Science of Social Bonding in Family, Friendship & Romantic Love

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.240 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.960 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.880 | Today's episode is about the biology, psychology,

00:00:18.000 | and practices of social bonding.

00:00:20.720 | From the day we are born until the day we die,

00:00:23.700 | the quality of our social bonds

00:00:25.400 | dictates much of our quality of life.

00:00:28.240 | It should therefore be no surprise that our brain,

00:00:31.440 | and indeed much of our entire nervous system,

00:00:34.120 | is wired for social bonds.

00:00:36.780 | Now, social bonds occur between infant and parent.

00:00:40.360 | There are even particular wiring diagrams within the brain

00:00:43.960 | and spinal cord and body that are oriented

00:00:46.540 | towards the specific bonds that occur

00:00:48.520 | between infant and mother, as well as infant and father.

00:00:52.860 | And we have specific brain circuitries for friendship,

00:00:56.180 | specific brain circuitries that are activated

00:00:58.780 | in romantic relationships.

00:01:00.560 | And as it goes, specific brain circuitries

00:01:03.580 | that are activated when we break up with a romantic partner,

00:01:06.940 | or when they break up with us,

00:01:08.380 | or when somebody passes away, moves away,

00:01:11.200 | or otherwise leaves our lives in one form or another.

00:01:15.520 | Today, we are going to talk about

00:01:17.040 | those brain and nervous system circuitries.

00:01:19.440 | We're also going to talk about the neurochemicals

00:01:21.400 | and hormones that underlie their function.

00:01:24.240 | And we are going to touch on a number of important

00:01:26.880 | and actionable tools that you can apply in everyday life.

00:01:30.560 | And because we are headed into the holiday,

00:01:33.120 | the New Year's and Christmas holiday,

00:01:35.840 | that you can deploy in your various interactions

00:01:38.300 | with family members and friends.

00:01:40.040 | And should you not be spending time

00:01:42.020 | with family members and friends,

00:01:43.120 | today we are also going to talk about

00:01:44.900 | how to achieve social bonds out of the context

00:01:48.260 | of family and romantic partnership and friendship.

00:01:51.300 | So today's episode is going to include a lot of science,

00:01:54.120 | a lot of actionable tools,

00:01:55.800 | and I'm confident that you will come away

00:01:57.760 | from today's episode with tremendous knowledge

00:02:00.700 | about how you function.

00:02:02.580 | For instance, if you're an introvert or an extrovert,

00:02:05.000 | why is that?

00:02:05.840 | Turns out there may be a neurochemical basis for that.

00:02:08.240 | Maybe you're somebody that really enjoys social media.

00:02:10.320 | Maybe you're somebody that doesn't.

00:02:11.680 | Today I'm going to talk about a gene or a set of genes

00:02:14.680 | that predicts whether or not you will follow more people

00:02:17.560 | or seek out more online social interactions or fewer.

00:02:21.640 | Believe it or not, there's biology around that now,

00:02:23.720 | and it's excellent peer reviewed work.

00:02:25.760 | We will also talk about how bonds are broken

00:02:28.960 | and why breakups can be so painful,

00:02:31.220 | not just romantic breakups,

00:02:32.500 | but breakups with friendships and coworkers

00:02:35.160 | and how to move through those more seamlessly.

00:02:38.080 | So regardless of your age and regardless of whether or not

00:02:40.840 | you are in a romantic partnership of one form or another

00:02:43.760 | or not, I do believe this episode will be useful to you

00:02:47.280 | as you explore the social bonds

00:02:49.380 | that already exist in your life

00:02:50.800 | and as you seek out new and changing social bonds.

00:02:55.160 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:02:57.560 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:03:00.120 | It is however, part of my desire and effort

00:03:02.040 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:03:04.560 | and science related tools to the general public.

00:03:07.180 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:07:08.520 | Let's talk about the biology of social bonding.

00:07:10.860 | And I want to point out

00:07:11.780 | that I use the word bonding intentionally.

00:07:14.840 | It's a verb.

00:07:16.220 | And in biology, we want to think about verbs

00:07:18.940 | because everything in biology is a process.

00:07:22.280 | It's not an event.

00:07:24.020 | And when we think about things in biology as a process,

00:07:26.500 | that means it's going to have multiple steps.

00:07:28.380 | And today we are going to explore the steps

00:07:30.900 | start to finish of social bonding,

00:07:33.380 | meaning how social bonds are established,

00:07:35.700 | how they are maintained, how they are broken,

00:07:38.020 | and how they are reestablished.

00:07:40.380 | Now, an important feature of biology generally,

00:07:42.860 | but in particular, as it relates to social bonding,

00:07:45.780 | is that the neural circuits,

00:07:48.540 | meaning the brain areas and neurons and the hormones,

00:07:51.580 | things like oxytocin, which we'll talk about today,

00:07:54.340 | and the other chemicals in the brain and body

00:07:57.000 | that are responsible for the process we call social bonding,

00:08:00.260 | are not unique to particular social bonds.

00:08:04.020 | They are generic.

00:08:05.380 | What I mean by that is that the same brain circuits

00:08:07.980 | that are responsible for establishing a bond

00:08:10.580 | between parent and child are actually repurposed

00:08:14.220 | in romantic relationships.

00:08:16.180 | This might not come as a surprise to many of you.

00:08:18.620 | Many of you are probably familiar with this idea

00:08:20.620 | of securely attached people versus anxious attached people

00:08:23.880 | versus avoidant attached people.

00:08:25.660 | We're going to touch on that a little bit,

00:08:27.420 | but all of that has roots in whether or not children

00:08:30.460 | and parents formed healthy social bonds

00:08:34.100 | or whether or not they had challenged social bonds.

00:08:37.340 | Now, it's clear from the scientific

00:08:40.200 | and psychological literature

00:08:42.500 | that just because you might've had a not so great

00:08:46.000 | or even terrible social bond with a parent

00:08:49.100 | or with some other caretaker or loved one as a child,

00:08:52.240 | that doesn't fate you to have poor social bonds as an adult.

00:08:55.180 | There's a lot of plasticity in the system,

00:08:57.540 | meaning it can change,

00:08:58.960 | it can rewire in response to experience.

00:09:01.480 | And as we will soon discover,

00:09:04.140 | there are specific components within the neural circuits

00:09:07.260 | of your brain that are responsible for social bonding

00:09:10.340 | that allow you to place subjective labels

00:09:13.520 | on why you are doing certain things

00:09:15.340 | and to rewire the neural circuits for social bonding.

00:09:18.020 | So we're going to touch on all of that today.

00:09:19.900 | But the important feature really to point out

00:09:22.540 | is that we don't have 12 different circuits

00:09:25.100 | in the brain and body for different types of social bonds.

00:09:27.820 | We have one, and there's some universal features

00:09:30.820 | that underlie all forms of social bonds.

00:09:33.660 | So we're going to start by exploring

00:09:35.260 | what those neural circuits are,

00:09:37.020 | and then we are going to see how they plug

00:09:39.100 | into different types of social bonds.

00:09:41.300 | And then we are going to explore things like introversion,

00:09:44.860 | extraversion, where you're going to touch on a little bit

00:09:47.560 | about things like trauma bonds, healthy bonds,

00:09:50.380 | and various other aspects of how humans

00:09:53.020 | can bond to one another.

00:09:54.600 | And as you'll soon discover,

00:09:56.280 | there is a unique chemical signature

00:09:58.740 | of all bonding of all kinds.

00:10:01.220 | And you're going to learn how to modulate

00:10:02.920 | that chemical signature.

00:10:04.460 | Before we talk about social bonding,

00:10:06.100 | I want to talk about its mirror image,

00:10:08.180 | which is lack of social bonding or social isolation.

00:10:11.660 | Now, for better or for worse,

00:10:13.860 | there is a tremendous literature

00:10:16.500 | on the biology of social isolation

00:10:19.340 | and all of the terrible things that happen

00:10:21.120 | when animals or humans are socially isolated

00:10:24.140 | at particular phases of life.

00:10:25.900 | Now, for those of you that are introverts,

00:10:29.060 | you are not necessarily damaging yourself

00:10:31.080 | by deciding to spend less time with other people.

00:10:33.060 | Many people like time alone.

00:10:34.180 | I personally am an introvert.

00:10:36.060 | I get a thrill out of spending time

00:10:38.300 | with one or two close friends,

00:10:40.360 | but I enjoy a lot of time by myself.

00:10:42.540 | I like to socialize,

00:10:43.580 | so I wouldn't call myself an extreme introvert,

00:10:45.640 | but I know there are some extreme introverts out there.

00:10:47.860 | But when we talk about social isolation,

00:10:49.700 | what we're referring to is when animals or humans

00:10:53.980 | are restricted from having the social contacts

00:10:56.980 | that they would prefer to have.

00:10:59.180 | And to just briefly touch on the major takeaways

00:11:02.500 | from this literature, which spans back 100 years or more,

00:11:05.920 | being socially isolated is stressful.

00:11:10.460 | And one of the hallmark features of social isolation

00:11:13.480 | is chronically elevated stress hormones like adrenaline,

00:11:16.860 | also called epinephrine, like cortisol,

00:11:18.900 | a stress hormone that at healthy levels

00:11:21.660 | is good for combating inflammation,

00:11:24.020 | helps us have energy early in the day,

00:11:25.960 | focused throughout the day.

00:11:27.300 | But if cortisol is elevated for too long,

00:11:30.220 | which is the consequence of social isolation,

00:11:33.140 | the immune system suffers and other chemicals

00:11:36.240 | start to be released in the brain and body

00:11:38.340 | that are designed to motivate the organism,

00:11:40.780 | animal or human, to seek out social bonds.

00:11:43.500 | An example of one such chemical

00:11:46.560 | is a peptide called tachykinin.

00:11:48.860 | Tachykinin is present in flies, in mice and in humans,

00:11:53.700 | and under conditions of social isolation,

00:11:56.460 | its levels go up and because of the brain areas

00:11:59.740 | that contain receptors for tachykinin,

00:12:02.380 | people start feeling very aggressive and irritable

00:12:06.140 | after social isolation.

00:12:07.900 | Now that should be a little bit counterintuitive to you.

00:12:10.020 | You would think, oh, if you isolate an animal or human

00:12:13.180 | and then you give them the opportunity

00:12:14.820 | for social interaction, they should behave very well,

00:12:17.280 | they should be thrilled,

00:12:18.120 | they're finally getting the nourishment,

00:12:19.960 | the social nourishment that they've been lacking for so long.

00:12:22.780 | It turns out that's not the case.

00:12:24.200 | Chronic social isolation changes

00:12:26.980 | the nature of the brain and body

00:12:28.620 | such that it makes social connection harder

00:12:31.740 | and it makes the person who's been isolated irritable,

00:12:35.000 | even aggressive with other people.

00:12:37.540 | Now, I don't want to go too deeply

00:12:38.900 | into the biology of social isolation

00:12:41.580 | because it doesn't actually afford us that much insight

00:12:43.940 | into what healthy social bonding looks like.

00:12:46.500 | So today we're going to focus more

00:12:48.300 | on the functional biology,

00:12:50.820 | dual meaning of the word functional,

00:12:52.220 | as opposed to the pathology of social isolation.

00:12:55.920 | However, I do want to point out

00:12:58.060 | that social isolation starts to deteriorate

00:13:01.720 | certain aspects of brain and body pretty quickly,

00:13:05.420 | but how quickly depends, again,

00:13:07.580 | on how introverted or extroverted somebody is.

00:13:09.980 | So if you're somebody who's socially isolated

00:13:12.020 | for the holidays or has been socially isolated

00:13:13.940 | for a period of time and is craving social contact,

00:13:16.960 | that is a healthy craving.

00:13:18.440 | And as we'll learn next,

00:13:20.340 | the healthy craving for social contact

00:13:22.380 | has a very specific brain circuit,

00:13:24.140 | has a very specific neurochemical signature

00:13:26.120 | associated with it, and has some remarkable features

00:13:29.400 | that you can leverage in social contacts of all kinds.

00:13:32.960 | I think some of the more important

00:13:34.620 | and exciting work on social bonding

00:13:36.700 | comes from the laboratory of Kay Tai.

00:13:40.040 | Kay is a professor at the Salk Institute

00:13:41.880 | for Biological Studies.

00:13:43.220 | She's an investigator with the Howard Hughes

00:13:44.900 | Medical Institute.

00:13:46.220 | And in recent years,

00:13:47.700 | I would say in about the last five or six years,

00:13:49.860 | her laboratory has made a fundamental discovery

00:13:53.240 | as to why we seek out and put so much effort

00:13:56.700 | into social bonds.

00:13:58.420 | And the key discovery that she made is that much like hunger,

00:14:03.160 | much like temperature, much like thirst,

00:14:06.520 | we have brain circuits that are devoted

00:14:09.140 | to what's called a social homeostasis.

00:14:12.880 | Many of you have probably heard about homeostasis before.

00:14:15.340 | Homeostasis is the characteristic

00:14:18.300 | of various biological circuits and even individual cells

00:14:21.260 | to try and maintain a certain level.

00:14:23.480 | It's most easily thought of in the context of hunger.

00:14:25.860 | If you don't eat for a while,

00:14:26.820 | your drive to pursue food and think about food

00:14:29.500 | and make food and spend money on food,

00:14:33.180 | and indeed to enjoy food goes up.

00:14:36.180 | Whereas when you're well-fed,

00:14:37.780 | you don't tend to seek out food with as much vigor

00:14:41.040 | or as much intensity.

00:14:42.060 | You wouldn't invest as much time, effort, money, et cetera.

00:14:44.900 | So homeostasis is the aspect of cells, tissues,

00:14:48.260 | and organisms to seek some sort of balance,

00:14:50.980 | to regulate themselves.

00:14:53.240 | In a crude way, you can think about the thermostat

00:14:55.260 | on your home as a homeostatic circuit.

00:14:57.700 | When the temperature goes up a little bit,

00:14:59.220 | it cools things down to maintain a certain temperature.

00:15:01.660 | When the room gets cold, it hits a certain level

00:15:05.420 | and a sensor detects that, it clicks on,

00:15:07.920 | and then the heat goes on

00:15:08.820 | to maintain a certain set temperature.

00:15:10.860 | So that's a simple way of thinking about homeostasis.

00:15:13.880 | Every homeostatic circuit has three components,

00:15:17.100 | or at least three.

00:15:18.240 | One is a detector, meaning the organism

00:15:21.960 | or the thermostat on your wall has to have some way

00:15:24.300 | of detecting what's going on in the environment, all right,

00:15:27.820 | in the context of social bonding,

00:15:30.120 | whether or not you are interacting with others

00:15:32.040 | and whether or not those interactions are going well.

00:15:33.860 | So that has to be detected, that's the first thing.

00:15:36.200 | Then there has to be a control center,

00:15:37.740 | that's the second thing.

00:15:39.280 | And the control center is the one that makes the adjustments

00:15:42.920 | to, in the case of social bonding,

00:15:44.920 | to your behavior and to your psychology.

00:15:47.320 | So you'll soon learn that there are ways in which

00:15:50.220 | the more time that you spend alone,

00:15:52.140 | the more motivated you are to seek out the pictures of faces,

00:15:56.940 | the interactions with actual people,

00:15:59.100 | physical contact, and so forth.

00:16:01.320 | Now that might seem obvious to you,

00:16:02.960 | but thanks to the work of Keitai and others,

00:16:05.740 | it's remarkable to learn that there are specific

00:16:08.840 | brain centers that are adjusting our psychology and biology

00:16:11.900 | so that we seek out bonds more aggressively,

00:16:14.560 | or maybe we don't because we are perfectly sated

00:16:18.300 | or satiated with respect to how much contact

00:16:21.320 | we've had with other people.

00:16:22.720 | Now, the third component of this homeostatic circuit

00:16:26.820 | is the effector.

00:16:28.160 | The effector is actually what drives

00:16:30.280 | the behavioral response.

00:16:32.200 | It's what leads you to pick up your social media

00:16:34.640 | and start scrolling.

00:16:35.460 | It's what leads you to text a friend.

00:16:37.020 | It's what leads you to call a friend or make plans

00:16:40.040 | and what leads you to follow through on those plans.

00:16:42.640 | So again, those three components are a detector,

00:16:45.520 | a control center, and an effector.

00:16:48.520 | And as you'll soon learn,

00:16:50.000 | the neural circuit that controls this social homeostasis

00:16:53.600 | actually has a fourth component.

00:16:55.240 | And that fourth component is one

00:16:57.280 | that places subjective understanding

00:16:59.520 | as to why you are doing what you are doing

00:17:01.840 | and establishes your place in a hierarchy.

00:17:06.840 | Now, I know the word hierarchy can be a little bit

00:17:09.280 | of a barbed wire one because people immediately

00:17:11.520 | start thinking about boss and subordinate

00:17:14.960 | or in couples, a leader and a follower.

00:17:17.600 | But when we talk about social hierarchies

00:17:19.960 | in the context of human interactions,

00:17:21.780 | social hierarchies are very plastic,

00:17:24.920 | meaning in one setting, one person can be the leader.

00:17:28.060 | In another setting, the other person can be the leader.

00:17:30.420 | You probably have groups of friends or family members

00:17:32.720 | where you're constantly passing the baton

00:17:34.940 | as to who's going to drive, who's going to navigate,

00:17:37.800 | who's going to pick the restaurant,

00:17:40.420 | who's going to clear the dishes,

00:17:42.140 | and who's going to do certain activities and not others.

00:17:44.640 | So hierarchies are very dynamic.

00:17:46.880 | And as a consequence, social bonding has to be very plastic

00:17:51.080 | and very fluid so that you move from one environment

00:17:53.660 | to the next, even with the same people,

00:17:55.880 | you have to be able to make those adjustments.

00:17:58.120 | And in the case of the social homeostasis circuit,

00:18:01.020 | those adjustments are made by a particular brain structure.

00:18:04.020 | I've talked about in this podcast before,

00:18:05.540 | it's called the prefrontal cortex.

00:18:07.140 | It is the seat of our higher consciousness, if you will.

00:18:09.980 | It's what allows us to play subjective labels on things

00:18:13.020 | so we are not strictly input-output, we're not robotic.

00:18:16.800 | Meaning if you go to dinner with a friend

00:18:19.420 | and they are exceptional at choosing restaurants,

00:18:22.020 | well, in the context of the social homeostasis circuit,

00:18:24.880 | your prefrontal cortex would allow them

00:18:26.500 | to pick the restaurant because basically,

00:18:28.600 | they are dominant over you in their capacity

00:18:31.180 | to pick good restaurants, at least in this example.

00:18:34.020 | Whereas as you leave that restaurant

00:18:36.140 | and perhaps you are navigating

00:18:37.380 | to where to get a drink after dinner

00:18:39.820 | or where to walk through the city,

00:18:41.580 | perhaps you have the better sense of direction.

00:18:43.540 | And so then the social bonding has to be maintained

00:18:47.060 | as you switch the hierarchy, okay?

00:18:49.380 | So that's the role of that fourth element,

00:18:51.220 | the prefrontal cortex.

00:18:52.580 | Now, I just briefly want to touch on some of the brain areas

00:18:56.220 | that thanks to the work of Keitai and others,

00:18:58.780 | we now know underlie the detection, control, and response.

00:19:03.620 | Okay, I call them the detector, control center, and effector

00:19:06.620 | because inside of that description

00:19:08.400 | isn't just a bunch of names of neural structures.

00:19:11.140 | There are also hints

00:19:12.280 | as to what the underlying neurochemicals are.

00:19:14.900 | And by understanding what the neurochemicals are,

00:19:17.440 | you can start to think about tools that you can use

00:19:19.740 | to form social bonds

00:19:21.580 | and maintain social bonds in better, healthier ways.

00:19:24.620 | So let's talk about the detector first.

00:19:26.760 | Now, keep in mind that you have your senses.

00:19:28.740 | You have your vision, you have your hearing,

00:19:30.540 | you have touch, you have smell, you have taste.

00:19:33.340 | Sensation, as I've talked about many times before

00:19:36.000 | in the podcast, but I'll just remind you,

00:19:37.860 | sensation is the conversion of physical stimuli

00:19:41.520 | in the environment into electrical and chemical signals

00:19:44.480 | in your nervous system.

00:19:45.580 | The language of the nervous system

00:19:46.700 | is electrical and chemical signals.

00:19:48.500 | So photons of light

00:19:49.660 | are converted to electrical and chemical signals.

00:19:51.520 | Pressure on the skin or light touch on the skin

00:19:54.080 | is converted into electrical and chemical signals

00:19:56.120 | and so on and so forth.

00:19:57.440 | So all of that, of course, is flowing into the nervous system

00:20:00.500 | but the detector that underlies social homeostasis

00:20:04.640 | involves mainly two structures.

00:20:06.940 | One is called the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex,

00:20:09.380 | and the other is the BLA, basolateral amygdala.

00:20:12.140 | And when you hear the word amygdala,

00:20:13.260 | you're probably thinking fear.

00:20:14.900 | But today, as you'll see,

00:20:16.420 | the amygdala actually has

00:20:17.460 | many different subcompartments and components.

00:20:19.940 | And there's a reason why the basolateral amygdala,

00:20:22.620 | which is associated with certain aspects

00:20:25.160 | of aversive behaviors,

00:20:26.540 | meaning moving away from certain types of things

00:20:28.900 | or interactions,

00:20:29.860 | there's a reason why the BLA

00:20:31.340 | is such an integral part of the detector system.

00:20:34.660 | And that's because just as it's important to form

00:20:37.060 | healthy social bonds,

00:20:38.180 | it's vitally important to try and avoid

00:20:40.700 | unhealthy social bonds.

00:20:42.500 | And so the basolateral amygdala

00:20:44.020 | is mainly associated with these aversive type responses

00:20:47.180 | of just moving away from certain things.

00:20:49.580 | The control center in the social homeostasis circuit

00:20:54.220 | involves a brain area called the lateral hypothalamus

00:20:56.880 | and the periventricular hypothalamus.

00:21:00.140 | The lateral hypothalamus and the periventricular hypothalamus

00:21:03.580 | contain neurons that are able to access the hormone system

00:21:08.580 | in order to influence the release of things like oxytocin,

00:21:11.540 | which is a hormone neuropeptide.

00:21:13.680 | It's kind of part hormone, part neurotransmitter.

00:21:16.000 | It's kind of a hybrid.

00:21:16.860 | We're going to talk a lot about oxytocin today.

00:21:19.380 | So we've got the ACC and the BLA.

00:21:21.600 | These are areas that are mainly involved

00:21:23.100 | in moving away from things,

00:21:24.480 | although also toward them.

00:21:25.820 | That's the detector.

00:21:26.660 | Then we've got the control center,

00:21:28.180 | which is in the hypothalamus.

00:21:30.060 | And then there's a very special and important area

00:21:34.260 | associated with social bonding

00:21:35.740 | that I want everyone to learn,

00:21:37.420 | which is the dorsal raphe nucleus or DRN,

00:21:40.820 | dorsal raphe nucleus.

00:21:41.980 | The dorsal raphe nucleus is a small collection of neurons

00:21:44.760 | in the midbrain, so it's deep in the brain.

00:21:47.820 | And most of the time when you hear about raphe,

00:21:50.900 | R-A-P-H-E, by the way, raphe nucleus,

00:21:54.700 | you're talking about serotonin.

00:21:56.340 | Serotonin is a neuromodulator

00:21:57.820 | that is often associated with feelings of satiety

00:22:01.180 | after eating, warmth, basically satisfaction

00:22:04.840 | with things that you already have.

00:22:06.820 | However, within this dorsal raphe nucleus,

00:22:10.740 | there is a small subset of neurons that release dopamine.

00:22:14.700 | Dopamine is a neuromodulator most often associated

00:22:17.120 | with movement, craving, motivation, and desire.

00:22:20.980 | And the neural circuits that are rich with dopamine

00:22:24.340 | are things like the substantia nigra,

00:22:26.040 | the mesolimbic dopamine system, the VTA,

00:22:28.840 | the nucleus accumbens, et cetera,

00:22:30.140 | those names don't have to mean anything to you.

00:22:32.040 | However, this unique population of dopamine neurons

00:22:35.800 | in the raphe is truly unique in that it's responsible

00:22:39.580 | for mediating what I've been calling social homeostasis.

00:22:43.180 | It is the effector or the response

00:22:46.780 | that mediates social homeostasis.

00:22:48.820 | Now, I haven't told you exactly what social homeostasis is.

00:22:51.920 | Social homeostasis, just like hunger,

00:22:54.780 | is the process by which when you lack social interaction,

00:22:59.420 | you start to crave it.

00:23:00.700 | What's very interesting about the fact

00:23:03.420 | that there are dopamine neurons in this raphe structure

00:23:06.660 | that is the effector for social homeostasis

00:23:10.380 | is that what this means is that when you are not interacting

00:23:15.380 | with people at a frequency or intensity

00:23:18.660 | that is right for you, dopamine is released into the brain.

00:23:24.020 | In most popular conversations about dopamine,

00:23:26.300 | and even in scientific circles,

00:23:28.020 | when you hear dopamine release,

00:23:29.400 | you think about reward or feeling good

00:23:31.620 | because indeed many behaviors

00:23:33.180 | and drugs of abuse increase dopamine.

00:23:36.180 | That's one of the reasons

00:23:37.000 | they have so much addictive potential.

00:23:39.220 | However, dopamine is not associated with feeling good.

00:23:42.380 | It is actually the neurochemical that's responsible

00:23:45.440 | for movement toward things that feel good.

00:23:48.960 | So to zoom out and conceptualize what we have here,

00:23:51.820 | we have a brain area that is a detector

00:23:54.420 | that either will move us toward or away

00:23:56.340 | from certain types of experiences or sensations.

00:23:59.860 | We have a control center that is going to release

00:24:03.500 | certain hormones and neuropeptides into our brain and blood,

00:24:06.700 | depending on the sorts of interactions

00:24:08.380 | that we happen to be having.

00:24:10.220 | And we have this response system,

00:24:12.500 | which is the dorsal raphe nucleus

00:24:14.460 | that contains dopamine neurons.

00:24:15.940 | And when we are not interacting with people

00:24:19.220 | at the frequency or intensity that we crave,

00:24:22.100 | dopamine is released and that dopamine causes us

00:24:25.240 | to seek out social interactions of particular kinds.

00:24:28.840 | So let's talk about what social homeostasis is

00:24:31.480 | and how it plays out.

00:24:32.740 | And again, let's use hunger as an example.

00:24:35.380 | So let's say you're a person

00:24:37.020 | who eats every three or four hours regularly.

00:24:40.140 | So on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

00:24:41.900 | you're just accustomed to eating every three or four hours.

00:24:44.880 | If just suddenly I steal your meal out of the fridge at work,

00:24:49.800 | something I would not do,

00:24:50.780 | but just for sake of mental experimentation,

00:24:53.540 | that would probably cause you to go and seek out food

00:24:57.840 | through some other route.

00:24:58.740 | You might buy food, you'd probably be upset first,

00:25:00.740 | but then you go buy food or replace the food

00:25:02.480 | that you were going to eat.

00:25:03.320 | You'd be hungry for that food.

00:25:04.320 | And indeed there are hormonal type mechanisms

00:25:08.280 | and other mechanisms that when we eat regularly

00:25:11.320 | and we predict that food is coming in,

00:25:13.040 | we actually start secreting insulin,

00:25:14.540 | which is for mobilizing blood sugar.

00:25:16.460 | There are hormones in the bloodstream

00:25:18.260 | that make us hungry on a regular clock-like schedule.

00:25:21.500 | And you would seek out more food.

00:25:24.200 | Similarly, if you're somebody who is accustomed

00:25:26.940 | to a lot of social interaction,

00:25:29.860 | and suddenly I take away that social interaction,

00:25:33.520 | you would feel kind of let down.

00:25:35.420 | You would crave a replacement social interaction.

00:25:39.020 | You might be upset that you had a lunch date with a friend,

00:25:41.420 | you're used to having lunch with them every Wednesday,

00:25:43.500 | and they cancel and you would crave the interaction, okay?

00:25:47.280 | This is called a prosocial craving.

00:25:49.500 | And indeed, this is what you see in animals and humans.

00:25:52.540 | If you, what's called acutely isolate them,

00:25:56.340 | which is just a fancy scientific word of saying,

00:25:58.220 | deprive them of social interactions in a short-term basis,

00:26:01.900 | they start engaging in prosocial behaviors.

00:26:04.260 | They start texting other people,

00:26:05.400 | they start seeking out social interactions

00:26:08.020 | of different kinds.

00:26:09.460 | And that makes perfect sense, right?

00:26:11.460 | But thought of from a different side,

00:26:13.940 | you could also imagine how,

00:26:15.780 | well, if you're getting a social interaction

00:26:18.380 | with somebody on a daily or weekly basis,

00:26:20.180 | and suddenly you remove that interaction,

00:26:22.740 | well, then people might not care.

00:26:24.820 | They might just think,

00:26:25.660 | well, I'll get the interaction tomorrow

00:26:26.660 | or the next year or the next day,

00:26:27.620 | because they're sated,

00:26:28.860 | much in the same way that the person who eats very regularly

00:26:31.180 | might say, well, I ate four hours ago

00:26:32.740 | and I'll eat eight hours later, no big deal.

00:26:34.280 | But that's not what happens.

00:26:35.860 | There's a prediction that we are going to have

00:26:38.400 | certain types of interactions.

00:26:39.900 | And when those interactions don't happen,

00:26:42.460 | we replace that lack of interaction

00:26:44.540 | with a drive and a motivation

00:26:46.260 | to seek out social interaction.

00:26:48.620 | And that drive and motivation is caused by,

00:26:52.020 | or I should say is driven by dopamine release

00:26:54.700 | from that dorsal raphe.

00:26:56.540 | And so the takeaway is that

00:26:58.340 | when we lack social interaction that we expect,

00:27:01.220 | we become prosocial.

00:27:03.060 | However, if we are chronically socially isolated,

00:27:07.400 | meaning we don't have interactions

00:27:09.180 | with people for a long time,

00:27:10.880 | we become actually more introverted.

00:27:13.500 | This is separate from all of the tacky kind and stuff

00:27:15.900 | that I talked about earlier

00:27:16.980 | or falling into states of chronic stress,

00:27:19.020 | but it's well-established now that in humans and in animals,

00:27:22.280 | if you don't give them enough social interaction,

00:27:25.860 | they actually become antisocial.

00:27:28.060 | And so this is actually a little bit like

00:27:29.940 | what one might see with long-term fasting.

00:27:33.060 | I give the example of eating every four hours.

00:27:34.820 | Now let's give the parallel example

00:27:36.340 | of somebody who's been fasting perhaps

00:27:39.580 | for two or three days.

00:27:41.140 | If they are expecting to eat

00:27:42.900 | and then the meal doesn't arrive,

00:27:45.460 | they are not necessarily going to immediately try

00:27:48.700 | and seek out food.

00:27:49.900 | And that's a little bit counterintuitive.

00:27:51.180 | You would have thought,

00:27:52.000 | well, they haven't eaten in a very long time.

00:27:53.180 | They're going to be very motivated to seek out food,

00:27:55.460 | but no, they are accustomed to fasting.

00:27:57.960 | Similarly, the social homeostasis circuit

00:28:00.940 | works in a way such that

00:28:02.620 | when we don't have social interactions for a very long time,

00:28:05.820 | we start to lose our craving for social interactions.

00:28:09.720 | Let's look at the social homeostasis circuit

00:28:11.720 | through the lens of what's commonly called

00:28:13.660 | introversion and extroversion.

00:28:16.420 | Now, typically when we hear about introverts,

00:28:18.300 | we think about the quiet person at the party

00:28:20.300 | or the person that doesn't want to go out at all.

00:28:22.140 | And we think about an extrovert

00:28:23.480 | as somebody who's really social,

00:28:24.900 | the so-called social butterfly,

00:28:26.540 | who enjoys social interactions, is really chatty,

00:28:29.260 | is kind of life of the party type person.

00:28:31.000 | That's the cliche or the kind of pop psychology cliche.

00:28:33.940 | But actually in the psychology literature,

00:28:35.920 | that's not really the way it holds up.

00:28:37.860 | Many people who appear introverted are actually extroverted.

00:28:42.360 | The quiet person at a party could be an extrovert,

00:28:46.880 | except that they just don't talk very much.

00:28:49.420 | The characteristic of an extrovert

00:28:51.240 | is somebody that gets energy or feels good

00:28:53.940 | from social interactions.

00:28:55.100 | They sort of get a lift.

00:28:56.380 | And we can predict that that lift occurs

00:28:59.020 | because of some release of dopamine

00:29:01.060 | within their brain and body.

00:29:02.140 | And indeed there's evidence for that.

00:29:03.460 | Neuroimaging studies support that.

00:29:05.520 | Other forms of neurobiological analysis

00:29:07.580 | support that as well.

00:29:09.100 | We can also imagine that the person who's talking a lot

00:29:12.300 | is somebody who's very extroverted.

00:29:14.500 | But oftentimes people who talk a lot for their work

00:29:17.420 | or they're somebody who's very social

00:29:19.500 | when you interact with them,

00:29:21.100 | that person gets back to their car

00:29:22.620 | and is absolutely depleted and exhausted by that interaction

00:29:25.580 | or all sorts of social interactions.

00:29:28.400 | So we really can't predict whether or not

00:29:30.720 | somebody is an introvert or an extrovert

00:29:32.620 | simply based on their behavior.

00:29:34.060 | It's really more of an internal subjective label.

00:29:37.120 | However, if we look at introversion and extroversion

00:29:39.540 | through this lens of the social homeostatic set point,

00:29:42.940 | and we think about dopamine as this molecule

00:29:45.700 | that drives motivation to seek out social interactions,

00:29:49.360 | what we can reasonably assume is that introverts are people

00:29:54.660 | that when they engage in certain forms

00:29:57.080 | of social interaction,

00:29:58.840 | either the amount of dopamine that's released

00:30:01.920 | is greater than it is in an extrovert.

00:30:04.980 | That's right, I said greater than it is in an extrovert.

00:30:07.400 | And so they actually feel quite motivated,

00:30:10.000 | but also satisfied by very brief,

00:30:12.920 | or we could say sort of sparse social interactions.

00:30:17.260 | They don't need a lot of social engagement to feel sated.

00:30:20.520 | Again, the parallel example will be hunger.

00:30:22.740 | This would be somebody who doesn't need to eat much

00:30:25.000 | in order to feel satisfied.

00:30:26.900 | Whereas the extrovert, we can reasonably assume,

00:30:30.540 | releases less dopamine in response

00:30:33.140 | to an individual social interaction.

00:30:35.100 | And so they need much more social interaction

00:30:37.300 | in order to feel filled up by that interaction.

00:30:40.500 | And indeed, this is supported

00:30:41.580 | by the neurobiological imaging studies.

00:30:43.820 | So rather than think about introverts and extroverts

00:30:46.220 | as chatty versus quiet,

00:30:47.780 | it's useful to think about people, maybe yourself,

00:30:52.220 | maybe other people you know,

00:30:53.820 | as how much social interaction they need

00:30:56.340 | in order to bring the social homeostasis into balance.

00:30:59.660 | Now there's the fourth component

00:31:01.020 | of this social homeostasis circuit that I mentioned before,

00:31:03.420 | and that's the prefrontal cortex.

00:31:05.180 | The prefrontal cortex is involved in thinking

00:31:07.240 | and planning and action,

00:31:08.620 | and it has extensive connections with areas of the brain,

00:31:11.580 | like the hypothalamus,

00:31:13.260 | which is responsible for a lot of motivated drives.

00:31:16.660 | It also has connections

00:31:18.020 | with the various reward centers of the brain,

00:31:19.740 | and it can act as kind of an accelerator,

00:31:22.480 | meaning it can encourage more electrical activity

00:31:25.500 | of other brain centers,

00:31:27.020 | or as a brake on those brain centers.

00:31:29.320 | Really good example.

00:31:30.500 | It's kind of a trivial one

00:31:31.900 | in the context of today's discussion,

00:31:33.360 | but it's a concrete one, so I'll use it.

00:31:35.160 | Would be, I know many people out there use cold showers

00:31:38.680 | as a way to stimulate metabolism

00:31:40.200 | and build up resilience and this sort of thing.

00:31:42.180 | If you get into a very cold shower

00:31:44.120 | and you feel as if you want to get out,

00:31:46.740 | but you force yourself to stay in,

00:31:48.440 | you're forcing yourself to stay in

00:31:50.560 | because your prefrontal cortex

00:31:51.880 | is placing some subjective label on that experience.

00:31:54.660 | Either you're doing it for a certain benefit,

00:31:56.660 | or you've got a timer and you're using the timer

00:31:59.600 | as the regulator of how long you're going to stay in.

00:32:01.700 | Basically, you're overriding reflexes,

00:32:03.520 | and that's the main function of the prefrontal cortex.

00:32:06.720 | But as I mentioned earlier,

00:32:07.620 | the prefrontal cortex components

00:32:09.580 | that wire into the social homeostasis circuit

00:32:12.180 | are responsible for evaluating

00:32:14.120 | where you are in a given hierarchy.

00:32:16.400 | And that affords you a ton of flexibility

00:32:19.180 | in terms of the types of social interactions

00:32:20.980 | that you can engage in,

00:32:21.900 | and whether or not you're going to spend time

00:32:24.380 | with certain people or not,

00:32:26.080 | whether or not you're going to engage and then disengage.

00:32:28.000 | What do I mean by this?

00:32:28.900 | Well, let's say you're an extroverted person.

00:32:31.200 | You're somebody that likes a lot of social interaction

00:32:33.480 | and you get a lot of dopamine release on whole

00:32:36.960 | from a lot of social interaction.

00:32:38.440 | So maybe one interaction with a teller at the supermarket

00:32:41.320 | isn't really going to give you much dopamine,

00:32:43.240 | but going to a party will give you more dopamine,

00:32:45.660 | and so you seek out these larger social interactions.

00:32:48.980 | However, you might go to a party

00:32:50.880 | where somebody says something or you see somebody there

00:32:52.960 | that you'd much prefer not to see,

00:32:54.640 | and therefore you decide to leave.

00:32:56.440 | The deciding to leave is regulated

00:32:59.400 | by that prefrontal cortex component.

00:33:01.560 | So it's important to understand

00:33:03.340 | that just because there's a homeostatic circuit

00:33:05.320 | that involves areas like the amygdala and the hypothalamus

00:33:07.960 | and these deep brain regions like the dorsal raphe,

00:33:10.680 | as a human being, you have flexibility

00:33:13.380 | over your social interactions,

00:33:14.660 | and that flexibility arrives from those prefrontal circuits.

00:33:17.560 | So there's a ton of subjective nature to it.

00:33:20.120 | There's a lot of context to it.

00:33:21.880 | So while there are some predictable elements

00:33:24.640 | of these circuits,

00:33:25.580 | they are not simply what we would call plug and chug.

00:33:28.200 | You have flexibility.

00:33:29.380 | You are able to say, you know, I love parties,

00:33:31.320 | but I really don't want to go to that party

00:33:32.960 | because so-and-so is there,

00:33:34.200 | or I very much don't like going across town in traffic,

00:33:38.080 | but I'm going to do it today

00:33:39.280 | because a certain collection of people,

00:33:41.600 | or perhaps a certain individual,

00:33:43.820 | will be at that particular party.

00:33:45.400 | And so the prefrontal cortex, again,

00:33:47.040 | is what allows you that subjective ruling

00:33:49.600 | or ruling over what would otherwise just be reflexes.

00:33:52.840 | So now I'd like to drill a little bit deeper

00:33:55.040 | into this incredible neural structure

00:33:57.680 | that is the dorsal raphe nucleus

00:33:59.800 | and this small collection of neurons,

00:34:02.140 | the dopamine neurons of the dorsal raphe,

00:34:03.960 | because while it's a small collection,

00:34:05.300 | they are very powerful.

00:34:06.700 | Loneliness has been defined by the great psychologist,

00:34:11.780 | John Cacioppo, as the distress that results

00:34:15.080 | from discrepancies between ideal

00:34:16.840 | and perceived social relationships.

00:34:18.560 | Let me repeat that.

00:34:19.400 | Loneliness is not just being isolated.

00:34:21.880 | Loneliness, as he defines it,

00:34:24.720 | is the distress that results from discrepancies

00:34:27.320 | between ideal and perceived social relationships.

00:34:30.040 | It's when we expect things to be one way

00:34:32.000 | and they're actually another way.

00:34:33.560 | And which way we expect them to be

00:34:36.000 | and which way they turn out, again, is highly subjective.

00:34:39.040 | What you expect from friendships

00:34:40.920 | and what other people expect from friendships

00:34:42.420 | could be entirely different,

00:34:43.800 | but the circuit that underlies friendship bonding

00:34:46.240 | is exactly the same.

00:34:47.640 | And it is this dorsal raphe nucleus

00:34:50.000 | and the dopamine neurons in that nucleus

00:34:51.720 | that underlie the bond that is social friendship

00:34:54.080 | and all types of social bonds.

00:34:56.020 | There's a key finding in the literature.

00:34:58.360 | The title of this paper is "Dorsal Raphe Dopamine Neurons

00:35:00.960 | "Represent the Experience of Social Isolation."

00:35:03.960 | This is a paper from Kay Tye's lab.

00:35:05.660 | The first author is Mathews, Jillian Mathews,

00:35:08.040 | to be specific.

00:35:09.540 | What they did is they were able to selectively activate

00:35:12.400 | the dopamine neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus.

00:35:15.520 | And when they did that, they induced a loneliness-like state.

00:35:19.380 | Now, how did they know it was a loneliness-like state?

00:35:21.840 | They knew because it motivated the seeking out

00:35:24.320 | of social connections.

00:35:25.600 | This is the kind of social hunger

00:35:28.680 | that I was referring to before.

00:35:30.560 | Whereas when the dopamine neurons of the dorsal raphe

00:35:33.520 | are inhibited, meaning their activity is quieted,

00:35:36.720 | that suppressed a loneliness state.

00:35:40.860 | So that's a little counterintuitive, right?

00:35:42.920 | It's a group of neurons that when activated

00:35:45.680 | makes you feel lonely.

00:35:47.280 | And when this brain area is not activated,

00:35:51.060 | it suppresses loneliness.

00:35:52.620 | But if you think about it,

00:35:53.460 | that's exactly the kind of circuit that you would want

00:35:56.200 | in order to drive social behavior.

00:35:58.740 | When you're feeling lonely, dopamine is released

00:36:01.640 | and it causes you to go out and seek social interactions.

00:36:04.620 | When this brain area has enough social interactions,

00:36:08.600 | that's sort of a figure of speech,

00:36:09.780 | brain areas don't have enough social interactions.

00:36:11.960 | But when enough social interactions have happened,

00:36:14.460 | that the neurons in this brain area

00:36:15.720 | shut down their production of dopamine,

00:36:17.720 | well, the loneliness state turns off.

00:36:21.100 | So what we think of as loneliness,

00:36:23.120 | as this big kind of dark cloud

00:36:25.680 | or fog in our psychological landscape,

00:36:29.240 | boils down to a very small set of neurons

00:36:31.440 | releasing a specific neurochemical for motivation.

00:36:34.520 | And to me, this really changes the way

00:36:36.360 | that we think about loneliness

00:36:37.820 | and that we think about social interactions.

00:36:40.760 | There's so much subjective landscape

00:36:42.720 | to loneliness and to social interactions.

00:36:45.880 | But at the end of the day,

00:36:46.840 | what it really is is that we are all social animals

00:36:49.640 | to some extent or another,

00:36:51.200 | and we all crave social interactions

00:36:53.520 | to some extent or another,

00:36:54.860 | although the extent will vary depending on where you are

00:36:58.440 | in the introversion/extroversion continuum,

00:37:00.820 | and it is indeed a continuum.

00:37:02.540 | Now, the other aspect of the study that was really important

00:37:05.380 | gets back to that issue of hierarchy and social rank.

00:37:09.000 | What they found is that depending on where you see yourself

00:37:13.400 | in the social rank,

00:37:15.260 | the dopamine neurons in the raphe

00:37:17.240 | will lead to one consequence or another,

00:37:19.880 | meaning moving toward social interactions

00:37:22.380 | or moving away from them.

00:37:24.120 | So the whole system is set up

00:37:26.060 | so that you have a ton of flexibility

00:37:27.840 | and control over social interactions.

00:37:29.840 | So just a couple of key points and actionable takeaways

00:37:32.480 | based on the information I've offered up until now.

00:37:36.260 | If you think of yourself as an introvert,

00:37:39.140 | it's very likely that you get a lot of dopamine

00:37:42.460 | from a few or minimal social interactions.

00:37:46.160 | Whereas if you're an extrovert,

00:37:47.920 | contrary to what you might think,

00:37:49.980 | social interactions are not going to flood your system

00:37:52.220 | with dopamine.

00:37:53.200 | They actually are going to lead to less dopamine release

00:37:57.160 | than it would for an introvert,

00:37:58.780 | and therefore you're going to need

00:38:00.000 | a lot more social interactions

00:38:02.020 | in order to feel filled up by those interactions.

00:38:04.960 | Now I've been drawing a lot of parallels

00:38:06.500 | between this social seeking

00:38:08.820 | or avoiding social isolation and hunger,

00:38:12.380 | but is that really the case?

00:38:14.220 | And could it be that there are actually interactions

00:38:17.440 | between the different drives,

00:38:18.760 | meaning could social isolation

00:38:21.480 | or the desire to seek out social interactions

00:38:24.240 | actually relate to the hunger system and vice versa?

00:38:27.260 | And indeed the answer is yes.

00:38:29.580 | We don't have 50 different homeostatic systems

00:38:33.680 | and 50 different neurochemicals

00:38:36.740 | to underlie our drive to eat,

00:38:39.780 | our drive for romantic interactions,

00:38:42.860 | our drive for friendship interactions.

00:38:46.080 | We have essentially one, maybe two,

00:38:49.100 | and they all funnel into the same dopamine system.

00:38:51.980 | And there's a beautiful paper

00:38:53.500 | that illustrates some of the crossover

00:38:55.180 | between these different homeostatic drives.

00:38:58.540 | The title of the paper is "Acute Social Isolation Evokes

00:39:01.480 | Midbrain Craving Responses Similar to Hunger."

00:39:04.620 | This is from Rebecca Saxe's lab at MIT,

00:39:07.460 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

00:39:09.980 | Dr. Kay Tai is also an author on this paper.

00:39:12.340 | The paper was published in "Nature Neuroscience."

00:39:13.940 | It's a really terrific paper.

00:39:16.340 | Just to briefly summarize what they did,

00:39:18.660 | they took people that were categorized

00:39:20.900 | as socially connected, healthy human adults.

00:39:23.140 | So these are people that are used

00:39:24.220 | to pretty frequent social interactions,

00:39:26.520 | and they socially isolated them for about 10 hours.

00:39:31.380 | And they had no opportunity to access social media,

00:39:35.040 | email, fiction reading even,

00:39:38.160 | and certainly didn't have the opportunity

00:39:39.740 | to interact with people face-to-face.

00:39:41.800 | So what this did is it increased social craving,

00:39:44.660 | both objectively, the people said

00:39:46.520 | that they were now craving social interactions,

00:39:48.600 | and then they did brain imaging

00:39:50.020 | in response to images of people,

00:39:52.100 | people interacting, food, flowers, other types of stimuli.

00:39:56.060 | Some of the stimuli or these images,

00:39:58.360 | we call them stimuli, but they're images really,

00:40:01.040 | had a lot of social engagement going on in them.

00:40:02.980 | Others did not.

00:40:03.820 | Some had a lot of faces showing, others did not.

00:40:06.420 | And as you might suspect,

00:40:08.140 | there was activation of many of the brain areas

00:40:11.520 | that we've talked about earlier, dorsal raphe nucleus,

00:40:13.920 | and other brain areas associated with dopaminergic neurons.

00:40:17.400 | When the socially isolated people viewed social cues,

00:40:22.400 | people interacting, faces, and so on,

00:40:24.700 | and less so for things like flowers.

00:40:27.080 | However, they also had increased responses

00:40:30.880 | to images of food, which is interesting,

00:40:34.380 | and actually is consistent with the literature

00:40:36.820 | that when people are socially isolated,

00:40:38.680 | they often will start eating more,

00:40:41.140 | or they will change the nature of the foods that they eat.

00:40:43.940 | Now, we think of that as comfort foods

00:40:46.300 | or soothing oneself through eating

00:40:48.900 | rather than social interaction as a kind of pathology.

00:40:51.900 | But while it might not be healthy,

00:40:53.840 | depending on the context and the person,

00:40:56.060 | it's really important to understand

00:40:57.420 | that the reason that happens

00:40:59.640 | is because we have a common circuit

00:41:01.780 | and that the system, meaning the person,

00:41:03.880 | is actually craving dopamine release.

00:41:05.860 | They don't consciously know this.

00:41:07.120 | This is all subconsciously carried out,

00:41:08.740 | but they're craving dopamine release.

00:41:10.420 | And if they can't get it from social interactions

00:41:12.460 | as they normally would, they'll start seeking it from food.

00:41:15.500 | Now, they did an important reverse experiment as well

00:41:18.900 | where they had subjects go on 10 hours of food fasting.

00:41:22.640 | Now, these were not people that were familiar with fasting.

00:41:25.520 | They weren't doing intermittent fasting.

00:41:28.240 | They were eating more typical meal schedules.

00:41:30.820 | And so that created increased hunger, et cetera,

00:41:33.700 | but it also increased their appetite, if you will,

00:41:37.060 | for social interactions.

00:41:38.740 | And so the important point here

00:41:40.340 | is that there's a common biology,

00:41:42.340 | there's a common circuitry

00:41:43.820 | that underlies homeostatic craving of things

00:41:46.900 | that maintain us as individuals and as a species.

00:41:50.060 | And it really places social interactions

00:41:53.240 | as right up there in the list of things

00:41:55.820 | that we could consider so vital for our survival

00:41:58.540 | and for our health.

00:41:59.380 | Things like food, water, social interactions

00:42:02.580 | are really sit within a top tier amongst each other,

00:42:07.100 | and they use the same common circuitry,

00:42:09.180 | dorsal raphe dopamine neurons,

00:42:11.100 | in addition to other structures

00:42:12.400 | in order to create this drive

00:42:14.800 | to seek out certain types of stimuli.

00:42:17.180 | Now, this is a very reductionist view of social bonding.

00:42:19.920 | I realize that.

00:42:21.360 | But it's important to realize

00:42:23.060 | that while we place all this subjective context,

00:42:25.560 | oh, I miss this person,

00:42:26.820 | or I really would like to avoid that person,

00:42:30.380 | at the end of the day,

00:42:31.220 | it really all funnels into a system

00:42:33.820 | whereby a single neurochemical

00:42:35.680 | is either being released and motivating us

00:42:38.580 | to seek out more of a particular type of interaction

00:42:41.220 | or is not released,

00:42:42.120 | and therefore we are perfectly comfortable

00:42:43.560 | staying exactly where we are.

00:42:45.660 | As I say this, some of you are probably thinking,

00:42:47.900 | oh, that's probably what happens when you fall in love.

00:42:50.220 | And indeed, that's the case.

00:42:51.680 | When people enter romantic relationships,

00:42:54.300 | that to them are very satisfying.

00:42:56.320 | There's this period that,

00:42:58.700 | the theory is that it lasts anywhere

00:43:00.320 | from six days to six months,

00:43:02.160 | although some people report

00:43:03.120 | that this feeling can last many, many years, even decades,

00:43:06.260 | of just feeling completely filled up and sated

00:43:10.160 | by the experience of being with that person,

00:43:12.740 | so much so that cravings for food are reduced,

00:43:15.900 | cravings for sleep are reduced.

00:43:17.520 | Now, there's all sorts of activities

00:43:18.740 | and things that go along with new romantic partnerships

00:43:21.140 | that take up time

00:43:22.340 | that might get in the way of things like sleep

00:43:24.300 | or things like food.

00:43:25.600 | But the point is that dopamine is the final common pathway

00:43:29.820 | by which we seek out things

00:43:31.700 | and we end up feeling as if we are satisfied

00:43:34.380 | by certain types of interactions.

00:43:36.500 | Now, similarly, if you've ever been isolated

00:43:38.620 | for a long period of time,

00:43:40.380 | your focus might've shifted to what you're going to eat,

00:43:43.620 | what you're going to cook for dinner

00:43:44.720 | in a much more heightened way.

00:43:46.500 | The importance of those sensory stimuli

00:43:48.780 | and those types of interactions,

00:43:50.100 | and indeed the taste of food itself, expands.

00:43:52.820 | So normally, when we are in social relationships

00:43:55.700 | that are ones that are familiar to us,

00:43:58.120 | we have a balance of these different drives.

00:44:00.260 | But when one particular drive takes over

00:44:03.300 | and we are very focused on it,

00:44:05.820 | because they all funnel into the same circuitry,

00:44:08.480 | there really isn't the seeking out

00:44:10.440 | of certain types of behaviors like food seeking

00:44:12.280 | when we're newly in love.

00:44:13.900 | Now, that doesn't mean that food won't taste good to us

00:44:16.140 | so that we don't seek it.

00:44:16.980 | And indeed, there are experiments that have been done

00:44:18.760 | where if people have just fallen in love,

00:44:20.280 | the taste of a strawberry can just be incredible.

00:44:22.960 | The other effect of dopamine is that it changes the way

00:44:25.220 | that we interpret sensory stimuli.

00:44:26.860 | Our detectors actually change when we are in heightened

00:44:29.980 | states of dopaminergic activity or drive.

00:44:33.340 | Basically what this means is that things seem better

00:44:35.680 | than they would when we have less dopamine in our system.

00:44:38.900 | The point here is that there's a lot of crossover.

00:44:41.460 | There's a lot of meshing together

00:44:43.460 | of different homeostatic drives,

00:44:45.180 | that they don't exist in separate channels.

00:44:47.540 | And it's only under conditions

00:44:49.380 | in which one particular homeostatic drive

00:44:51.940 | is kind of being played out to the extreme,

00:44:53.820 | such as the example of falling in love,

00:44:56.180 | that we tend to avoid or sort of overlook

00:44:59.900 | the other homeostatic drives.

00:45:01.300 | And that's because simply we're getting enough dopamine

00:45:04.020 | we don't need anymore.

00:45:05.600 | Up until now, I've been focused on the organizational logic

00:45:08.740 | of social bonding, which is really just nerd speak

00:45:10.860 | for how is it that we form bonds, avoid bonds?

00:45:13.500 | Why do people seek out more or fewer bonds

00:45:15.660 | than others, et cetera?

00:45:17.260 | Now I'd like to shift gears a bit

00:45:19.600 | and focus on what are some things that we can do

00:45:23.060 | to encourage the formation of healthy bonds.

00:45:26.600 | There's a beautiful study that was published

00:45:29.260 | in Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal.

00:45:32.420 | The title of this paper is conscious processing

00:45:34.440 | of narrative stimuli synchronizes heart rate

00:45:36.420 | between individuals.

00:45:38.040 | I mentioned this on a previous podcast,

00:45:39.740 | but I'd like to mention it again

00:45:41.180 | and go into a little bit more depth

00:45:42.340 | because it points to specific actionable items

00:45:44.960 | that we can all use in order to enhance the quality

00:45:48.000 | and depth of social bonds of all kinds.

00:45:51.240 | Now, this study involved a very simple type of experiment.

00:45:54.740 | They had people listen to a story.

00:45:56.440 | Everybody in the study listened to the same story,

00:45:59.100 | but they listened to that story at different times

00:46:00.880 | and indeed in different locations.

00:46:02.800 | So different people, same story.

00:46:05.860 | And they measured things like heart rate.

00:46:07.840 | They measured breathing, et cetera.

00:46:09.600 | Now, what was the motivation for doing this?

00:46:11.780 | Well, there's a long standing literature showing

00:46:14.420 | that our physiology, things like our heart rate,

00:46:17.180 | our breathing, our skin conductance,

00:46:19.000 | meaning the amount of sweating can be synchronized

00:46:23.180 | between individuals.

00:46:24.820 | And that synchronization can occur

00:46:27.860 | according to a variety of different things.

00:46:29.540 | There've been studies that have people look at one another

00:46:31.500 | and they look and actually see that their pupil size

00:46:34.540 | of their eyes starts to synchronize.

00:46:36.780 | People's breathing can synchronize.

00:46:38.940 | People's body temperatures can even start to synchronize

00:46:42.500 | or at least shifts in body temperature can synchronize.

00:46:44.620 | One person gets cooler, the other person gets cooler.

00:46:46.820 | A lot of this is subconscious.

00:46:48.540 | Some of it can be detected by conscious cues

00:46:50.600 | like flushing of the skin

00:46:51.660 | or actually seeing someone's pupils change.

00:46:53.720 | But actually the pupil reflex is a really good example

00:46:56.700 | whereby except for rare cases

00:46:59.780 | and certain highly trained individuals,

00:47:01.580 | most people can't control their pupil reflexes

00:47:03.940 | in a very deliberate way.

00:47:05.300 | It's truly a reflex.

00:47:06.920 | It's an autonomic reflex.

00:47:08.920 | So there's a lot of literature showing

00:47:10.420 | that within small groups or two people,

00:47:14.060 | these physiological signals can be synchronized.

00:47:15.960 | What this study found was that when people listen

00:47:19.180 | to the same story, but at different times,

00:47:21.580 | their heart rates start to synchronize.

00:47:23.760 | This is incredible because people are listening

00:47:25.380 | to the story at different times,

00:47:27.000 | but the gaps between their heartbeats

00:47:28.460 | become very stereotyped

00:47:29.820 | and map almost precisely onto one another.

00:47:32.660 | That's incredible.

00:47:33.700 | Now, we also know from an extensive literature

00:47:37.820 | that the quality and perceived depth of a social bond

00:47:42.300 | correlates very strongly

00:47:45.140 | with how much physiological synchronization there is

00:47:48.760 | between individuals.

00:47:50.580 | In other words, when your bodies feel the same,

00:47:54.500 | you tend to feel more bonded to somebody else.

00:47:57.620 | And so this whole thing is a rather circular argument.

00:48:00.380 | When you feel closer to somebody else,

00:48:01.980 | your physiology synchronize.

00:48:04.040 | And the reverse is true as well.

00:48:06.140 | When your physiologies are synchronized,

00:48:07.740 | you feel closer to other people.

00:48:09.780 | This is what I call the concert phenomenon.

00:48:11.520 | If you ever go to see your favorite band

00:48:14.260 | or you go to a concert that you particularly love,

00:48:17.080 | you will often look over at somebody

00:48:19.140 | and you'll see them enjoying the same thing.

00:48:21.040 | And they're often in a similar state as you are,

00:48:23.440 | maybe the sort of like favorite song comes on,

00:48:25.860 | and you actually feel connected to that person.

00:48:28.960 | You feel like you're in,

00:48:29.800 | obviously there's a shared experience,

00:48:31.820 | but there's also a shared physiological response

00:48:34.520 | to that experience.

00:48:35.700 | And so this can happen en masse with large groups of people,

00:48:39.060 | or it can happen just between two individuals.

00:48:41.480 | And as this study points out,

00:48:43.200 | it can actually happen between individuals

00:48:44.820 | without them actually interacting with one another

00:48:46.940 | when the story they are listening to is the anchor

00:48:49.820 | or the driver of their physiology.

00:48:51.740 | This really points to the fact

00:48:53.900 | that the body and the brain are reciprocally connected.

00:48:57.100 | Yes, indeed, what we think, what we hear, what we feel,

00:49:00.740 | drives our physiology,

00:49:02.220 | our heartbeat, our respiration, et cetera,

00:49:04.520 | but our heartbeat and respiration

00:49:06.080 | also are influencing our state of mind.

00:49:09.260 | And in this case,

00:49:10.100 | it's encouraging certain types of social bonds

00:49:12.900 | when our heart rates are synchronized.

00:49:15.580 | You can leverage this.

00:49:16.940 | How can you leverage this?

00:49:17.940 | Well, let's take a upcoming example of the holidays.

00:49:21.780 | There's a sort of a joke, I think it was Ram Dass,

00:49:26.340 | sort of Buddhist philosopher type that said,

00:49:30.060 | "If you think you're enlightened, go visit your parents."

00:49:32.940 | And I think what he was referring to is that some people,

00:49:35.600 | not all people, have challenging relationships

00:49:37.760 | with their parents.

00:49:38.600 | We're going to talk about child-parent attachment

00:49:40.600 | and interactions in a few minutes,

00:49:42.080 | but some people have a wonderful relationship

00:49:45.340 | to both their parents and more power to them.

00:49:47.820 | I think that's wonderful.

00:49:49.440 | We should all be so lucky.

00:49:50.900 | Many people have challenged relationships

00:49:52.620 | with their parents,

00:49:53.460 | or they have a great relationship with their parents,

00:49:55.700 | but their parents know or they know how to drive that dart

00:49:59.560 | right into that particular soft piece

00:50:01.520 | of psychological flesh by saying just the slightest thing,

00:50:05.060 | or even by raising their eyebrow or rolling their eyes

00:50:07.620 | or the tone in which they do something.

00:50:09.100 | This is also true between siblings.

00:50:11.400 | I think many of you can think of examples

00:50:13.580 | where this is true.

00:50:14.540 | Many people, when they interact with others,

00:50:18.540 | expect that the mere interaction with the other person

00:50:22.220 | is going to create the sense of bonding.

00:50:24.700 | And often that is the case.

00:50:26.060 | For instance, if people are involved in intimate disclosure,

00:50:29.540 | if people enjoy each other's company so much

00:50:33.660 | that just the mere sight of somebody evokes great feelings

00:50:36.540 | and it's mutual, that often can happen.

00:50:38.860 | But in many types of social interactions,

00:50:41.700 | it's not the direct interaction with that person

00:50:45.180 | that makes us feel close to them,

00:50:46.560 | but rather it's shared experience.

00:50:49.200 | And shared experience is shared physiology.

00:50:52.580 | That's the point I'm trying to make by way of this study

00:50:55.660 | about conscious processing of narrative stimuli

00:50:57.800 | synchronizes heart rate of different individuals.

00:51:00.360 | So for instance, if you have a somewhat challenged

00:51:04.020 | or a somewhat, let's call it a slight friction

00:51:07.600 | in getting close with somebody,

00:51:10.540 | or it can be a challenging interaction,

00:51:12.480 | oftentimes it's very useful to focus outward

00:51:15.760 | on some other common narrative, a movie.

00:51:18.560 | Oftentimes people will watch a game together.

00:51:20.620 | Actually, there's a lot of critique that people or families

00:51:24.440 | will focus outward too much on external events.

00:51:27.460 | But these external events can be observing the grandchild

00:51:30.960 | and how wonderful they are,

00:51:31.980 | or observing the meal and how wonderful it is.

00:51:34.480 | Or as we commonly see in various traditions,

00:51:37.720 | there's a story that's repeated each year.

00:51:40.000 | Certainly in the upcoming holidays,

00:51:41.420 | there's Christmas stories, there are themes and traditions.

00:51:45.220 | And those themes and traditions

00:51:46.740 | anchor a number of different aspects of our psychology.

00:51:49.800 | They're really wonderful.

00:51:50.720 | They thread through the ages really,

00:51:53.300 | and allow us to link our own experiences up

00:51:55.900 | with previous generations and experiences.

00:51:59.080 | But in addition to that, they synchronize our physiologies.

00:52:02.360 | And so sometimes it can be useful

00:52:03.960 | rather than expecting others to shift our physiology

00:52:06.960 | in the way that we wish,

00:52:08.400 | or us shifting their physiologies in the way that we wish,

00:52:11.640 | and then expecting some bond to mushroom out of that

00:52:14.680 | in some beautiful way, to focus on some external stimulus,

00:52:19.680 | to focus on something that will synchronize

00:52:21.760 | the physiologies of both people.

00:52:23.080 | That can act as a bridge in order to establish social bonds.

00:52:26.460 | And this is not a hack or a workaround

00:52:28.800 | for making terrible relationships good.

00:52:30.700 | This is actually at the seat of what we come away

00:52:33.740 | from a social interaction with as feeling,

00:52:36.180 | wow, that was a really wonderful time.

00:52:38.200 | Often, a really wonderful time can be by virtue

00:52:40.840 | of the specific things that were said,

00:52:42.820 | or the specific things that one engaged in.

00:52:45.440 | But more often than not, the final common pathway,

00:52:48.420 | we should say, of great experiences

00:52:51.040 | was a great physiological experience

00:52:53.980 | and a shared physiological experience.

00:52:57.000 | I have a short anecdote that relates to this.

00:52:58.580 | I have an older sibling,

00:52:59.560 | and she used to say that when she was in college,

00:53:01.520 | the best dates that she ever went on were dates

00:53:03.740 | where she was asked to go out and listen to music.

00:53:06.680 | She pointed out, however, that oftentimes

00:53:09.160 | the guys that would ask her out

00:53:10.240 | would take her to jazz clubs.

00:53:11.360 | She always had the theory that they would ask her

00:53:12.760 | to jazz clubs because at jazz clubs,

00:53:14.520 | typically you would sit down,

00:53:15.840 | and then she had to conclude that they couldn't dance.

00:53:18.400 | My sister likes to dance.

00:53:19.420 | And so anytime someone actually had the nerve

00:53:21.420 | to take her dancing, those turned out to be particularly,

00:53:24.740 | let's just say, satisfying dates and relationships.

00:53:27.220 | At least they lasted longer.

00:53:28.280 | That's all I know about them.

00:53:29.120 | That's all I want to know about them.

00:53:30.420 | She's my sister after all.

00:53:32.060 | But the theory behind whoever was asking her out

00:53:35.860 | on these dates was the right one,

00:53:37.260 | which is that if you want to bond with somebody,

00:53:39.260 | you create a common physiological response

00:53:41.800 | through a common and shared experience.

00:53:44.460 | And that is often a good entry way

00:53:46.940 | into establishing whether or not, it's always a question,

00:53:50.040 | whether or not there can be common physiological experience

00:53:52.300 | between two individuals.

00:53:54.140 | Up until now, we've been talking about social bonding

00:53:56.440 | through the lens of neural circuits

00:53:58.060 | that are already established.

00:53:59.940 | However, early in the episode,

00:54:01.460 | I mentioned that these very neural circuits

00:54:03.380 | that are responsible for social bonding

00:54:05.100 | in adult forms of attachment,

00:54:07.240 | be it romantic or friendship or otherwise,

00:54:10.320 | are actually established during development.

00:54:13.240 | One of the more important and I think exciting areas

00:54:16.420 | of early attachment as it relates to adult attachment

00:54:20.460 | comes to us from the work of Alan Shore.

00:54:23.460 | Alan Shore, spelled A-L-L-A-N, Shore, S-C-H-O-R-E,

00:54:28.460 | is a psychoanalyst who also has deep understanding

00:54:31.700 | of neurobiology of attachment,

00:54:34.740 | both in childhood and in adulthood.

00:54:38.060 | And he's focused a lot on differences

00:54:40.940 | between right brain and left brain forms of attachment.

00:54:44.820 | Now, in a early episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:54:47.740 | I touched into the fact that most of what's discussed

00:54:50.740 | in the general public and sort of pop psychology

00:54:53.460 | and even in some neurobiology courses

00:54:56.380 | about right brain versus left brain

00:54:58.820 | and one side of the brain being more emotional

00:55:00.780 | and the other side being more rational is completely wrong.

00:55:04.060 | Most of what I see out there is actually backwards

00:55:08.360 | to the way things actually work.

00:55:10.100 | And while there is some what we call lateralization

00:55:13.220 | of function, meaning certain brain functions

00:55:16.160 | are handled by neurons on one side of the brain or the other,

00:55:19.520 | the idea that one side of your brain is emotional

00:55:22.340 | and the other side of your brain is rational

00:55:24.220 | is just simply not true.

00:55:26.420 | However, the work of Alan Shore

00:55:28.620 | points to some very concrete neural circuits

00:55:31.380 | that do have a lateralization bias,

00:55:34.700 | meaning they are more right brain than left brain

00:55:36.780 | or more left brain than right brain

00:55:38.900 | that underlies certain forms of attachment

00:55:41.400 | between child and parent, in particular, child and mother,

00:55:45.940 | and that these right brain isms, if you will,

00:55:49.640 | and left brain isms for attachment get played out

00:55:53.880 | again and again in our forms of attachment as adults.

00:55:58.460 | So I'd like to talk about that work briefly now

00:56:00.780 | because I think it really points

00:56:01.980 | to a number of important features of how we establish bonds

00:56:05.540 | and the different routes to establishing bonds.

00:56:08.540 | So within the field of psychoanalysis,

00:56:10.300 | there's a longstanding discussion, of course,

00:56:12.300 | about the so-called unconscious or subconscious,

00:56:14.820 | the things that we are not aware of,

00:56:16.700 | and I think there's growing evidence pointing to the fact

00:56:19.140 | that at least one major component of the subconscious

00:56:22.620 | or the unconscious is the so-called autonomic nervous system.

00:56:25.880 | The autonomic nervous system

00:56:27.300 | is the portion of our nervous system

00:56:28.900 | that controls our reflexive breathing, our heart rate,

00:56:31.380 | our skin conductance, meaning our sweating, pupil size.

00:56:35.660 | It's the aspect of our nervous system

00:56:38.020 | that makes us more alert or more calm.

00:56:40.180 | It's the so-called sympathetic, meaning for alertness,

00:56:42.820 | or parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system,

00:56:45.340 | parasympathetic for more calming responses.

00:56:48.100 | Now, what Dr. Schor's work and the work of others

00:56:52.640 | is now showing is that early infant parent,

00:56:57.100 | in particular infant-mother attachment,

00:56:58.820 | involves a coordination or synchronization

00:57:02.700 | of these right brain circuits and these left brain circuits

00:57:06.560 | as they relate to the autonomic nervous system.

00:57:10.740 | How does this play out?

00:57:11.800 | Well, it plays out where early on as an infant,

00:57:14.720 | when you're born, you're truly helpless,

00:57:16.620 | you can't feed yourself, you can't warm yourself,

00:57:18.820 | you can't change yourself,

00:57:19.900 | and you certainly can't ambulate, walk anywhere

00:57:22.780 | to get the things that you need.

00:57:24.400 | All of those functions, all of those needs, rather,

00:57:28.940 | are met by your primary caretaker.

00:57:31.380 | Typically, that's the mother.

00:57:33.480 | Fathers, of course, play a role also,

00:57:35.220 | but because of breastfeeding or even bottle feeding,

00:57:38.020 | typically mothers play a more prominent role.

00:57:40.300 | I realize there are exceptions, but that's the general rule.

00:57:43.160 | There are now brain imaging studies

00:57:46.840 | examining the brains of infants and the brains of mothers

00:57:51.100 | as they interact and showing that the physical contact

00:57:54.800 | between the two, the breathing of the mother and child,

00:57:58.720 | the heart rate of the mother and child,

00:58:00.760 | and indeed the pupil size of the mother and child

00:58:02.960 | are actually actively getting coordinated.

00:58:05.120 | In other words, the mother is regulating

00:58:07.540 | the infant's autonomic nervous system primarily,

00:58:10.220 | and the infant is also regulating

00:58:11.780 | the mother's autonomic nervous system.

00:58:13.540 | A small coo from a baby or a cry,

00:58:16.180 | which is a stress cry from a baby,

00:58:17.580 | will definitely regulate the autonomic nervous system

00:58:19.820 | of the mother.

00:58:20.880 | This whole right brain system is directly tapped in

00:58:25.880 | to the so-called oxytocin system,

00:58:28.420 | and we'll talk more about oxytocin in a moment.

00:58:30.440 | Oxytocin, again, being this peptide hormone

00:58:32.840 | that is involved in social bonds of all kinds,

00:58:35.320 | but that at least in early childhood

00:58:37.640 | is very closely associated with milk letdown

00:58:40.080 | and milk production.

00:58:41.540 | There's actually a lot of stimulation of oxytocin release

00:58:44.660 | in the mother by nursing itself,

00:58:47.000 | so physical contact with the nipple

00:58:48.800 | and by the contact of skin between baby and mother,

00:58:53.720 | and there's specificity there.

00:58:55.040 | It's not just any baby that can evoke

00:58:57.900 | the most amount of oxytocin release from the mother.

00:59:01.000 | Now, however, there are examples where just holding a child

00:59:04.340 | will evoke oxytocin release in the non-parent

00:59:06.800 | or somebody other than the parent.

00:59:08.520 | I think most people experience that.

00:59:10.160 | That's the new puppy or new baby phenomenon,

00:59:12.580 | 'cause indeed puppies can evoke oxytocin release as well.

00:59:15.480 | The point is not that oxytocin is only released

00:59:18.720 | in response to the primary relationship

00:59:21.460 | or the mother and their child,

00:59:23.400 | but rather that the amount of oxytocin

00:59:26.040 | scales with how closely related one is

00:59:28.560 | to that particular child and vice versa.

00:59:31.240 | So there's oxytocin release occurring

00:59:33.160 | in both the child and the mother.

00:59:35.040 | So this right brain system

00:59:37.040 | is an emotional but autonomic system.

00:59:40.420 | It is below our subconscious detection.

00:59:44.380 | Now, as we get older,

00:59:47.080 | there's another system that starts to come into play

00:59:50.720 | in parent-child interactions,

00:59:53.720 | and this also comes into play

00:59:55.260 | in sibling interactions and so forth,

00:59:56.980 | and that's the left brain system as described by Alan Short.

01:00:00.200 | Now, again, this isn't about emotion versus rationality.

01:00:03.200 | This is about autonomic

01:00:04.580 | versus more conscious forms of bonding.

01:00:06.700 | So on the left brain circuit side,

01:00:09.800 | there is evidence for, based on neuroimaging studies,

01:00:12.540 | but also animal studies to support the idea

01:00:15.060 | that on the left brain side of things,

01:00:17.540 | there is a processing more of narratives

01:00:21.020 | that are very concrete, logical narratives, okay?

01:00:23.980 | And again, I have to zoom out and just really tamp down

01:00:27.660 | the idea that it's not that one side of the brain

01:00:29.700 | is emotional and the other side is rational,

01:00:31.920 | but rather that these two things are happening in parallel,

01:00:34.440 | and that there's a bit of a dominance

01:00:36.840 | for the left brain circuitry

01:00:38.680 | to be involved in the kinds of bonding

01:00:41.520 | that are associated with prediction and reward.

01:00:44.180 | So a good example would be reading to a child every night,

01:00:48.160 | sitting there and reading.

01:00:49.600 | I can recall reading to my niece

01:00:51.100 | and seeing her parents read to her,

01:00:53.520 | and she had no clue whatsoever with what they were saying

01:00:56.360 | because she, well, at least I don't know,

01:00:58.360 | but she certainly couldn't speak,

01:00:59.880 | but she liked looking at the pictures,

01:01:01.680 | and it was a very predictable sort of interaction.

01:01:04.580 | It was, okay, out come the books.

01:01:06.260 | It was usually here's the bath, then there's the pajamas,

01:01:09.020 | then there's the lights go down, then out comes the book,

01:01:11.460 | and then there's the interaction between parent and child,

01:01:13.820 | which of course usually also involves physical contact.

01:01:16.920 | So it's not like the right brain system

01:01:18.200 | and the left brain system are operating separately.

01:01:20.260 | They're operating in parallel,

01:01:21.900 | but that sort of prediction and reward

01:01:24.020 | kids like to be read to

01:01:25.500 | is generally mediated by this left brain system.

01:01:27.980 | And this carries on as children get older

01:01:30.100 | and as parents take on and evolve their parenting roles.

01:01:33.040 | It's very apparent that healthy social bonding

01:01:38.940 | between children and caretaker relies on the fact

01:01:43.160 | that both this right brain system

01:01:44.860 | and the left brain system are engaged,

01:01:46.820 | that there's a synchronization of autonomic function,

01:01:49.940 | meaning a joining together in actual somatic feeling,

01:01:54.260 | and that there's a synchronization of experience

01:01:58.400 | that's more about some outward or external stimulus,

01:02:01.260 | like reading a book or watching a show together

01:02:03.420 | or enjoying some common experience of a meal together.

01:02:07.900 | And of course, as children get older,

01:02:09.220 | they're able to access more and more

01:02:10.900 | cognitively sophisticated things.

01:02:12.620 | You can watch a movie with them

01:02:13.820 | and they'll make predictions about which characters

01:02:15.540 | are going to show up, for instance,

01:02:17.140 | or you can take them to a concert

01:02:19.860 | and they can appreciate the concert or play in that concert

01:02:22.620 | and they appreciate that they're being appreciated, okay?

01:02:24.940 | So there are a million different,

01:02:26.000 | there's infinite number of examples here,

01:02:27.900 | but the idea is that there are two parallel circuits

01:02:30.780 | that are important for establishing bonds

01:02:33.320 | and that this is set up very early on in childhood

01:02:36.340 | and that it's neither emotional nor rational, but both.

01:02:40.420 | Now, both of these circuits tap into the circuitry

01:02:43.100 | that we talked about earlier where dopamine is released

01:02:46.180 | and molecules like serotonin,

01:02:48.580 | which again is a neuromodulator more associated

01:02:51.100 | with feelings of warmth, comfort, and satisfaction

01:02:54.220 | with our immediate surroundings and possessions

01:02:56.420 | rather than seeking of things and motivation

01:02:58.660 | and drive to go look for things,

01:03:00.200 | as is the case with dopamine.

01:03:01.840 | So there's still interactions with those systems,

01:03:04.420 | but the work of Alan Shore has stimulated a lot of interest

01:03:08.380 | in what are these circuits

01:03:10.620 | that underlie these autonomic bonding,

01:03:13.540 | this matching of heart rate and breathing,

01:03:17.580 | and what are the neural circuits that underlie this bonding

01:03:21.860 | or this synchronization of experience

01:03:24.480 | on the kind of left brain side.

01:03:26.540 | And the reason I find this model so attractive

01:03:28.980 | is that it's very clear that healthy child-parent bonds

01:03:32.960 | are established not by one or the other

01:03:36.100 | of these right brain or left brain systems, but by both.

01:03:39.100 | And there isn't enough time to go into it right now,

01:03:42.020 | but some of you are probably familiar with this idea

01:03:44.900 | of anxious attached versus avoidant attached

01:03:47.780 | versus there's a kind of dissociative attached model

01:03:51.300 | of infant-parent bonding.

01:03:53.680 | Just briefly, what's becoming clear

01:03:56.060 | from the neurobiological imaging studies

01:03:58.500 | is that as people start to advance into adolescence

01:04:03.180 | and adulthood and well into their elderly years,

01:04:07.720 | the same circuits that were active

01:04:09.700 | and established in childhood are repurposed

01:04:12.700 | for other forms of attachment.

01:04:14.820 | And that to have truly complete bonds

01:04:18.060 | with other individuals,

01:04:18.980 | but in particular with romantic partners,

01:04:21.540 | it's important that there be both synchronization

01:04:24.020 | of physiology and synchronization of these more,

01:04:27.140 | I guess we could call them more rational

01:04:29.220 | or predictive type circuits.

01:04:31.540 | So we can leverage this information.

01:04:34.020 | We can start to think about what sorts of bonds to us

01:04:37.240 | feel very enriching and very complete.

01:04:39.860 | We know that we can have, for instance,

01:04:42.060 | an emotional connection with somebody,

01:04:44.020 | but we can also have a cognitive connection with somebody.

01:04:46.400 | I have many colleagues with whom I have

01:04:48.860 | deep intellectual connection and convergence with.

01:04:52.780 | I wouldn't say that I have deep emotional connection

01:04:56.020 | with most of them, a few of them, yes,

01:04:58.180 | but most of them, no.

01:04:59.380 | Others in my life, for instance,

01:05:03.140 | I have a deep emotional connection to,

01:05:05.820 | but not a lot of deep cognitive connection to.

01:05:08.340 | A good example would be the connection that I had

01:05:10.180 | with my bulldog who unfortunately passed away,

01:05:12.580 | but Costello, we had a very close emotional connection.

01:05:17.580 | It was based on touch, it was based on our walks,

01:05:19.500 | it was based on fun, it was very autonomic.

01:05:22.900 | We rarely discussed, if ever, what we were doing.

01:05:25.880 | We had a felt relationship

01:05:27.900 | as opposed to a cognitive relationship.

01:05:29.980 | And while I'm sort of half kidding about that as an example,

01:05:33.640 | it's a really good example, it was a very real bond.

01:05:36.280 | And in fact, just as a brief anecdote,

01:05:38.220 | I can remember when Costello was a puppy

01:05:40.060 | and I was entirely responsible for his wellbeing,

01:05:43.000 | like any parent of any infant,

01:05:45.780 | I lost my appetite for those few weeks

01:05:48.440 | when I was house training him,

01:05:49.780 | and I seemed to lose all ability

01:05:52.240 | to process any cognitive information.

01:05:54.060 | Now, I was also sleep deprived,

01:05:55.640 | but I was entirely focused on the autonomic bond

01:05:59.180 | that we were forming.

01:06:00.220 | Now, thankfully, that eventually

01:06:01.880 | was established pretty quickly.

01:06:03.780 | Basically, I went on to just basically feed him,

01:06:06.860 | walk him and do everything for him,

01:06:08.480 | and we had a wonderful relationship.

01:06:10.760 | Now, it's very clear that what we're talking about here

01:06:12.700 | is a form of empathy.

01:06:14.180 | Empathy is the ability to feel,

01:06:18.220 | or at least think we feel what others feel.

01:06:21.580 | Because again, as my colleague and the great bio engineer

01:06:24.840 | and psychiatrist at Stanford, Carl Deisseroth,

01:06:27.860 | has said, and he was a guest on this podcast,

01:06:30.500 | we really don't know how other people feel.

01:06:33.440 | We just get the sense that perhaps

01:06:34.960 | we are feeling the same thing

01:06:36.060 | or we're feeling something different

01:06:37.260 | and we infer or we project what they might be thinking.

01:06:40.060 | Empathy is this sense that we are sensing

01:06:44.700 | what other people are sensing, okay?

01:06:46.340 | And there's no real way to verify that

01:06:48.060 | except if you're measuring physiologies,

01:06:49.680 | you could get some insight into that.

01:06:51.620 | In the clinical psychology

01:06:52.780 | and in the neurobiological literature now,

01:06:55.920 | it's understood that there is both emotional empathy,

01:06:59.340 | like actually feeling what somebody is feeling,

01:07:01.420 | and what is now called cognitive empathy.

01:07:04.700 | Cognitive empathy is this idea that we both see

01:07:07.700 | and experience something the same way at a mental level.

01:07:11.580 | Emotional empathy is this idea that yes,

01:07:14.140 | I can feel what you feel at a visceral,

01:07:17.140 | somatic or autonomic level.

01:07:19.780 | And it's absolutely clear that strong social bonds

01:07:24.340 | between children and caretaker

01:07:26.700 | involve both emotional empathy,

01:07:28.500 | this autonomic function, and cognitive empathy,

01:07:31.220 | that there's a mutual understanding

01:07:33.380 | of how the other person feels

01:07:35.980 | and how the other person thinks

01:07:38.340 | in order to be able to make predictions

01:07:39.840 | about what they're going to do.

01:07:41.220 | It's also very clear based on the emerging literature

01:07:44.100 | that romantic relationships,

01:07:45.720 | and to some extent friendships,

01:07:47.640 | although friendships have been explored a bit less

01:07:50.100 | in the literature,

01:07:51.200 | that emotional empathy and cognitive empathy

01:07:54.100 | are both required in order to establish

01:07:56.660 | what we call a trusting social bond.

01:07:58.860 | And there's some beautiful experiments done

01:08:00.980 | using neuroimaging of two individuals

01:08:02.820 | playing a trust game,

01:08:03.980 | essentially a game where you're trying to predict

01:08:05.740 | the other person's behavior,

01:08:06.820 | whether or not they will behave in a trustworthy way.

01:08:09.060 | And these experiments tend to use real money,

01:08:12.460 | so there's actually something at stake.

01:08:14.060 | And you can more or less predict

01:08:15.760 | whether or not somebody feels a lot of trust

01:08:18.340 | for somebody else,

01:08:19.200 | and whether or not they believe they will act

01:08:21.380 | in a trustworthy manner

01:08:23.000 | based on whether or not they have high levels

01:08:25.060 | of both cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.

01:08:28.340 | So for those of you that are seeking

01:08:29.660 | to establish deeper bonds or bonds of any kind,

01:08:33.000 | it's important that you think about

01:08:34.280 | synchronization of bodily states,

01:08:36.120 | we talked about that earlier,

01:08:37.660 | and synchronization of cognitive states.

01:08:40.080 | Now that doesn't mean you have to agree on everything.

01:08:41.780 | In fact, oftentimes people who feel very close

01:08:44.860 | to one another cognitively and emotionally

01:08:47.700 | argue about all sorts of things

01:08:48.860 | and disagree about a lot of things.

01:08:50.220 | In fact, we probably know,

01:08:51.880 | I certainly know people and couples

01:08:54.060 | that seem to bond through arguing,

01:08:56.080 | which is an interesting phenotype in itself.

01:08:59.040 | But the point isn't that there be total convergence

01:09:01.700 | of opinion or stance,

01:09:03.360 | but rather that we understand how the other feels,

01:09:06.480 | and we believe that they understand how we feel,

01:09:09.100 | that we understand how the other person thinks,

01:09:11.400 | and that they think that we understand how they think.

01:09:15.220 | So it's a reciprocal loop between two people

01:09:17.540 | that involves this cognition and involves emotion.

01:09:20.540 | And it's grounded, as Dr. Schor has pointed out,

01:09:24.020 | in our earliest forms of attachment.

01:09:26.380 | And that makes perfect sense,

01:09:27.820 | because the same sorts of circuits

01:09:29.480 | that are responsible for social homeostasis,

01:09:32.260 | the kind of right brain and left brain circuits

01:09:33.840 | that are responsible for infant-mother attachment,

01:09:37.220 | and then later for more intellectual

01:09:39.840 | or predictive type attachments between child and caregiver,

01:09:43.340 | are the exact same circuits that we superimpose

01:09:45.900 | into all other types of relationships

01:09:47.960 | throughout the rest of our life.

01:09:49.800 | And I should just mention that for those of you

01:09:52.200 | that might be thinking that you had a less than satisfactory

01:09:57.600 | infant-caretaker interaction or form of attachment,

01:10:01.640 | you are not alone.

01:10:02.720 | And in fact, much of the work that Dr. Schor focuses on

01:10:05.740 | is about how those early circumstances

01:10:08.420 | can be understood and rewired

01:10:10.520 | toward the development of healthy adult attachment.

01:10:13.100 | And if you want to check out his work,

01:10:15.000 | he's actually got a few YouTube videos out there.

01:10:18.220 | Again, it's Alan Schor, spelled S-C-H-O-R-E.

01:10:21.340 | I'd love to get him as a guest on the podcast.

01:10:23.360 | He also has a book, it's called "Right Brain Psychotherapy,"

01:10:26.260 | and it's an excellent book.

01:10:27.400 | It's actually pretty accessible,

01:10:28.560 | even if you don't have a background in biology or psychology.

01:10:32.360 | I found it to be very interesting.

01:10:34.260 | There are a lot of excellent references.

01:10:36.040 | And again, if you're listening, Dr. Schor,

01:10:38.100 | you know Alan Schor, we'd love to get you on the podcast.

01:10:41.000 | One of the key themes to understand

01:10:42.800 | about biological processes is that they often work

01:10:46.240 | on short time scales and longer time scales.

01:10:48.680 | And up until now, we've mainly been talking about the stuff

01:10:50.880 | that happens on short time scales.

01:10:52.760 | So the kind of synchronization of heart rate

01:10:54.680 | or activation of a given set of neurons

01:10:56.760 | that dumps some dopamine and causes us to seek out

01:10:59.960 | more social interaction or less, for instance.

01:11:02.800 | But every biological circuit and function

01:11:05.720 | needs to have longstanding effects as well.

01:11:08.760 | And typically, when you're thinking about

01:11:10.080 | longstanding effects in the brain and body,

01:11:12.380 | you start looking towards the hormone system.

01:11:14.320 | It's not always the case, but more often than not,

01:11:16.940 | neurotransmitters and neuromodulators are pretty quick,

01:11:19.920 | whereas hormones have longer lasting effects.

01:11:22.140 | In fact, a lot of hormones can actually travel

01:11:24.180 | to the nucleus of a cell and actually change

01:11:26.040 | which genes are expressed.

01:11:28.060 | So if ever there was a hormone or hormone-like molecule

01:11:32.140 | that's associated with social bonding, it's oxytocin.

01:11:35.940 | And oxytocin has gotten a ton of interest

01:11:39.160 | in the popular press.

01:11:40.420 | I don't know why that is, but perhaps it's because

01:11:42.520 | of all the incredible things that oxytocin

01:11:44.320 | is associated with.

01:11:46.240 | And it is indeed a lot of things.

01:11:48.720 | So for instance, oxytocin is released in the brain

01:11:52.480 | and binds to receptors in different locations in the body.

01:11:55.520 | And the moment you hear different locations

01:11:57.200 | in the body, receptors, you should think,

01:11:59.940 | well, it's going to have lots of different effects.

01:12:01.680 | And indeed it does.

01:12:02.840 | Oxytocin is involved in orgasm.

01:12:05.800 | It's involved in social recognition.

01:12:08.500 | That's right.

01:12:09.340 | When you see people that you consider your people,

01:12:11.920 | your team, your group, your friends, oxytocin is released.

01:12:16.360 | Even if you don't come into physical contact with them.

01:12:19.680 | Oxytocin is also associated with pair bonding,

01:12:22.200 | the feeling that they are your person

01:12:24.820 | and that you are their person

01:12:26.660 | is a common language people use.

01:12:28.580 | It's also associated with honesty.

01:12:31.440 | Believe it or not, there are experiments that show

01:12:33.140 | that if people receive oxytocin through an inhalation spray,

01:12:37.320 | that they will be more honest

01:12:38.600 | and forthcoming about certain things.

01:12:40.840 | And the oxytocin system and variants in the oxytocin system

01:12:44.760 | have also been associated with autism

01:12:46.600 | and various autism spectrum disorders.

01:12:48.660 | So there's a huge range of behaviors that it's involved in

01:12:51.040 | because you have receptors for oxytocin

01:12:53.040 | and lots of different brain structures

01:12:54.720 | and areas of the body that do different things.

01:12:56.800 | However, there's some very consistent effects of oxytocin

01:12:59.600 | that are worth just listing off.

01:13:00.980 | And then I'm going to talk about two separate pathways

01:13:04.000 | by which oxytocin can manifest its effects

01:13:07.320 | and how you can actually regulate oxytocin

01:13:09.400 | in ways that are interesting and perhaps useful as well.

01:13:13.220 | First of all, oxytocin is involved

01:13:15.160 | in the milk letdown reflex, lactation.

01:13:18.380 | This makes perfect sense.

01:13:19.420 | There needs to be a cue by which the suckling on the nipple

01:13:23.620 | of the infant causes the release or letdown of milk

01:13:27.040 | and milk letdown and lactation is controlled by prolactin,

01:13:29.880 | another hormone, but also oxytocin.

01:13:31.860 | Oxytocin is also involved in uterine contraction

01:13:36.180 | during childbirth.

01:13:38.320 | It's involved in cervical dilation

01:13:39.900 | to allow the baby to pass out of the birth canal.

01:13:43.520 | So it's involved in induction of breastfeeding and of labor,

01:13:47.680 | which is remarkable and especially remarkable

01:13:50.200 | given that in males, or at least in some male animals

01:13:52.580 | and in some male humans, and I do want to say some,

01:13:54.880 | and I'll get back to this,

01:13:55.840 | it can be involved in the erection response.

01:13:58.160 | It can be involved in the orgasm response

01:14:00.080 | in both males and females.

01:14:01.400 | Although there, there's a very interesting difference.

01:14:03.760 | There's a little bit of controversy about this,

01:14:06.500 | but it does appear that in females,

01:14:09.640 | sexual stimulation and orgasm cause the release of oxytocin,

01:14:15.440 | whereas in males, sexual stimulation does not cause

01:14:18.260 | the release of oxytocin,

01:14:19.640 | but rather a different molecule vasopressin

01:14:22.320 | is triggered by sexual stimulation.

01:14:24.920 | But orgasm does trigger the release of oxytocin in males,

01:14:27.840 | but with a delay of about 30 minutes.

01:14:31.060 | Why that is and the specific function of that is not clear,

01:14:34.120 | but it does seem that oxytocin is involved

01:14:36.440 | in the sexual response in both males and females.

01:14:39.380 | The main types of interactions that release oxytocin

01:14:42.460 | at high levels are, first of all,

01:14:45.240 | that the interaction be between individuals

01:14:47.920 | that see each other as very closely associated, right?

01:14:52.600 | So a infant and mother are very closely associated,

01:14:55.740 | whether or not it's an adopted infant or not,

01:14:57.520 | oftentimes they are in close contact,

01:14:59.020 | oftentimes they are from the very body of the other.

01:15:01.880 | And so the amount or the amplitude of oxytocin release

01:15:05.240 | tends to scale with how closely associated individuals are.

01:15:08.400 | Just the sight of one's baby or smell of one's baby

01:15:11.520 | can evoke oxytocin release and vice versa from the mother.

01:15:15.040 | Physical contact even more so.

01:15:17.200 | In romantic partners, physical contact,

01:15:20.640 | even the sight of a picture of a partner

01:15:22.960 | can evoke oxytocin release and sexual desire, also trust.

01:15:27.620 | So there's this whole collection of psychological

01:15:29.620 | and physiological things that are packaged

01:15:31.880 | into the oxytocin system.

01:15:34.100 | It's not just a one-way system.

01:15:36.560 | Now, a lot of people out there have written to me

01:15:38.780 | asking about inhalant oxytocin,

01:15:41.320 | asking whether or not that can actually increase

01:15:43.720 | the depth or rate of pair bonding.

01:15:46.080 | And there does seem to be some evidence for that.

01:15:48.380 | Now, I think in most places, oxytocin is prescription,

01:15:51.240 | although it might be over the counter in others.

01:15:53.720 | I don't know, you have to check where you are.

01:15:55.520 | As far as I know, you can't just go out

01:15:56.900 | and buy oxytocin nasal spray, although you may be able to.

01:15:59.800 | Forgive me, I'm naive to that point.

01:16:01.880 | But it's interesting to note that some drugs

01:16:05.920 | that are being used in clinical trials

01:16:07.640 | for things like trauma and are also used

01:16:09.880 | in clinical therapeutic settings for increasing bonding,

01:16:12.980 | in particular MDMA, also called ecstasy,

01:16:15.860 | increase dopamine and serotonin, we know this.

01:16:19.800 | Dopamine and serotonin have a vast number of effects

01:16:22.960 | throughout the brain and body that I've talked about

01:16:24.560 | some of them today in another podcast.

01:16:26.620 | But one of the lesser appreciated effects of MDMA

01:16:31.020 | is that it causes huge increases, massive increases

01:16:34.460 | in the amount of oxytocin that's released

01:16:36.660 | into the brain and body.

01:16:38.140 | And MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, while still illegal,

01:16:42.180 | as far as I know, certainly in the United States,

01:16:44.060 | but in most places throughout the world,

01:16:45.800 | is being explored in clinical trials,

01:16:47.800 | not just for trauma, not just for depression,

01:16:49.880 | not just for eating disorders,

01:16:50.980 | but also for reestablishing what seem to be fractured

01:16:55.280 | or challenged bonds between romantic partners.

01:16:57.960 | And while most of the attention has been focused

01:17:00.080 | on the dopaminergic and serotonergic aspects

01:17:03.720 | of the MDMA response, it's clear to me,

01:17:06.460 | based on my read of the literature,

01:17:08.040 | that the enormously elevated oxytocin that occurs

01:17:11.760 | during the consumption of MDMA is part of the reason

01:17:15.460 | why people experience during the MDMA session

01:17:18.680 | and post-MDMA session a much greater degree

01:17:22.960 | and depth of kinship or feeling of connection

01:17:25.800 | with that person.

01:17:26.680 | And it's important to point out that that feeling

01:17:29.200 | of connection is of the autonomic type

01:17:31.740 | that I was referring to earlier, a la Alan Shore's work.

01:17:35.040 | That it's not of the, oh, we think about things

01:17:37.400 | the exact same way, we agree on everything now.

01:17:39.560 | It's more of that their physiologies are synchronized.

01:17:43.260 | So much so that even in individuals within a couple

01:17:47.160 | where one does a therapeutic session and the other does not,

01:17:50.880 | they still both feel quite more bonded to the other.

01:17:54.040 | Now, oftentimes in the clinical therapeutic setting,

01:17:56.560 | both members of a couple or romantic partnership,

01:17:59.360 | whatever that form it may take, are consuming MDMA

01:18:03.800 | and then thereby experiencing elevated oxytocin

01:18:08.020 | and this enhanced sense of bonding.

01:18:09.580 | And again, it's this autonomic bonding,

01:18:11.400 | but it's so powerful, meaning the oxytocin response

01:18:15.220 | is so powerful that it doesn't even require

01:18:17.280 | that both individuals experience this huge inflection

01:18:20.320 | than oxytocin and that's because one person's physiology

01:18:23.720 | is influencing the other and oxytocin is this kind

01:18:26.800 | of bridging signal that occurs in both nervous systems,

01:18:30.100 | synchronizes things like heartbeat.

01:18:31.760 | Obviously it's associated with touch.

01:18:34.120 | And so if people are touching or people are engaging

01:18:36.240 | in the sorts of behaviors that I mentioned earlier

01:18:37.920 | that can increase oxytocin further,

01:18:40.680 | that's going to further increase the depth of the bond.

01:18:43.280 | But the point here is that there's actually a hormonal glue

01:18:47.120 | between individuals, okay?

01:18:48.940 | Infant and mother, friends, teammates,

01:18:52.100 | romantic partners, and so on.

01:18:53.780 | And that hormonal glue is oxytocin.

01:18:56.820 | Now, people vary in the extent to which they feel

01:19:00.580 | or have the capacity to feel bonded to anyone.

01:19:04.340 | And it is now generally understood that some of that

01:19:08.340 | variation might depend on variations in oxytocin receptors

01:19:12.820 | or what are called gene polymorphisms for oxytocin.

01:19:16.000 | Genes can have a number of different sequences in them.

01:19:18.500 | They're nucleotide sequences.

01:19:19.700 | We won't go into genetics right now.

01:19:21.140 | A's and G's and C's and T's in various combinations

01:19:23.780 | are what make up the genes.

01:19:24.740 | Genes are transcribed into RNA.

01:19:27.780 | RNA is translated into proteins that affect cells, okay?

01:19:32.980 | The oxytocin gene encodes for oxytocin

01:19:35.780 | and variants in that gene change the amount

01:19:38.660 | and function of oxytocin.

01:19:41.580 | There's a really interesting study

01:19:43.780 | published just this last year in a relatively new journal.

01:19:46.640 | That journal has a kind of a unusual name.

01:19:48.720 | It's Helion.

01:19:49.820 | I think it's Helion and not Helion, but Helion, H-E-L-I-Y-O-N.

01:19:53.640 | This is a cell press journal.

01:19:55.420 | As far as I can tell, it's a very solid journal.

01:19:57.800 | Certainly the cell press label is very stringent.

01:20:01.460 | And this paper is entitled

01:20:04.000 | "The relation between oxytocin receptor gene polymorphisms,"

01:20:07.740 | which just means changes in genes or variations in genes,

01:20:12.000 | "adult attachment and Instagram sociability

01:20:15.340 | and exploratory analysis."

01:20:16.660 | This is a really wild study, but I like the study.

01:20:19.000 | It's very thorough.

01:20:19.840 | First author, last name, Carollo, C-A-R-O-L-L-O.

01:20:23.940 | And what they found was that by analyzing the genetics

01:20:28.660 | of different individuals who are on social media

01:20:32.080 | and looking at how many people those individuals follow

01:20:36.820 | and how many people follow them,

01:20:39.700 | and what they come up with

01:20:41.100 | is a so-called social desirability index,

01:20:44.060 | they were able to correlate in a very straightforward way

01:20:47.820 | that people that carry certain variants

01:20:50.340 | in the oxytocin and oxytocin receptor genes

01:20:53.760 | actually seek out more online social Instagram interactions.

01:20:58.760 | So some people I know, I won't name their names,

01:21:01.960 | only follow anywhere from zero to six accounts.

01:21:05.680 | Other people follow thousands of accounts

01:21:08.760 | and they take the ratio of how many accounts people follow

01:21:11.760 | versus how many followers they have.

01:21:13.720 | Arguably not a perfect measure,

01:21:15.240 | but a nice one in the sense that you can do this

01:21:17.400 | in a completely unbiased way

01:21:19.240 | with many, many thousands of subjects.

01:21:21.640 | And then they were able to get genomic analysis

01:21:24.380 | from a number of these subjects.

01:21:26.000 | And it turns out that people who have, let's say,

01:21:29.600 | higher levels of oxytocin function

01:21:33.040 | or potential levels of oxytocin function

01:21:37.020 | actively seek out more social interactions on social media.

01:21:41.000 | So this, I think, represents an important first

01:21:43.320 | in the area of how social media and data from social media

01:21:46.400 | are starting to merge with biological data

01:21:49.040 | in terms of predicting how avidly people will seek out

01:21:52.480 | social interactions of an online type.

01:21:55.160 | And nowadays we hear a lot about how online we are connected

01:21:59.120 | but we're not really, what is it?

01:22:00.920 | We're communicating but we're not connected

01:22:02.680 | or the connections aren't real.

01:22:04.200 | I think we're going to need to revisit that.

01:22:06.040 | While I'm certainly a believer in the idea

01:22:07.960 | that face-to-face communication and common interactions

01:22:10.960 | with people standing in the same space

01:22:14.080 | or playing sports together, enjoying music together,

01:22:16.620 | enjoying meals together is vitally important.

01:22:18.880 | There's an entire generation

01:22:21.000 | or several generations of people that are coming up

01:22:23.960 | who much of their social interaction has been online.

01:22:27.280 | And if you think about it,

01:22:28.540 | all of the things that we've spelled out earlier

01:22:30.980 | about common mental narrative,

01:22:33.560 | this left brain system, a la Alan Shore,

01:22:35.760 | or autonomic bonding or synchronization of heartbeats

01:22:39.900 | according to common stories,

01:22:41.240 | all that is happening in online social interactions.

01:22:44.460 | When a thousand of us look at the exact same Instagram post,

01:22:48.360 | yes, we will have a thousand independent responses to that,

01:22:51.920 | but chances are many of us have a similar or same response

01:22:54.900 | based on the data that we talked about earlier

01:22:56.840 | in synchronization of heartbeats.

01:22:58.320 | And so we are socially bonded with other people

01:23:01.320 | through social media.

01:23:02.640 | And it's very apparent that the oxytocin system

01:23:05.500 | is playing some role in that.

01:23:07.620 | And this, if we zoom out, makes perfect sense

01:23:10.440 | because again, dopamine, serotonin, prolactin, oxytocin,

01:23:15.400 | none of these systems were placed in us

01:23:18.620 | or are organized within us in order to encourage specific

01:23:23.060 | and only specific types of social interactions.

01:23:25.840 | The one that we can say is absolutely critical

01:23:28.020 | is the child-parent interaction, right?

01:23:30.340 | Because children simply can't take care of themselves,

01:23:32.120 | they need a caretaker.

01:23:33.180 | I should have said caretaker, not parent.

01:23:35.120 | But infants, if they're not taking care, will die.

01:23:38.520 | But beyond that, we have evolved or come to realize

01:23:42.520 | many different types of social interactions.

01:23:44.720 | And online interactions nowadays are very, very common.

01:23:48.160 | I'm certainly involved in them.

01:23:49.240 | I'm guessing you're involved in them as well.

01:23:50.600 | We're involved in one right now, for example.

01:23:53.680 | The oxytocin system is absolutely threaded through

01:23:56.840 | and largely responsible

01:23:58.400 | for those types of social bonds as well.

01:24:01.320 | And incidentally, oxytocin is the name of the fifth song

01:24:04.240 | on Billie Eilish's second album, "Happier Than Ever."

01:24:07.080 | So we've covered a lot about the biology

01:24:09.160 | and indeed the neural circuitry and neurochemistry

01:24:11.440 | and neuroendocrinology of social bonding.

01:24:15.240 | I want to make sure that I highlight the key features

01:24:17.720 | that go into any and all of your social bonds.

01:24:21.140 | First of all, all social bonds have the potential

01:24:24.320 | to include both what we called emotional empathy

01:24:27.240 | and cognitive empathy.

01:24:28.600 | And so if you are interested in establishing

01:24:31.040 | and deepening social bonds of any kind,

01:24:34.000 | it's important that you put some effort toward

01:24:37.560 | this thing that we call emotional empathy,

01:24:39.360 | which is really about sharing autonomic experience.

01:24:42.820 | Now, depending on the relationship,

01:24:43.960 | that will take on different contexts.

01:24:45.240 | What's appropriate in one type of bond

01:24:47.020 | is not going to be appropriate in another type of bond.

01:24:49.320 | Physical contact, for instance,

01:24:50.760 | is appropriate for certain types of bonds

01:24:52.960 | and not for others.

01:24:54.600 | Nonetheless, emotional empathy

01:24:57.560 | and the synchronization of autonomic function,

01:24:59.760 | heart rate, breathing, et cetera,

01:25:02.060 | can be best accomplished by paying attention

01:25:03.820 | to external events, in particular, narrative, story, music,

01:25:07.440 | and perhaps sports or other types of experience

01:25:10.040 | as an external stimulus to drive synchrony

01:25:12.760 | of those internal states.

01:25:15.200 | The other aspect of forming deep bonds

01:25:16.880 | is cognitive empathy.

01:25:18.960 | Again, cognitive empathy is not about agreeing on things

01:25:22.980 | or viewing things the exact same way.

01:25:25.020 | It's about really gaining understanding

01:25:27.400 | of how somebody else thinks about something,

01:25:30.100 | really paying attention to that,

01:25:31.440 | and then paying attention to how you think about

01:25:35.180 | and feel about something.

01:25:36.720 | So that's what cognitive empathy is.

01:25:38.280 | So emotional and cognitive empathy together

01:25:40.680 | are what make up these really robust bonds of various kinds.

01:25:45.040 | Now, we also talked about introversion and extroversion,

01:25:48.040 | and I'd like to try and dismantle the common misperceptions

01:25:51.560 | about introversion and extroversion

01:25:52.960 | because when we look at the neural circuitry, as you recall,

01:25:55.680 | introverts are not people

01:25:57.520 | that don't like social interaction.

01:25:59.700 | It's just that they feel filled up or sated

01:26:03.360 | by less social interaction than would be an extrovert.

01:26:07.560 | And that's because at least according

01:26:09.440 | to the social homeostasis circuit model,

01:26:11.680 | they actually get more dopamine

01:26:13.600 | from less social interaction, okay?

01:26:16.060 | It's like somebody who's sated by less amount of food, okay?

01:26:19.600 | It doesn't mean they don't have the same appetite.

01:26:21.640 | It just means that they get more from less.

01:26:24.380 | Whereas extroverts get less dopamine release

01:26:28.760 | from an equivalent amount of social interaction.

01:26:31.320 | And of course, these aren't precise measurements,

01:26:33.160 | but on the whole, extroverts need more social interaction,

01:26:36.520 | more frequent, more long-lasting, et cetera,

01:26:39.480 | in order to achieve that dopamine threshold.

01:26:41.520 | Because again, dopamine is driving

01:26:43.800 | that craving of social interaction.

01:26:46.280 | And once it's met, then people don't feel

01:26:48.500 | like they have to seek social interaction as much.

01:26:51.200 | So for those of you that feel

01:26:52.800 | as if you're an introvert or extrovert,

01:26:55.000 | or that no introverts and extroverts,

01:26:57.080 | it's not about how verbal people are.

01:26:59.720 | It's not about how much they seek out

01:27:01.360 | social interactions per se.

01:27:03.420 | It's about how much social interaction

01:27:05.240 | is enough for the given person.

01:27:08.120 | Now, the whole reason for providing this framework,

01:27:10.200 | this biological circuitry, et cetera,

01:27:12.820 | is not to simply put a reductionist view

01:27:15.760 | on things that you already realized and knew,

01:27:18.200 | but rather to give you some leverage points

01:27:20.200 | to understand how is it that you form social bonds?

01:27:23.340 | How is it that you might be challenged

01:27:24.640 | in forming certain types of social bonds?

01:27:26.560 | And to think about entry points

01:27:28.500 | to both establishing and reinforcing social bonds

01:27:31.240 | of different kinds.

01:27:32.620 | Hopefully it will also give you insight into why breakups,

01:27:36.640 | whether it be between friendships or romantic partners,

01:27:38.820 | can be so painful.

01:27:40.620 | A breakup of any kind involves both a breaking

01:27:43.200 | of that emotional empathy and that cognitive empathy.

01:27:46.320 | And indeed it has a neurobiological

01:27:49.640 | and hormonal underpinning, right?

01:27:51.160 | We go into some sense a social isolation,

01:27:54.320 | even if we're surrounded by other types of people.

01:27:56.760 | If one of our major sources of oxytocin,

01:27:59.580 | or one of our major sources of dopamine,

01:28:01.880 | suddenly is not around,

01:28:03.720 | that is incredibly devastating to a nervous system.

01:28:06.880 | And to borrow from the great psychologist

01:28:09.360 | and neurobiologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett,

01:28:11.600 | who says, "We are not just individuals,

01:28:14.120 | "we are nervous systems influencing other nervous systems

01:28:17.360 | "and their nervous systems are influencing us."

01:28:19.360 | I think that's the right way to think about it.

01:28:21.400 | So it should come as no surprise

01:28:23.380 | that breakups of various kinds are very challenging,

01:28:26.400 | regardless of what underlied that breakup,

01:28:29.620 | whether or not somebody moving or an actual decision

01:28:31.780 | of one person to leave the relationship or both, et cetera.

01:28:35.300 | On the more positive side, largely biological,

01:28:39.140 | but to some extent psychological view of social bonding

01:28:43.300 | will also allow you to orient in this vast landscape

01:28:46.900 | that we call social bonds,

01:28:48.660 | to understand why it is perhaps

01:28:50.480 | that you seek out so many online interactions.

01:28:52.480 | Maybe you have the oxytocin polymorphism

01:28:55.880 | that causes you to want more,

01:28:57.720 | follow more accounts or interact more with people

01:29:00.080 | and comment more, respond to comments, who knows?

01:29:02.680 | I'm also hoping that it will allow you to get a lens

01:29:07.600 | into how you can strengthen the social bonds

01:29:09.720 | that you want to strengthen

01:29:11.080 | and to establish new social bonds

01:29:12.720 | that you want to establish.

01:29:14.600 | None of this is meant to manipulate or leverage social bonds

01:29:18.020 | that wouldn't otherwise form.

01:29:19.940 | To the contrary, it's about identifying

01:29:22.200 | what are the specific routes

01:29:24.480 | by which social bonds are created

01:29:27.160 | and allowing you, I hope, to work with people

01:29:31.760 | that you feel challenged in forming social bonds with,

01:29:34.520 | or maybe deciding to completely divorce

01:29:36.540 | from those social bonds entirely,

01:29:38.160 | because there's absolutely no hope

01:29:39.320 | of ever forming emotional or cognitive empathy.

01:29:41.960 | I certainly acknowledge that that could be the case too.

01:29:44.200 | So there's both a light and a dark and a gray zone

01:29:46.540 | to this entire thing that we call social bonding.

01:29:48.600 | What is not graded, but is absolute, as they say,

01:29:52.540 | is that social bonds are vitally important

01:29:54.900 | to us as a species,

01:29:56.340 | whether or not they are at a distance over social media,

01:29:58.820 | whether or not they are in close proximity,

01:30:00.340 | actual physical contact.

01:30:02.480 | Today, what I've really tried to illustrate

01:30:04.000 | is that there are a common set of biological,

01:30:06.840 | neurochemical, and hormonal underpinnings

01:30:10.140 | to what we call social bonding.

01:30:11.900 | And so while it is complex and it is subjective,

01:30:15.320 | it involves the hierarchies,

01:30:16.660 | it involves our previous upbringing,

01:30:19.220 | it involves our goals, et cetera,

01:30:22.020 | it is not infinitely complex.

01:30:24.260 | And in that sense, it is tractable.

01:30:26.820 | Hopefully I've offered you some levers or some entry points

01:30:29.780 | under which you can both understand

01:30:31.420 | and move towards social bonds

01:30:33.100 | that would be more satisfying and more gratifying for you.

01:30:36.720 | That's certainly one of the goals.

01:30:37.980 | The other one is that hopefully if you're a clinician

01:30:40.520 | or simply the friend that people go to

01:30:42.440 | or the family member that people go to

01:30:43.780 | when they are challenged

01:30:45.060 | through various challenges and social bonds,

01:30:47.580 | that you can start to perhaps pass along

01:30:49.860 | some of the information as a way of people understanding

01:30:54.240 | what they're going through as they are breaking up,

01:30:56.440 | but also as they are falling in love,

01:30:58.200 | as they are forming attachments

01:30:59.860 | and as they are being challenged with attachments.

01:31:01.780 | That's my hope.

01:31:02.900 | And especially as you head into the holidays

01:31:05.180 | and end of year, but also as it continues into 2022,

01:31:09.880 | I would hope that you would take this knowledge

01:31:11.420 | and apply it in any of the ways

01:31:12.820 | that you feel are meaningful and adaptive for you.

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01:31:58.100 | We didn't talk about supplements on today's episode

01:32:00.020 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but on many episodes we do.

01:32:03.600 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

01:32:05.620 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

01:32:07.940 | for things like enhancing the depth and quality of sleep,

01:32:10.860 | for things like focus, immune system, et cetera.

01:32:14.620 | If you'd like to see the supplements that I take,

01:32:16.640 | you can go to thorne.com/u/huberman.

01:32:20.820 | The reason we partnered with Thorne

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01:32:27.620 | that they include in their supplements

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01:32:30.500 | of the supplements that they include.

01:32:32.020 | This is not true for a lot

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01:32:35.580 | Thorne is partnered with the Mayo Clinic,

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01:32:38.580 | so there's tremendous confidence in their stringency.

01:32:41.200 | Again, if you go to thorne.com/u/huberman,

01:32:44.820 | you can see all the supplements that I take.

01:32:46.300 | You can get 20% off any of those supplements.

01:32:48.420 | And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site

01:32:50.540 | through that portal,

01:32:51.420 | you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements

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01:32:55.180 | If you're not already following the Huberman Lab

01:32:57.020 | on Instagram and Twitter, please do so.

01:32:59.620 | On Instagram, I regularly teach short snippets

01:33:02.540 | about neuroscience and neuroscience-related tools.

01:33:04.640 | Some of that information overlaps

01:33:06.280 | with what's covered on the podcast.

01:33:07.780 | Often it does not.

01:33:09.520 | So check us out at Huberman Lab on Instagram and on Twitter.

01:33:13.320 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:33:15.380 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:33:17.340 | (upbeat music)

01:33:19.920 | (upbeat music)

Science of Social Bonding in Family, Friendship & Romantic Love | Huberman Lab Podcast #51

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