How Oxytocin Affects Attraction, Love & Social Behavior | Dr. Michael Platt & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - Let's talk about oxytocin.

00:00:05.000 | We hear about it as the love hormone,

00:00:07.420 | the affiliative hormone.

00:00:08.760 | Folks, it's a neuro hormone,

00:00:10.480 | so it's somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone.

00:00:14.960 | Let's set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff,

00:00:17.120 | and I'd love to know your knowledge

00:00:21.720 | about what changing levels of oxytocin does

00:00:26.280 | to perception, to behavior, humans.

00:00:30.160 | - So yeah, oxytocin, we've been interested in it

00:00:33.540 | for a long time because, as you said,

00:00:35.280 | it seems to be a dial that can turn up or turn down

00:00:40.080 | certain aspects of social behavior

00:00:41.440 | and other aspects of mental and emotional function.

00:00:45.280 | It's important to point out that oxytocin

00:00:47.440 | and its sister neuro hormone, vasopressin,

00:00:51.720 | arginine vasopressin, which is sort of maybe

00:00:55.200 | a little more important in males than in females,

00:00:57.040 | and females, oxytocin's a little more important,

00:00:58.640 | but they're in both, and they've been around a long time.

00:01:02.400 | They've actually, you know,

00:01:03.320 | there's a very early invertebrate evolution.

00:01:06.820 | In mammals, oxytocin has the primary role, right,

00:01:11.080 | of helping to build bonds between mom and baby,

00:01:15.240 | so oxytocin's released during childbirth,

00:01:18.240 | it's released when mom is nursing,

00:01:20.680 | and it seems that in humans and some other social,

00:01:23.960 | you know, really, really social creatures,

00:01:26.040 | it's now been co-opted to kind of have

00:01:29.240 | a similar kind of role in the relationships you have

00:01:33.440 | with other people who are not your offspring

00:01:35.700 | or your pairmate, right, 'cause oxytocin, for example,

00:01:39.400 | is released, you know, when you orgasm,

00:01:41.080 | and so, and that's, you know, thought to be why

00:01:43.400 | that sort of pillow talk afterward is, you know,

00:01:45.720 | like, it's more engaging, and, you know,

00:01:48.400 | people feel things at that time that they might have,

00:01:50.800 | that are different from what they would have felt

00:01:52.760 | before that. - It fosters attachment.

00:01:54.080 | - Fosters attachment, that's a good way of putting it.

00:01:57.640 | So, oxytocin levels are hard to measure, right?

00:02:02.480 | You can measure it at a distance in the periphery,

00:02:05.920 | in the blood, but it's not exactly, like,

00:02:07.800 | one-to-one correlated with what's going on in the brain,

00:02:10.600 | and in general, we don't wanna put, like a, you know,

00:02:13.640 | a pump or a little thing in your brain

00:02:16.040 | that we could measure how much is in there.

00:02:18.880 | So, we can look at, instead, what is often done

00:02:23.520 | is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin,

00:02:27.360 | more oxytocin than you normally have, like, into the brain.

00:02:30.840 | You can't inject it or anything like that,

00:02:32.560 | and the way that it's typically applied

00:02:34.920 | is to squirt it up your nose, or inhale it intranasally,

00:02:39.280 | so it then is taken up by the nerves

00:02:42.440 | that are in your sinuses and whatnot,

00:02:43.880 | and then goes into the brain.

00:02:46.080 | That was what it was thought to,

00:02:47.320 | I think, that we were the first to show

00:02:48.760 | that that's actually how it works.

00:02:50.720 | We did all the work in monkeys,

00:02:52.080 | where it's, all these things are just sort of easier to do,

00:02:57.080 | and the behavior's a little bit less complex,

00:02:59.440 | so our readouts are, I think, a bit more straightforward.

00:03:03.760 | In the human studies, there's a lot of, you know,

00:03:06.160 | it's controversial, 'cause there's a lot of, like,

00:03:08.220 | there's some crap studies,

00:03:09.440 | and there's just a lot of variability

00:03:10.600 | in the effects across studies,

00:03:11.560 | and I think some of that's just because

00:03:13.600 | you ask people to squirt it up their own noses,

00:03:15.960 | and so there's a lot of, that introduces variation

00:03:18.960 | in just how good they were at getting it in the right place.

00:03:22.000 | With the monkeys, what we did instead

00:03:23.080 | is we used what's called a nebulizer or aerosolizer.

00:03:26.280 | Like, I had noticed when, like, my kid had, like, pneumonia,

00:03:29.720 | and I took him to the ER, they put this mask on him,

00:03:31.720 | and they, you know, they missed this albuterol,

00:03:34.640 | which opened up his airways.

00:03:35.600 | Oh, we could do that with oxytocin, too,

00:03:37.000 | so that's what we did with the monkeys.

00:03:37.880 | It makes sure they get, like, a really good dose,

00:03:40.600 | and then we showed that that gets right into the brain.

00:03:42.480 | Okay, now that puts us in a position

00:03:44.000 | to ask questions of what does it do.

00:03:46.520 | Well, one of the first things that oxytocin does

00:03:48.720 | is it relaxes you, so just overall, you know,

00:03:53.400 | you were talking about autonomic function.

00:03:54.800 | It's a relaxer.

00:03:55.880 | It's an anxiolytic, so it, and in monkeys,

00:04:00.880 | what that does is it reduces their vigilance

00:04:03.520 | to sort of any threats, so they're just a lot more chill,

00:04:07.760 | so that's sort of a primary thing,

00:04:09.920 | and then we've looked at how it affects their behavior

00:04:13.800 | in males and females separately,

00:04:15.960 | because as I said before, they sort of,

00:04:17.840 | first of all, males and females have different strategies

00:04:20.640 | and behaviors and the expression

00:04:23.640 | of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, et cetera,

00:04:27.120 | and vasopressin receptors are a little bit different,

00:04:29.360 | and in male monkeys, it's super interesting,

00:04:32.160 | because, you know, we've been talking about how,

00:04:34.280 | you know, dominance, and they're really,

00:04:36.080 | like rhesus macaques have this really steep hierarchy,

00:04:39.800 | and one of the things we found right away

00:04:41.360 | is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy,

00:04:45.160 | so the dominant male monkeys become

00:04:48.200 | super chill and friendly,

00:04:49.480 | and the subordinate ones become a bit bolder,

00:04:54.160 | perhaps because, you know, when, if I dose,

00:04:57.120 | if I dosed my own, or I've dosed you with oxytocin,

00:04:59.560 | it'd change your behavior, which would change my behavior,

00:05:02.040 | so it reverberates across individuals,

00:05:04.760 | so it flattens the hierarchy.

00:05:07.440 | They spend more time making eye contact.

00:05:09.420 | They pay more attention to the other individual,

00:05:11.760 | and we've shown that--

00:05:13.120 | - It's Burning Man.

00:05:13.960 | - Yeah, it's true.

00:05:14.800 | - I've never been to Burning Man.

00:05:15.640 | - I've never either, but it's--

00:05:16.920 | - This is what I hear.

00:05:17.800 | - No, I think that's the right point,

00:05:19.520 | and I'll circle back to that,

00:05:21.080 | because we also showed that in a task-based situation

00:05:25.400 | where a monkey can choose, we gave monkeys choices

00:05:27.520 | of whether they could give a reward to themselves,

00:05:29.280 | to another monkey, to a bottle that could collect reward,

00:05:33.880 | you know, in case they just like to see juice dripping out,

00:05:37.520 | and they would become more pro-social,

00:05:39.460 | so they're much more likely to give a reward

00:05:42.420 | to another monkey.

00:05:43.260 | They're more altruistic, as we talked about earlier,

00:05:48.260 | so that's like, it looks like a real pro-social

00:05:52.200 | kind of thing, right, which I think is super interesting.

00:05:55.740 | In females, it's a little bit different.

00:05:58.340 | Females become kind of nicer to each other,

00:06:02.500 | and we see that greater eye contact, et cetera,

00:06:04.620 | but they become more aggressive toward males.

00:06:07.540 | And we speculate, I think, it's a hypothesis,

00:06:11.420 | that because oxytocin is released

00:06:14.140 | when you've got an infant, basically, for females,

00:06:18.800 | males are a bigger threat then,

00:06:22.160 | because in many primate societies and other mammals,

00:06:26.920 | males sometimes can be infanticidal,

00:06:30.940 | because if they kill off a female's infant,

00:06:35.020 | then that will bring that female into receptivity

00:06:40.020 | for mating much more quickly,

00:06:43.300 | and so that's sort of the--

00:06:44.980 | - Brutal. - Evolutionary, yeah,

00:06:46.140 | it is brutal, the evolutionary rationale behind that.

00:06:48.740 | So that's kind of our supposition.

00:06:51.240 | The other thing that I thought is really interesting,

00:06:55.700 | as well, is we find a greater,

00:06:59.380 | or an increase in the synchronization of behavior.

00:07:02.940 | So when I do, you know this idea of mirroring,

00:07:06.220 | which has been talked about in business context

00:07:08.420 | for a long time, it's a real thing,

00:07:11.580 | and it's a marker of a good relationship,

00:07:14.300 | a strong relationship.

00:07:15.300 | If you have good rapport with somebody,

00:07:16.620 | you tend to adopt similar movements and postures,

00:07:20.780 | and if you do those things-- - Shirts.

00:07:22.540 | - Shirts, exactly, we didn't coordinate here, but yeah.

00:07:26.100 | - You just happen to be a great dresser.

00:07:27.340 | - Ah, well, you know, same here.

00:07:29.060 | So when you have that, actually, if you do those things,

00:07:32.240 | if I subtly mirror you, and I'm in a job interview,

00:07:35.260 | I'm more likely to get the job,

00:07:36.380 | gonna get a higher salary, et cetera,

00:07:37.900 | all those sort of good things. - Really?

00:07:39.420 | - So oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony,

00:07:43.380 | and one of the things, this is like something

00:07:45.260 | I've been fascinated in for the last decade,

00:07:48.540 | and we and a lot of other people have been working on,

00:07:50.300 | is that this synchrony, the behavioral and neural level,

00:07:53.940 | physiological synchrony, is kind of,

00:07:57.880 | it's this black magic of social behavior.

00:08:01.380 | It's the glue that allows us to live and work together.

00:08:05.900 | So the observation is that if you and I,

00:08:08.700 | we have a good rapport here, let's say,

00:08:10.140 | if we are measuring activity in our brains right now,

00:08:13.860 | we'd see that they were coming into alignment.

00:08:16.180 | So they might've been very disparate

00:08:17.780 | when I arrived here and you arrived here today,

00:08:20.740 | and as we've grown closer and we've discovered things

00:08:25.020 | that are similar about us, that the, you know,

00:08:28.300 | our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping.

00:08:31.740 | So we see this world more similarly,

00:08:33.580 | we feel more similarly about it,

00:08:35.660 | we're more likely to take similar decisions,

00:08:38.420 | and then that, the coolest thing

00:08:41.660 | is this reverberates down to your body.

00:08:43.340 | So if our brains begin to align,

00:08:47.260 | our hearts actually begin to beat together,

00:08:49.700 | you know, if we have different resting heart rates,

00:08:52.300 | we begin to breathe together and you start to move together,

00:08:54.380 | you start to look at the same things in the environment.

00:08:55.940 | We've talked about attention.

00:08:56.780 | When you look at something, the same thing,

00:08:58.820 | you're getting the same data and that feedback loop,

00:09:03.140 | which I think now you can see that

00:09:04.940 | that is a way to coordinate behavior.

00:09:08.580 | And that is the essence of sort of,

00:09:10.420 | that's our secret sauce as a species,

00:09:12.500 | which is that we can collaborate and do things together.

00:09:16.340 | And it seems to, like oxytocin, vasopressin

00:09:18.940 | are involved in this as a way

00:09:20.820 | of kind of turning up the dial on synchrony.

00:09:23.700 | It seemed to turn up the so-called social brain network.

00:09:27.140 | And then that synchrony is the glue,

00:09:31.380 | and it's a biomarker, a biological marker

00:09:34.580 | of a close relationship that predicts

00:09:37.020 | better communication, increased trust,

00:09:39.220 | better teamwork, you know,

00:09:41.700 | whether your marriage is gonna last.

00:09:43.220 | I mean, the things that it predicts,

00:09:45.500 | you know, group decision-making,

00:09:47.340 | so we showed that in like in a business context,

00:09:49.900 | committees that are more in sync with each other,

00:09:52.980 | that their hearts are beating together,

00:09:55.340 | are more likely to reach the right decision

00:09:58.220 | in a really difficult problem

00:10:00.220 | than committees that are not.

00:10:01.820 | The cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker,

00:10:05.420 | you can hack that, right, in the sense that

00:10:08.260 | now we can start looking at all those

00:10:09.780 | trust-building exercises or anything else

00:10:11.980 | that, you know, is supposed to turn things up,

00:10:14.620 | turn up the dial on teamwork or communication,

00:10:18.180 | and we have a readout.

00:10:19.300 | And we could say, yeah, that's working.

00:10:20.940 | That's actually doing the thing.

00:10:22.820 | It's not BS, right?

00:10:25.180 | You should invest your time and energy in that

00:10:27.700 | rather than something else.

00:10:29.180 | And there's like, now we've been working through this list

00:10:31.380 | as well as others.

00:10:32.220 | There's a whole host of things

00:10:33.780 | that seem to actually turn up synchrony,

00:10:37.220 | and that's a shortcut to team chemistry.

00:10:41.020 | (upbeat music)

00:10:44.540 | (upbeat music)

00:10:47.140 | you

How Oxytocin Affects Attraction, Love & Social Behavior | Dr. Michael Platt & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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