies have been done in romantic couples with those couples either touching one another, touching and kissing or um in kind of clever, I think, control experiments of the person just touching a pillow or something or kissing a pillow um in order to try and create the most a reasonable control for what are actually pretty complicated interpersonal dynamics to do in a brain imaging scanner. But some of the other studies that have been done recently involved so called eeg. So these are electrical recordings that are done noninvasively putting bunch of electro ads on the outside of scale.

E G. Is useful in that you can, uh do IT not invasively uh, you can do IT um in while people are moving in doing things, kissing, touching h ta h IT doesn't allow one to image or to evaluate neal activity very deeply in the brain. So you can miss out on a lot of things.

It's sort like looking at the wave structure on the ocean without actually looking into the depth of the of the ocean so you can miss certain things. But if you see things um generally you trust there there but you can see what you don't see. none.

There's um there are some studies that i'll just point you to um and that form the um segway for what i'm going to uh discussing in a moment which is a study publishing scientific reports um in twenty twenty one entitled investigating real life emotions in romantic couples mobile E E G study. So this um is as the titles suggest, something be a where these eg caps of electrodes get engage in very passionate emotional kisses, emotional speech toward one another, standing a different distances. A lot of cool stuff that you can do that you really couldn't do in a brain scanner because in a brain skin or people have to be there, usually in a bite bar that actually draw x like this.

I've been in one of these things. Um there's not a lot of moving around to be had least not using the current technology in any case. What they found was there is a shift in brain waves.

Brain states um things like alpha waves, which is just a particular frequency of brains ves in the newly cortex, the kind of outer shell of the brain just beneath the skull. And in people that are kissing or in people they are engaged in romantic speech or I didn't actually hear what they said to one another, but what the couple seems exciting, romantic and arousing. Today they see more alpha wave activity compared to the control conditions.

And there are some what we call lateralization, where the left hemisphere was more active than the ride and so forth. Um and these studies are important because we know that the autonomic nervous systems of individuals tend to start to collaborate and actually at the level of heartbeats, at the level of breathing during romantic interactions of different kinds. But these studies are some of the first of their kind to start looking at neural synching ization between individuals.

Now, the simple version of looking at this, and the way I would have got this would all go was, okay. Two people start kissing. They start talking about what they find particularly romantic and arousing for them in their brain ways, will just matched to one another.

And that's really the basis of romantic attachment and romantic engagement in that sort of thing. But IT turns out that the opposite is true. So a really nice study publishing in a really fine journal, cerebral cortex, is a journal that i've known about for many years.

They publish strong anatomy, physiology and or imaging. Um there's A A study that was published for south ur katja mora um in and this paper really points again this is twenty twenty one and the tile this paper is brain knows who is on the same wave life. Resting state connectivity can predict compatibility of female male relationship.

Now what this study did was a little bit different. They looked at the resting or default mode activity of the brain. So rather than evoked activity, as it's called, where people are kissing or engage in some sort of activity, this was a gnral imaging study um not eeg but f mi functional magnetic resident imaging which is similar to eg in principle but allows you to look deep into the brain.

And he has a very good resolution in time and space so fast events can be monitored and um the precise location of those events can be monitored um somewhat Better than eg in their exceptions to this. So for you e years out there, um don't don't come after me with um electrodes. Just understand the f mi um gives you a fuller picture of what's going on and what cut you mura at all found was that, contrary to what are your reflective prediction might be, people tend to select people that have resting brain states that are different then theirs.

Or sometimes they found that are actually opposite to their own resting brain state. You might say, well that doesn't make any sense that office is all about automation ic uh coordination. But actually if we go back to Helen Fisher's categorization of the the dopamine e types, the sensation seeking types that is um ceremony in the kind of stable rule following types to toast tron and astern in times, remember that the two categories that he called testosterone stern type, the director and the and the follower the nurture I guess that would be the more accurate way the director in the nurture those tend to pair up across category, is not within category.

And so I think what's really needed for this field, which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet, is to really start to map the neun atomical and neurophysiology ical findings of, in this case, that resting brain state is in one form, in one individual, and they tend to seek out people whose resting brain state is different than there is not similar, that needs to be mapped onto the more subjective psychological categories that Helen Fisher, and indeed the gotland and others have created that sort of the state of the field. Now, and I mention this, not to confuse you, but to the contrary, to illustrate that it's not just about finding someone just like you, and it's not just about finding someone who's opposite to you. This is actually the reason that I decided to become a biologist at some point in my life, which is that we can find verbal saying and stories and examples to support just about anything.

This is not a knock on the field of psychology. As you can probably tell from today's episode, I great respect foreign reverence for the field of psychology, especially its collaboration with north science, and vice versa. But in the popular culture, we can find examples and saying that supported essentially anything as IT relates to relationship.

For instance, i've heard and you've probably heard, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And indeed of experience that and i'd believe it's true, but I also have experienced, and I believed to be true, that out of sight, out of mind also exist, that there will be a biological mechanism for that. The point here is that matching of same to same or same to different can both be effective in creating the desire, love, attachment process is a matter of who is looking for same and who is looking for different in there.

I think doctor Fisher, in the work of these a nerpa sio logic and brain images, really does point in a direction whereby there is not one form of attachment that is going to be holy above all else and will predict good outcomes. There is not going to be a case in which opposites a track. And that's always the best rule to follow.

Sometimes I will, sometimes IT won't. There is also not the case that people tend to pair up with similar. Sometimes that will be the case.

Sometimes IT won't. Now there are are certain statistics that support that statement. For instance, people on average, people pair up with individuals of similar educational background, income and attractiveness. That is true on average, but it's not always the case. And again, a knowledge of a and a respect for the different categorization of attachment, the different categorization of mate seeking describe by Fisher and others, and the recognition that matching of autonomic nervous systems, but also mismatching of resting state brain networks are all at play in driving what we are calling desire, love and attachment.

So in keeping with the exploration of the fact that there is a saying, or a book, or a song, or an example of pretty much any relationship dynamic I wanted, now talk about an article that came out a little over ten years ago that talked about the universe, salary of love and the ability to fall in love. So this would be very much in line with the George bernard shock quote that I mentioned earlier, that love is really over estimate the differences between individuals. And again, I should say that is not something that I personally believe, although maybe i'm just deluding myself. I'd like to think that the people that we fall in love with are really special for us, that they could not easily be replaced with anybody else that simply my stance. I'm not basing that on any hard court neurobiological mechanism.

But none the less an article was published in the new york times in twenty and fifteen that related to some psychological studies that we're done as well as some clinical work, as well as some what I would call pop psychology of things that fall outside the the domain of academics, science and the the whole basis of this article was thirty six questions that lead to love and IT involved a listing out, indeed, of thirty six questions, a step divided into set one, set two and set three that progress from, but somewhat ordinary questions about life, experience and self report more, uh, let's call them deep questions about people's values and and things that are emotionally close to them. And I just give an example of a few days, you can find this easily online by just putting into the your search engine thirty six questions that lead to love some of the questions in set number one were, for instance, what would constitute a perfect day for you? For what in your life do you feel most grateful to standard questioner stuff in set to um what is your most treasured memory was your most terrible memory.

So these are, as you can tell, are drilling a little bit deeper into one personal experience and an emotional system and then set three questions twenty five h through thirty six um are things um you know um what is A A very embarrassing moment in your life um when did you last cry in front of another person in by yourself um what is something that too serious to be joked about? So it's going a deeper into one's emotional system and even questions like of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing and why? So pretty, pretty heavy stuff there at the end.

Now the reason this article got so much traction and the reason i'm bringing him up today is that there was a statement that was made in and around this article, that if two people went on a date or simply SAT down and asked each other these questions, and each answer these questions, and the other was paying attention carefully and at some level, emotionally responding or not responding, but certainly paying attention to the answers of the other person, that by the end of that exchange, where one person asks thirty six questions in the other person and answers all thirty six, and then the other person asks all thirty six and the other person answers all thirty six, that they would fall in love, right? Which seems like I have a ridiculous thing. And yet, IT is the case that people who go through this exercise report feeling as if they know the other person quite well, and feeling certain levels of attachment or even love and desire for the other person, that they would not have predicted, excuse me, would not have predicted had they not gone through that process.

So what's going on in the exchange of questions, in the answers of a progressively more emotional and deep level? Well, what I predicted going on is that inside of that exchange, people are creating a sort of delusional story about the nature of the exchange being a reflection of some deeper attachment. And so even though people are just exchanging words, they're not physically touching.

Um they are not at least not at the point where they are running these kinds of question studies they may touch afterwards, for all I know, and probably did in some cases, but they're not exchanging life experience in an immediate way. They are not actually going off into the world and doing things together yet. They are simply exchanging narrative.

But we know based on recent studies, and i've covered this before on this pakistan, I mentioned again there was a study published in cell reports, a self Price journal, excEllent journal, showing that when individuals listen to the same narrative, their heart rates tend to synchro ze, or at least follow a very similar pattern, even if they're not in the same room listening to a given narrative, where, as in this case, people are facing one another, listening to the narratives of each other. Certainly, they are having auto onic responses, and IT stands to reason that their automatic nervous systems are synchronizing much in the same way that the solar reports study found that people will synchronize their autonomic ervy systems to a shared heard story from another. In other words, whether that we hear a story, watch a movie, listen to a song or exchange our own individual stories, our auditory nervous systems have the potential to map on to one another.

So i'm not all that surprise that people find that they fall in love, in quotes and after answering these questions to one another, because essentially the way these questions are laid out is they establish a narrative, they establish a very personal narrative and the other person is listening very closely. And we don't have physiological or brain imaging studies to um to support what i'm about to say. But the the reasonable interpretation is that that's causing some sort of automatic synchronization.

So if you want to try this on a day or even h it's actually been um hypothesized that this could be useful for existing couples um uh even if they already know the answers to some of these questions. And that doesn't surprise me either. I think the automated ic coordination is president during mating behavior.

Its present during shared experience of the outside world, movies, concerts, of watching one's children with somebody else. That said, and it's established by sharing one's own narrative of their own personal experience. So I don't want to seem overly reductionist. I'll never propose that all of our sensation, perception, action and experience in life boils down to as just being bags of chemicals and the action of those chemicals or any aspect of our nerve system.

And yet, in looking across the psychological literature of development of attachment, in the psychological literature of adult and romantic attachment, and what makes and breaks those attachments, it's very clear to me, and I think courses through the literature multiple levels that automation ic coordination is absolutely key for the establishment of desire, love and attachment. In fact, I talked earlier about how our actual conception is born out of automation ic coordination of one sort another. So again, IT doesn't necessarily mean the automatic ervy systems always be synchronized.

In the case of the two categories that Fisher proposed of the director slashed to stop drone type and the um the nurturing follower slash estrogen type IT was actually the coordination, but in opposite directions of individuals that fall into each of those categories that LED to more stable attachments or the seeking out of those attachments this should say, but non thesis at least to my mind very clear that automation ic coordination is a hallmark feature of desire, a hallmark feature of what we call love, and a hallmark feature of what we call a comment. And that the breaking of attachments were the failures of desire, the failures of love and the failures of attachment over time, in line with the work of god, men and others. And even just simply, what's required for mating behavior is also reflected in the autonomic server system.

But in that case, a failure to coordinate the automated ic server systems in some sort of concerted way. Any discussion about desire, love and attachment would be incomplete if we didn't talk about the dread infidelity and cheating. You much has been made of infidelity in cheating.

And whether not people who are higher on dopamine and sensation seeking tend to cheat more or less. Frankly, I don't think there's any solid evidence for that. I think there are a lot of examples that we can draw from in our own lives and in the lives of others that would generally support one or the other model.

But i'm not aware of any decent physiological studies or psychological size that really pointed that. Um for instance, I would never say that the certain logic fin types as described, my Fisher um is less prone to cheat or that the you know people who have an insecure attachment are are more likely to cheat. It's for instance, I don't think those correlations have been drawn in any kind of meaningful way yet, so I would be cautious about um assigning them without that evidence.

However, there are some interesting studies involving against uro imaging and some subjective measures in humans, meaning asking them questions that um there are good ways to teeth out lies from truth in in these sorts of studies, and whether not people tend to find their partner or others more or less attractive depending on how people feel about themselves. And I think this is a very interesting aspect to desire, love and attachment. For the following reason, you hear a lot out there that you know in order to form a really strong relationship, you have to have a good relationship with yourself or you have to love yourself or uh, you often here, for instance, that you know it's exactly when you're not looking for a relationship, that you're going to find what you hear this stuff right.

But none of that is really grounded in any studies. Again, that's like out of side, out of mine or absence makes the heart of founder there. There are many life examples to support um those statements and there are many life examples to support statements.

To the opposite, there's a particular study that I found this was publishing from tears in psychology, but it's a experimental study that involves new imaging. The title this study is manipulation of self expansion, alter's responses to attractive alternative partners. And I love the design of the study, what they did in this study is they took couples and they evaluated members of that relationship for what's called self expansion.

Now, self expansion is a metric that involves one's perception of self, has seen through the relationship to the other. And this is something that was developed by the authors are iron and iron so they have the same last name so i'm assuming this was either a sibling team or somehow related team or a romantic couple team. Um A R O N um and A R O N iron and iron in one thousand nine hundred eighty six.

Propose the self expansion model of close relationships, and they proposed that people are motivated to enter relationships and reading here in order to enhance myself and increase self efficacy. In other words, that one of the reasons why many people into relationships is that IT makes us feel good about ourselves and more capable. And I would see that as a healthy interdependence, not necessarily code dependence.

This is especially strong at the beginning of a relationship, IT turns out, when people are forming pair bonds. And it's the case that pleasure, arousal and excitement, again, all hallmark features of automation, ic, nervous system function, pleasure, alisal and excitement, give rise to self expansion, meaning to self efficacy. So what this self expansion models really about is how great other people that we are close to, in romantically attached, you can potentially make us feel in terms of what they say, in terms of what they do, in terms of the way in which we believe they feel about us.

So IT doesn't necessarily have to involve explicit statements of them telling us how great we are or them doing great gestures for us, but how we actually feel they feel about us turns out to be a very strong parameter in terms of how we feel about ourselves in the relationship. Overall, some of you out there are probably thinking, oh yeah, there are this thing, the love languages, right? I don't have any neuroscience to support that.

I think the love languages i'm not super familiar with this I didn't listed out but that some people are um their automatic nervous system, if you will, um tend to be very responsive to gifts or to quality time or to physical touch ture EXO kind of I think i've got a few of these right. I probably have a few wrong anyway. They're easy to find online and people do tend to have a kind of a bias toward two or three of these things that are especially meaningful for them.

And when I hear meaningful, I hear they tend to push the automatic error system and newer chemical systems of the brain body in a direction that makes us feel good, as supposed to alloy or neutral. In any event, this study looked at whether not people have high levels of self expansion through the actions or statements of their significant and how that influences their perception of people outside the relationship, meaning how attractive they perceive people outside the relationship to be turns out to be strongly influenced by a, whether not their self c expansion is very strongly driven by the other person that they are involved with, that they're in the romantic relationship with and whether not that being expressed to them. So here's how the study went.

First of all, they rated or categories zed individuals. On the basis of the self expansion metric, some people have more of a potential to experience self expansion through others, right? Some of us feel great about ourselves, and we're not topped off that.

Others don't feel so great about themselves, but they can feel much Better in response to praise, in particular, praise or self expansion type behaviors or statements from people that we really care about. And still, other people are a mixture of the two, the kind of moderate levels of both. So they raided them on this scale.

And then they had people experience self expansion narratives. They heard their significant others say really a terrific things about them and about the relationship in particular, that the relationship that they have was exciting, novel and chAllenging. So that was one former self expansion.

And they went into some detail as to why that was the case in their particularly relationship. Or they heard a narrative from us, from their significant other about strong feelings of love between the two that had been experienced previously in the relationship. So in the one case, sort of directed more towards them, and in the other case, it's more about the relationship itself. And then they did brain imaging of one, a person in the relationship, while that person assessed the attractiveness of people outside the relationship. And what they found was that people who were primed for the self expansion had lower activation of brain areas associated with assessing others attractiveness.

Then did the people who experienced a lot of self expansion, now that take away from that, at least the way I read the study, is if you're with somebody who really benefits from or experiences a lot of self expansion, unless you really want them to pay attention to the attractiveness of other people, IT stands to reason that they would benefit from more self expansion type gestures or statements. Okay, not so much centered on the relationship. We have such a great relationship.

There's so much love is so great that too. But in the context of this study, in these findings, that the person is really terrific, that the relationship that they've created together is really exciting, novel and chAllenging, that there's a narrative around the relationship that really has a lot to do with the dynamics between the individuals, in particular, that the person who really like self expansion is vital to that dynamic. okay.

So it's not looking down at the relationship is set of equals. There is sort of this bias written into this of that this person is really essential for the relationship. I'm not saying this is something that anyone has to do and something this is right wrong.

This is just what the data say. But what's remarkable is that in the absence of those statements, people who have or that rate high on this scale of self expansion rate, attractive alternative partners as more attractive. Now that's interesting to me because IT means that their actual perception of others is changing.

It's not that their opportunity to see others is changing, right? This is not a matter of them somehow getting access or no access to attractive alternative partners. Again, attractive alternative names, literally the language in the title of this paper.

They're still seeing all these attractive people. It's just that if they are feeling filled up in air quotes, h psychologically filled up, emotionally filled up, automatically filled, uh, enhanced in the language that we're using today by the self expansion narrative. Well, then the same set of attractive faces appear less attractive to a given individual.

Now whether that is predicts cheating or loyalty, I certainly can't say that would be very hard to assess in IT in your imaging. And there of course people um rarely um if ever report accurately uh their cheating behavior. There are some studies in which confidential is assured to the point where people seem to be more trusting and willing to reveal cheating behavior.

But if you look at the statistics on cheating behavior is very hard to track because people lie all the time about their cheating in and outside of the context of of psychological and neuroimaging studies. But I find this study, again, the title manipulation of self expansion, alter's responses to attractive alternative partners to be absolutely fascinating. Because, again, IT points to the fact that the interactions with are significant others.

Shapes are automatic, arrow shapes are perception of self, and thereby shapes are perception of other potential partners in the outside world, or shut us down to the potential of other people in the outside world. So when I hear statements such as it's important that you love yourself in order to really fall in love with somebody or IT is when one is not looking for a relationship that they're most likely to fall in love and form a stable relationship. I can filter that through these findings to say that it's really the person who needs a lot of self expansion, stimulating statements or actions coming from other people that is most prone to seeing other potential partners out in the world as attractive.

And in this set, we can return to the automatic nerve system is kind of a it's kind of A A glass that IT can be filled up through various context. IT can be filled up through our own ability to regulate. IT can be filled up through other people's ability to enhance our sense of well being.

And in some sense, this points to an idea where this is true, that the Better that we can feel about ourselves in the absence of any self expansion, type a input from somebody else really does place us on more stable grounds, such that when we do receive that praise, or we do receive those acts of kindness or service or physical touch, whatever they are, that we are able to, to further enhances the way that we feel, but that we don't necessarily tell them all of our feelings of self worth or self expansion to that one individual. So you might think that if person a can only receive the self expansion from the statements, from the action of the person they involved with person, be that that will form a very stable bond. But what the study points to is the fact that that's a very unstable bond, that person a is actually very acceptable to the attractive vst of others, because they're so desperately attached to this notion of self expansion, even if they don't realize that.

And so this really does point to the idea that while IT is important to link our autonomic nervous systems to establish desire, love and attachment, that we want to have a stable internal representation of ourselves, a stable autonomic nervous system, to some degree, another, so that we can be in stable romantic partnership with another individual, if that's what we're really trying to do. So until now, i've been weaving together studies from the field of experimental psychology and the fields of neuroscience, in particular neural imaging. But if you recall back to the very beginning of the episode, when I was discussing how orders and how hormones and how even birth control can shape people's ratings of attractiveness of others, you will realize that there's a deeper layer to all this, which is that our biology that resides below our conscious awareness, things like our hormones, things like fair mones, even, are shaping the way that we choose, interpret and act with other potential romantic partners, or the romantic partners that we already have.

Now this cannot be over emphasized, right? No matter how much we would like to create a sort of top down description, meaning from the cortex, in our understanding of things onto what we find attractive, who we find attractive, what we enjoy, what we don't enjoy in the pursuit and romantic interactions with others, there always seems to be an, indeed, there always is a deeper letter in which our subconscious processing drives us to find a particular person to be particular attractive, or in which we have chemistry with somebody, or in which we lack chemistry with somebody. And I would say that one of them, more exciting, fascinating and indeed mysterious aspects of desire, love in attachment, are those subconscious processes, those things that we call chemistry, right?

I mean, people will report, for instance, that somebody smell is just absolutely, positively intoxicating ating for them, or that somebody smell is absolutely repulsive to them, and they don't know why that the taste of someone's breath. And I don't mean that in any kind of poetic sense. I literally mean the taste of somebody's breath in some cases can be very exciting to somebody and believe that we can taste each other other's breath.

I talk about this in the chemical sensing episode. Some months back. But we actually have receptors for taste, smell, that engaging ordinated action such that we can't really separate taste and smell at some level.

And this is especially true when IT comes to the formation of romantic relationships in what we call chemistry. Now is chemistry absolutely required for forming stable attachments for love and for desire? No, of course they're not. But in general, these are primitive mechanisms that exist in all animals. They exist in special forms in human, but that they drive us toward behaviors that will, as the theory goes, lead to love and attachment, not always.

As doctor or Fisher pointed out that sex and sex drive is one way to explore potential love relationships and to explore potential attachments, which, of course, our major investments that extend well beyond, you know, one night or a week or a vacation or even a year. When we talk about stable attachments in general, that means long term attachments in humans. Now there is a biology to all of that chemistry stuff, and the studies of oral contraception and men finding women more attract of its certain faces of their menstrual cycle, and women finding men more attractive at certain phases of the woman's metro cycle point to the incredible power of those deeper biological mechanisms.

In the huberman lab podcast, I discussed both science and science based tools. And so i'd be remiss if I didn't actually cover some of the tools that relate to those deeper biological mechanisms. The hormones testosterone, one in estrogen, are almost always the first biological chemicals and hormones that are mentioned and described and explored when thinking about desire and love an attachment to, for that matter, since love an attachment stem from desire, I did an entire episode about the biology of testosterone and estrogen.

In ways to optimize testosterone and estrogen. You can easily find that episode at huberman lab out com. It's timestamp there. You can find all sorts of information about how certain behaviors or absence of behaviors drive up or down testosterone and estrogen.

I also dispell some myths about sexual behavior and things like mastering and how they relate to teston in astrogation, as well as some about how those harmons change across the lifespan. I also to talk about the role of exercise. I talk about supplementation, and I also talk a little bit about hormonal replacement therapy, although a will be the topic for a future episode.

So if you're interested in the biology of testosterone and estrogen, two hormones that absolutely influence things like libido and desire, please check out that episode as well as what i'm gona talk about in just a moment here. The simple stereotyped version of the hormones test, stored and s rogen, are that testosterone drives label or increases at A K sex drive and that estrogen somehow bonnat or is not involved in lib to and sex drive. And that is simply not the case, as I described in that test astroland and estrogen optimization episode.

And as i'll tell you now, yes, testosterone and some of its other forms, like the hydro testosterone, are strongly related to libido and sex drive in the pursuit and ability to mate. However, the hormone estrogen is also strongly associated with libido and mating behavior, so much so that for people that either chemical clear for some other reason have very low estrogen, libido can severely suffer. So it's a coordinated dance of estrogen testosterone, one in both males and females that leads to label or sextra.

So I absolutely wanted make clear that it's not A A simple relationship between to stop strong and sexy or ester's tra. Both are required at appropriate ratios. Now with that said, there are all things that can shift libido in both men and women in the direction of more desire or more desire to mate, either to seek mates or to mate with existing partners.

And there's a quite solid literature around a few of those substances. Now a common misconception is that because dopamine is involved in motivation and drive that simply increasing dopamine e through any number of different mechanisms or tools will increase libido in sex drive. And that simply not the case either.

IT is true that some level of dopamine or increase in dopamine is required for increases in libido. However, because of dolph means relationship to the automobile nervous system, and because the automatic nervous system is so intimately involved, no unintended in sexual activity in seeking an actual meeting behavior. As I described earlier, it's actually the case that if people drive their dopamine system too high, they will be in states of arousal that are high enough such that they seek and want sexual activity but they can't actually engage the person.

Pathetic ARM of the automatic ever system sufficient to become physically aroused. Now there is a whole description of this um that awaits us in a future episode. But i'll summarize now by saying for people that are taking substances just simply to increase dopamine in order to increase libido, that can be a potential hazards route to follow because depending on whether not that dopamine level is high enough, that IT puts them into a mode of seeking mates or mating.

But they can't adjust their automatic nova system during actual mating behavior. What essentially is i'm saying is IT can place people into a chronic pursuit, but an inability to perform sexually. And this is true for men and women.

okay. So I would just caution people against just thinking, oh, a lack of libido is simply a lack of doping. That is not the case.

IT could be from lower levels of development in, but I could also be for other reasons. And so these systems, the signaling systems and these neurochemicals are very intricate. And just simply ramping up dopamine has actually been found. For instance, in effect, mini cocaine users, there is a phenomenon which they become hyper arouse but can't perform sexually.

This is also true for people who take elevated levels of other recreational drugs, or who take and I depression that increased the dopamine in system too much right dosage has to be worked out with your physician with your psychiatrist such that you know mood is enhanced and um the various aspects of healthy well being mining body enhances but not so much so that that what we call the arousal arc is locked with the sea saw in the sympathetic drive position such that sexual roles will can occur OK. So this is an an important point to me because I think that a lot of people are under the impression that if they just drive up test astern increased dopamine and generally get themselves into high states of autonomic arse, so that that's gonna increase the libido. But that simply not the way the system works.

It's that sea saw, that sea sawing back and forth. That is the arc of a ousel that we talked about earlier. Now there are substances legal over the counter, substances that fall under the category, ation of supplements that do indeed increase libido and a rossel.

And i'm going to talk about some of those in the context appear reviewed literature. Now I want to be clear, however, that these are by no means required. Many people have healthy libidos have libidos that are healthy for uh their life and and what they need and and want.

Um and as always, in any discussion about supplementation, you absolutely have to check with your physician. I don't just say that to protect us. I say that to protect you, your health and well being is dependent on you doing certain things and not doing others, and everybody is different.

Nonetheless, there are studies that point to specific substances that are sold over the counter that, at least in the united states, are legal and that have been shown to be statistically significant in increasing measures of libido. There are many such substances, but three that in particular have good peer reviewed research to support them. Or mckay, M.

A C. A, which is actually a root. Tony ali, also sometimes called long jack. I didn't name them, forgive me, and turbulence or turbulence is sometimes called. I'm going to talk about each of these instance. But on the hall, the studies on marker are quite convincing that consumption of two to three grams per day of mecca, which generally is sold as a powder or a capable, typically consumed early in the day, because IT can be somewhat of a stimulant, meaning IT can increase alertness, and you ouldn't want IT to interfere with sleep by taking IT too late in the day. But in studies that include both men and women of durations anywhere from eight to twelve weeks of athletes, non athletes and different variations of moca, turns out there's black mocker, red marker, yellow marker.

There are bunch of different forms of moca, but that they can increase subjective reports of sexual desire independent of hormone systems, meaning IT does not seem, at least based on the existing literature, that mca increases test astarn or changes esterton, at least not on the time scales of these studies were done or with the measures that we're performed in these studies. But that mocker, again consumed IT in doses of anywhere from two to three grams per day, has been shown to significantly increase libido. And in fact, those dosages of moca have been shown to offset so called accessaries induced sexual disfunction.

So their various routes to sexual diffunce, the asses are selective. Serotonin reuptake inhibits. They go by named brands like prozac and so off.

There are many others now and generic forms and so forth. Those don't always, I should point out, lead to sexual diffunce. There's a those dependence um some people do quite well on accessorize and don't have any issues with sexual function.

Other people suffer quite a lot from sexual diffunce. While taking access is highly variable. You need to work with physician, a qualified psychiatrist. But nonetheless, everything i've been saying about mocker thus far has also been explored in the context of assi and do sexual disfunction.

The paper um that I referred to hear is um a double blind render ized pilot dose finding study of mocker route IT goes by the name l myn. These always have fancy names, and the latter names in biology always more complete. But it's mac root for the management of sr and ductile function. First author is doring D R D I N G. This was a study done at mass general which is one of the satellite a locations around harvard harvard md associate, harvard md.

Um that found a significant improvements um in libido when people were taking up a pretty low do so was actually in this case just one point five grams per day um up to a hyde's three grams per day of mckay and they were doing this in twenty remitted depressed outpatients to these are people that had depression. Their depression was successful ly treated with rice, but they were suffering from some of these s sri related sexual effects. And moca seem to offset some of those effects significantly in this population.

The other studies expLoring the lack of effect on sym testosterone in in adult healthy men. I was a twelve week study, again, a consuming anywhere from one point five to three milligrams mean one excuse me, fifty hundred milligrams, three thousand milligrams or placebo so again, this is one point five up to three grams of moca or placebo. Um and they raided um sexual desire, uh depression and and other measures such to stop one in the blood.

Again, no change in testosterone or estrogen, estadio levels in men treated with mocha and those treated with plasma, but none. There's there was a significant and positive effect on libido with this dosage of one point five to three grams per day moca, and there are several other studies um that also show this again um in people that are taking us S R S and people that are not taking S R S in in chronically um overtrained athletes. Um this was also found to be the case.

So seems like across the board makes a fairly useful supplement for those that are seeking to increase the libido. And there are fewer studies involving women, but there are a few such studies that also point to the same general positive effect on libido in women taking mocker at equivalent doses to those I just described. I think it's not worthy that mcs supplementation does not seem to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels to any significant degree, but IT does change libido.

I think that points to the fact that there are multiple systems in the brain body that influence libido, not just testoon and estrogen and indeed we know that to be the case things like pea, which is a substance found in chocolate, is a substance that some people supplement, is known for instance to increase sexual desire, but also the perception of sexual experiences as um more stimulating for instance. So there are a lot of pathways in the brain, in particular in the hypo thalamus, this ancient area of our brain that harbors neurons and hormone secreting cells, including neurons, that can shape our perceptions of our, even just our tactile experience of others and their attractiveness, and indeed can shift levels of desire independent of changing levels of circulating hormones. Another substance that has been shown to increase libido across a range of human populations is so called tony ali.

I've talked a little bit about this before on the human man la. Podcast in reference to to stop, and i've talked about IT extensively as a guest on other podcast. Tonga only goes by a number of different names.

Um one of them is exceedingly difficult for me to pronounce. It's e're comma long eppolito also called long jack. But toner ali is the typical name.

This is an erb. There's a malaysian version. In an indonesian version, my understanding is that the indonesian variety of tonga, ali is the one that is most potent for it's effects on level.

Previously, i've talk about tony ali taking in four hundred milligram per day capsules as a means to increase the amount of free, meaning unbound testosterone. So testosterone has a both bound form. In an unbound form, very briefly, the bound form is bound to album in the blood, or to so called sex former binding global in a when it's bound.

IT can't be biologically active at many cells. IT is important that some of IT be bound in order to get a sort of time release and proper distribution of test astronomy the body. But is the unbound free test astros that can really have its most potent effects.

And there's some evidence that tony ali can increase the amount of unbound so called free test by lowering sex for binding global. And although IT is almost certain that IT has other routes of mechanism as well none's, there are some reports of tonga ally increasing libido one particular article last author uh or I should say, last name of first author, excuse me, email I S M L. This was a published in a in evidence based complementary and alternative medicine from two thousand and twelve reports, a significant increase in libido and sexual function.

There are other such studies, not a lot of them, not as many robust controlled quality period studies as there are from mocker. Nonetheless, a number of people, men and women that I know do take tongue ali and IT seems to to work well for them. The question always comes up around discussion of supplements.

Do you need to cycle these things? The only way to determine that is really to do your blood work, monitor liver anime, monitor formal levels and so forth. So I simply can't say whether you need to or you don't need to cycle them.

Typically, a toner, ali and moca are not cycled in any regular kind way that I am aware of but um again, you really need to check with your doctor if you're going to initiate taking any of these things um and you certainly should do your best to monitor your blood work as well as subjective measures than evaluating whether not they're working for you, safe for you and so forth. The third and final substance lash supplement that I want to touch on, as IT relates to label, is called tributary to rests. So that's T R I B U L U S interests T E R R E S, T R I S.

This is a commonly sold over the counter supplement for increasing testosterone for fitness purposes and and so on. Whether not IT actually does that to a meaningful degree isn't clear, but i'm aware of four peer reviewed studies that were focused on both males and females are ranging anywhere from eighteen years old all the way up to sixty five plus. They say sixty five plus I guess could be seventy, could be eighty, I don't know but a fairly broad age range um where people took anywhere from.

Seven hundred and fifty milligrams per day divided into three equal doses so seven hundred and fifty total per day divided to three equal doses of tribute ous um or placebo for one hundred and twenty days um this particular study was focused on females um and according to the female sexual function index questioner um no significant difference between any of the groups however free and bioavailable test stone increased in the group taking tribute ous arrested total test astern did not reach statistical significance. So this is sort of the inverse of what we see with mocker, where they do need to be increases in testosterone, which would predict that there will be increased in libido. In this case, in this was post mental postle women, there was no increase libido.

There wasn't increase in testosterone. I mentioned IT only because there might be instances, is in which people want to increase their testosterone. IT does seem that tribulation, at least in that population, is capable of doing that.

Now there is a separate study that was done, a double line study lasting anywhere from one to six months that had a clear and significant increase in libido. Now this was taking six grams, so that six, six thousand milligrams of tribute route for sixty days and IT did seem to increase various aspects of sexual function. And there was a what appeared to be a substantial sixteen point three percent increase in stock rone.

But in this particular study, because of the variability across individuals that did not actually arrive its statistical significance. Now there were a number of other studies that explored the role tribulations, in particular in in females. And one of those studies was a study that was actually quite short.

IT was two to four weeks, involved sixty seven subjects. These were subjects that had experienced a loss of libido and took turbulence divide to two equal doses, compared that to possibility. And they did see a significant improvement in these measures of sexual desire and function on this female sexual function index. So there is some evidence that tribulation can be effective in increasing testosterone in certain populations, in increasing sexual desire and function in certain populations, particular in females. I think more studies are certainly needed.

But these three substances, flash supplements, mocker tonga ali, in particular indonesian tonga ali and tribute ous, can indeed create significant increases in sexual desire, and in some cases by adJusting the test astern and emergent system, in some cases not by adJusting the tester instruction system, again, pointing to the complexity of neurons and features that adjust things like libido, A K desire. So we covered a lot of material today related to desire, love and attachment. And yet I acknowledge that IT is not exhaustive of the vast landscape, that is, the psychology and biology of desire, love and attachment.

Nonetheless, I hope that you found the information interesting and hopefully actionable in some cases toward the relationships of your past, of present and potentially for the relationships of your future. If you're enjoying and or learning from this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a very straightforward zero cost way to support us and IT really does help us.

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Please also follow us on instagram and twitter. I teach neuroscience and neuroscience related tools on both instagram, twitter. Some of that material overlapped with material covered on the podcast. Some of IT is unique material only covered on instrument and twitter and has mentioned the beginning of today's epo de. We are now partnered with momentous supplements because they make single ingredient formulations that are the absolute highest quality, and they ship international.

If you go to live moments stock com slash huberman, you will find many of the supplements that have been discussed on very episodes of the huberman lab podcast, and you will find various protocols related to those supplements. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about desire, love and attachment. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.