The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment

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,

00:00:10.160 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.900 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.760 | Today, we are going to talk about the psychology

00:00:16.760 | and the biology of desire, love, and attachment.

00:00:21.080 | Today happens to be Valentine's Day, 2022.

00:00:24.600 | However, the themes we are going to discuss

00:00:27.000 | pertain to desire, love, and attachment

00:00:29.560 | on any given day.

00:00:30.760 | And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss

00:00:33.240 | almost certainly were at play thousands of years ago,

00:00:36.080 | hundreds of years ago,

00:00:37.480 | and no doubt will still be at play in our minds

00:00:40.160 | and in our bodies and in our psychologies

00:00:42.380 | for the decades, centuries, and thousands of years to come.

00:00:45.700 | Indeed, today I want to focus on core mechanisms

00:00:49.000 | that lead individuals to seek out other individuals

00:00:52.280 | with whom to mate with,

00:00:54.560 | with whom to have children with or not,

00:00:57.120 | with whom to enter short or long-term relationships with,

00:01:00.640 | and perhaps to end those relationships

00:01:03.200 | or to seek relationships on the side,

00:01:04.920 | so-called infidelity.

00:01:06.480 | I'm certainly not going to encourage or discourage

00:01:08.360 | any of these behaviors.

00:01:09.320 | I'm simply going to cover the peer-reviewed scientific data

00:01:12.700 | on all these aspects of desire, love, and attachment.

00:01:16.840 | I'm going to discuss how our childhood attachment styles,

00:01:20.260 | as they're called, influence our adult attachment styles.

00:01:24.760 | Yes, you heard that right.

00:01:25.960 | How we attached or did not attach to primary caregivers

00:01:30.640 | in our childhood has much to do with how we attach

00:01:35.280 | or fail to attach to romantic partners as adults,

00:01:39.060 | because the same neural circuits,

00:01:41.920 | the neurons and their connections in the brain and body

00:01:44.400 | that underlie attachment between infant and caregiver,

00:01:47.720 | between toddler and parent or other caregiver,

00:01:50.360 | and during adolescence and in our teenage years

00:01:53.180 | are repurposed for adult romantic attachments.

00:01:57.060 | I know that might be a little eerie to think about,

00:01:59.240 | but indeed that is true.

00:02:00.980 | Now, the fortunate thing is that regardless

00:02:03.020 | of our childhood attachment styles and experiences,

00:02:06.900 | the neural circuits for desire, love, and attachment

00:02:10.260 | are quite plastic.

00:02:11.320 | They are amenable to change in response

00:02:13.860 | to both what we think and what we feel,

00:02:16.860 | as well as what we do.

00:02:18.560 | However, all three aspects that we're discussing today,

00:02:22.040 | desire, love, and attachment,

00:02:24.060 | are also strongly biologically driven.

00:02:27.000 | We're going to talk about biological mechanisms

00:02:29.520 | such as hormones, biological mechanisms

00:02:32.120 | such as neurochemicals, things like dopamine,

00:02:34.320 | oxytocin, and serotonin, and neural circuits, brain areas,

00:02:38.820 | and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain

00:02:41.960 | that control whether or not we desire somebody or not,

00:02:45.140 | whether or not we lose or increase our desire

00:02:47.360 | for somebody over time, whether or not we fall in love,

00:02:50.960 | what love means, and whether or not the relationships

00:02:53.960 | we form continue to include the elements of desire

00:02:57.280 | and love over time or not.

00:02:59.680 | In order to illustrate just how powerfully our biology

00:03:02.120 | can shape our perception of the attractiveness

00:03:04.060 | of other people, I want to share with you the results

00:03:06.440 | of a couple of studies.

00:03:07.880 | Both studies explore how people rate

00:03:10.200 | other people's attractiveness.

00:03:12.160 | And in both studies, the major variable is that women

00:03:16.240 | are at different stages of their menstrual cycle.

00:03:18.840 | Now, in the first study, men are rating the attractiveness

00:03:22.440 | of women according to the smell of those women.

00:03:25.360 | Now, they're not smelling them directly.

00:03:26.760 | They're smelling clothing that women wore

00:03:29.240 | for a couple of days at different phases

00:03:31.640 | of their menstrual cycle.

00:03:32.880 | And what they find is that men will rate the odors of women

00:03:36.280 | as most attractive if those women wore those shirts,

00:03:40.760 | that clothing, in the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.

00:03:44.520 | Okay, so this is not to say that men do not find women

00:03:48.040 | attractive at other stages of their cycle.

00:03:50.080 | It is to say that men find women's odors

00:03:53.440 | particularly attractive if those odors were worn by women

00:03:57.520 | that are in the pre-ovulatory phase

00:03:59.680 | of their menstrual cycle, okay?

00:04:02.160 | Now, there was also a study that was done

00:04:04.840 | where women at different stages of their menstrual cycle

00:04:07.680 | are rating the odors of men.

00:04:09.920 | And a similar but mirror symmetric result was found

00:04:13.380 | such that women who are in the pre-ovulatory phase

00:04:16.260 | of their menstrual cycle will rate men's odors

00:04:19.480 | as more attractive than at other stages of their cycle.

00:04:23.400 | So the simple way to put this is that there seems

00:04:25.760 | to be something special about the pre-ovulatory phase

00:04:28.660 | of a woman's menstrual cycle that makes men rate them

00:04:31.480 | as more attractive during that time and women rate men

00:04:35.220 | as more attractive during that particular time as well.

00:04:38.460 | So this is a bi-directional effect.

00:04:41.360 | The way that the second study was done

00:04:43.620 | where women are rating men was not just to smell the odors

00:04:47.440 | of those men on t-shirts, they did that,

00:04:50.160 | but they correlated that with whether or not the shirts

00:04:52.760 | were worn by men that were particularly

00:04:54.800 | physically symmetrical.

00:04:56.600 | They actually had these men divided into groups.

00:04:58.640 | It was more of a continuum rather,

00:05:00.240 | rated according to body symmetry and face symmetry.

00:05:03.520 | And women preferred more symmetrical men

00:05:07.040 | when they were doing the preference test

00:05:09.760 | during the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.

00:05:12.400 | So again, the point is that that pre-ovulatory phase

00:05:14.380 | of the cycle seems to create a bi-directional

00:05:17.540 | mutual attractiveness.

00:05:19.380 | Now also extremely interesting is that this effect

00:05:21.980 | does really seem to have something to do with ovulation,

00:05:25.200 | because in both studies, they had women

00:05:28.020 | that were taking oral contraception or not.

00:05:30.340 | And what they found was if a woman

00:05:32.640 | is taking oral contraception, it prevented that peak

00:05:35.900 | in perceived attractiveness by the men,

00:05:38.640 | meaning men no longer perceived a woman to be more attractive

00:05:43.160 | at a particular phase of their cycle.

00:05:45.280 | And also women taking oral contraception

00:05:48.360 | no longer preferred the odors of more symmetrical men

00:05:51.700 | during the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.

00:05:54.160 | I want to make sure that it's especially clear

00:05:57.120 | that it is not the case that oral contraception

00:06:00.320 | reduced the perception of a woman as attractive.

00:06:03.480 | That did not happen in these studies.

00:06:05.280 | It reduced the further increase in a male's perception

00:06:09.500 | of her as attractive.

00:06:10.540 | And if women took oral contraception,

00:06:13.160 | it prevented them from preferring more symmetrical men

00:06:18.040 | based on the odors of those men.

00:06:20.100 | Now I realize there are a lot of variables here.

00:06:21.640 | We've got odors, we've got symmetry,

00:06:23.100 | we've got menstrual cycle, pre-ovulatory, non-pre-ovulatory,

00:06:26.200 | and we have whether or not people

00:06:28.200 | are taking contraception or not.

00:06:29.680 | But the basic finding is that depending on where women are

00:06:32.640 | in their menstrual cycle influences

00:06:34.180 | both men's perception of them as attractive

00:06:37.220 | and their perception of men as attractive

00:06:40.400 | and oral contraception eliminates that effect.

00:06:43.360 | So I share with you those data to illustrate

00:06:45.680 | that we often think that somebody is attractive or not

00:06:49.640 | based on, I don't know how they look,

00:06:52.340 | their skin, their hair, et cetera.

00:06:54.500 | But it also illustrates that their odor is a powerful cue

00:06:58.360 | for some people more than others.

00:06:59.760 | Some of us tend to be more olfactory driven than others.

00:07:02.000 | Although if you watched the Huberman Lab podcast episode

00:07:04.720 | that I did with Professor David Buss

00:07:06.720 | from the University of Texas, Austin,

00:07:08.520 | who's a luminary in the field of evolutionary psychology

00:07:12.340 | and has studied mate choice

00:07:13.980 | and mate selection bias over decades,

00:07:16.400 | he's really one of the founders of that field.

00:07:18.820 | He emphasized findings that odor for many people

00:07:23.180 | is a maker or a deal breaker.

00:07:26.240 | Meaning there are some people that even if somebody

00:07:29.260 | has all the characteristics that they're looking for

00:07:31.700 | in terms of kindness and attractiveness and values

00:07:34.520 | and other features that would and should be

00:07:37.100 | of very high priority in selecting a mate,

00:07:39.440 | that if someone does not like the way that person smells,

00:07:43.280 | their innate body odor,

00:07:45.000 | independent of colognes and perfumes and soaps, et cetera,

00:07:48.460 | that that's often a complete and total deal breaker.

00:07:51.480 | I'm sure there are some of you that can relate to that

00:07:53.200 | and there are some of you

00:07:54.360 | perhaps for which that is not the case.

00:07:56.440 | And you can't even imagine

00:07:57.520 | that being such a powerful variable.

00:07:59.420 | And yet the data suggests that indeed

00:08:02.280 | it is a powerful variable for many people out there.

00:08:04.840 | Before we begin,

00:08:05.680 | I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate

00:08:07.800 | from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:08:10.100 | It is however, part of my desire and effort

00:08:12.380 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:08:15.120 | and science related tools to the general public.

00:08:17.760 | In keeping with that theme,

00:08:18.840 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:14:13.180 | Let's talk about desire, love, and attachment.

00:14:16.180 | And of course, these are topics

00:14:17.380 | that grab tremendous interest,

00:14:18.740 | so it's worth us defining our terms a little bit

00:14:21.740 | before going any further.

00:14:23.820 | Of course, we can have many different kinds of loves.

00:14:26.900 | There's romantic love.

00:14:28.300 | There's love of family, so-called familial love.

00:14:31.200 | There's love of pets.

00:14:32.580 | We can even love objects,

00:14:34.240 | where we can feel as if we love objects.

00:14:36.260 | We can love certain activities.

00:14:37.660 | We can have friends that we love, and so on and so forth.

00:14:40.220 | The word love is used to encompass

00:14:41.780 | a lot of different types of relationships.

00:14:44.420 | Today, we are mainly going to be focused on romantic love

00:14:47.860 | and the neural mechanisms of romantic love.

00:14:51.160 | I want to acknowledge here at the outset

00:14:52.740 | that most of the studies of romantic love

00:14:55.080 | have focused on monogamous heterosexual love.

00:14:58.820 | And also, when we talk about studies focused on desire

00:15:02.260 | and attractiveness and attachment, that's also the case.

00:15:05.260 | And that simply reflects the general bias of the literature

00:15:08.220 | over the last 50 to 100 years.

00:15:10.620 | It does, of course, not rule out that similar

00:15:13.180 | or different mechanisms could be at play

00:15:15.400 | in non-monogamous relationships,

00:15:17.540 | in homosexual relationships,

00:15:19.560 | or in relationships of any kind or variation.

00:15:22.900 | It's also worth us defining our terms around desire.

00:15:26.380 | It can mean lust.

00:15:28.100 | It can mean the desire for long-term partnership.

00:15:30.900 | So we need to define our terms.

00:15:32.220 | And throughout, I will do my best

00:15:33.920 | to very carefully define what I mean by desire,

00:15:37.300 | what I mean by love, and what I mean by attachment.

00:15:41.860 | The formal study of love and desire and attachment

00:15:46.320 | goes back to the early 1900s.

00:15:49.860 | One of the classic studies on this

00:15:51.860 | is entitled "Love and Desire."

00:15:53.620 | It was published in 1912 and really focused

00:15:56.520 | on two opposing themes within romance.

00:16:01.060 | One is love, which in that paper was really meant

00:16:05.420 | to include attachment and dependence

00:16:08.100 | or interdependence between individuals, right?

00:16:11.620 | And the other end of the spectrum being desire

00:16:14.340 | or the sexual desire for another.

00:16:17.180 | And romance was meant to encapsulate both those things,

00:16:20.540 | love and desire.

00:16:22.260 | And for much of the 1900s,

00:16:25.300 | it was thought that love and desire

00:16:26.980 | were on sort of opposing ends or in kind of a push-pull.

00:16:30.260 | And it was the dynamic push and pull

00:16:32.340 | between love and desire that one could define romance.

00:16:37.340 | And that actually led to much of what's out there

00:16:40.340 | in the psychological literature.

00:16:42.180 | Today, we are going to explore some neurobiological studies,

00:16:46.060 | some studies of the endocrine system,

00:16:48.240 | meaning the hormone system,

00:16:49.440 | that actually support that general model.

00:16:51.320 | And I'll point you toward what I think is a very useful book

00:16:55.220 | in thinking about how relationships can both form and last

00:16:59.460 | over long periods of time

00:17:01.620 | and how those relationships can include

00:17:03.800 | both desire and interdependence.

00:17:07.900 | I'll also talk about some studies

00:17:09.520 | that have really focused on why relationships succeed

00:17:12.900 | and why they fail and how that relates to whether or not

00:17:16.180 | there is sufficient amounts of attachment and desire.

00:17:19.420 | So today, we're going to talk about the science

00:17:20.740 | and indeed, you'll also get some tools.

00:17:22.700 | Those tools should be useful to you,

00:17:23.980 | whether or not you happen to be in a relationship or not,

00:17:27.140 | whether or not you're seeking a relationship or not.

00:17:29.300 | I'd like to begin with an anecdote,

00:17:30.940 | and this is not an anecdote about my relationship history.

00:17:34.640 | It's a anecdote about my scientific history.

00:17:38.080 | When I started graduate school,

00:17:39.460 | the chairman of the department I was in at the time

00:17:41.940 | said to me, "You know, most PhDs last longer

00:17:45.980 | than most marriages."

00:17:47.120 | And indeed, he was right.

00:17:48.620 | And also, most marriages in this country end in divorce.

00:17:52.440 | I think it's about 50% with a slight skew

00:17:55.900 | toward more ending in divorce than persist

00:17:59.060 | until death do them part.

00:18:01.380 | But nonetheless, it's about half,

00:18:03.740 | and most marriages end before the eight-year period is up.

00:18:07.800 | Most PhDs take anywhere from four to nine years.

00:18:11.660 | So there was a bit of a smearing of averages there,

00:18:13.840 | but the point he was trying to make

00:18:15.140 | really landed home for me.

00:18:17.200 | It did not scare me out of relationships,

00:18:20.260 | nor did it scare me out of a PhD, obviously.

00:18:23.040 | What it did illustrate was that there's something

00:18:25.960 | about our attachment machinery that can be very,

00:18:29.760 | very compelling such that people take on

00:18:32.160 | tremendous levels of commitment.

00:18:33.940 | I have to imagine that most people enter marriages

00:18:36.300 | assuming that they're going to stay in those marriages.

00:18:37.900 | I don't think most people enter marriages

00:18:40.040 | thinking they're going to get divorced,

00:18:41.480 | but that if 50% of those commitments end in divorce,

00:18:46.120 | there must also be mechanisms

00:18:47.840 | by which our attachments can break.

00:18:50.700 | And today, we're going to talk about

00:18:52.040 | both the forming of attachments

00:18:53.660 | and the breaking of attachments,

00:18:55.320 | what can prevent those breaks in attachments,

00:18:57.640 | and indeed, what can lead to reattachments.

00:19:01.000 | There are biological mechanisms

00:19:04.400 | to desire, love, and attachment.

00:19:06.880 | That's abundantly clear.

00:19:08.740 | Now, there's a robust and very large literature

00:19:12.520 | in animal models.

00:19:13.840 | What I mean by that are field studies

00:19:15.660 | and laboratory studies in primates of different kinds,

00:19:19.040 | such as macaque monkeys or bonobos.

00:19:21.400 | People have looked at these sorts of things,

00:19:23.940 | believe it or not, in ducks, in laboratory mice,

00:19:26.760 | in different types of birds, et cetera.

00:19:29.480 | And if you look at that literature,

00:19:30.800 | you can essentially find biological examples

00:19:34.640 | in the animal kingdom for just about any behavior

00:19:37.120 | that you can easily map to human behavior.

00:19:39.800 | So for instance, there's a species of animal

00:19:42.560 | called the prairie vole.

00:19:43.800 | In one portion of the United States,

00:19:46.300 | this prairie vole species is monogamous.

00:19:48.400 | They only mate with one other prairie vole,

00:19:51.560 | only raise young with one other prairie vole

00:19:53.520 | for their entire life.

00:19:55.480 | And in another region of the United States,

00:19:58.040 | the same species of animal, the prairie vole,

00:20:01.080 | will mate with many individuals.

00:20:02.720 | They're non-monogamous.

00:20:04.040 | And the major difference, at least as far as we know,

00:20:06.380 | between the prairie voles in one location

00:20:08.360 | and another location is the levels of a molecule

00:20:11.920 | called vasopressin in the brain and body.

00:20:13.920 | Vasopressin is present in humans.

00:20:16.000 | It has numerous biological roles.

00:20:18.360 | It's responsible, for instance,

00:20:19.840 | for controlling the amount of urine that you excrete,

00:20:22.400 | the amount of water that you retain,

00:20:24.080 | and for sexual desire, as well as mate seeking.

00:20:28.360 | Levels of vasopressin in prairie voles

00:20:31.680 | are strongly determinant of whether or not a prairie vole

00:20:35.400 | is going to be monogamous or non-monogamous.

00:20:38.320 | Why do I raise this?

00:20:39.220 | Well, I raise this because the literature on prairie voles

00:20:43.520 | is quite beautiful and has been discussed quite a lot

00:20:47.000 | in the popular press.

00:20:47.820 | You can look it up with an easily just a web engine search.

00:20:50.980 | You'll find lots of information about this,

00:20:52.520 | lots of news articles about this,

00:20:53.960 | and lots of interpretations as to how vasopressin

00:20:56.880 | might be involved in similar different mechanisms in humans.

00:21:00.600 | Now, I don't have a problem

00:21:02.320 | with mapping animal studies to humans.

00:21:04.280 | I think there's certainly a place for that.

00:21:06.160 | But if we just sort of lean back

00:21:08.380 | and look at the giant mass of studies in animals

00:21:11.640 | and their mating behavior and their mate selection behavior,

00:21:15.440 | you can essentially find examples of anything.

00:21:17.840 | You can find examples of polygamy.

00:21:19.960 | You can find examples of cheating, of infidelity.

00:21:23.400 | You can find examples of all sorts of different behaviors

00:21:26.160 | that in your own mind, you can map to human behavior.

00:21:29.280 | But it's really hard to make the leap from animal models

00:21:32.560 | to humans in any kind of direct way.

00:21:34.560 | And so thankfully, there's been tremendous work done

00:21:37.840 | in the last mainly 20 years or so

00:21:40.240 | looking at human mate selection, human desire,

00:21:43.440 | human love, and human attachment.

00:21:45.440 | So we're mainly going to focus on those studies today.

00:21:47.440 | And where appropriate, we will map those findings

00:21:50.880 | back to the findings in animals

00:21:52.720 | to see if there are some universal truths

00:21:55.080 | or some universal principles about how the neural circuits

00:21:58.280 | and biological mechanisms work.

00:22:00.000 | But by and large, we're going to focus

00:22:01.160 | on human studies today.

00:22:02.300 | So unless I say otherwise,

00:22:03.680 | the data that I'm referring to today

00:22:05.100 | are entirely from human beings.

00:22:07.160 | So let's talk about attachment and attachment styles.

00:22:10.240 | And this will offer you the opportunity

00:22:11.840 | to answer some important questions for yourself,

00:22:15.120 | such as what is my, meaning your,

00:22:18.240 | attachment style in relationship?

00:22:20.440 | One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology

00:22:25.340 | is this notion of attachment styles.

00:22:27.680 | And this was something that was discovered

00:22:29.620 | through a beautiful set of studies

00:22:31.280 | that were done by Mary Ainsworth in the 1980s

00:22:34.740 | in which she developed a laboratory condition

00:22:37.240 | called the strange situation task.

00:22:39.880 | Now, the strange situation task has been studied

00:22:42.520 | over and over again in different cultures,

00:22:45.120 | in different locations throughout the world.

00:22:47.360 | And in preparing for this episode,

00:22:49.580 | I actually spoke to three different psychologists.

00:22:51.400 | I spoke to a psychoanalyst,

00:22:52.720 | I spoke to a cognitive behavioral psychologist,

00:22:54.580 | and I actually spoke to a psychiatrist,

00:22:56.040 | excuse me, not a psychologist,

00:22:57.160 | but a psychiatrist with a medical degree and asked,

00:23:00.240 | is the strange situation task

00:23:01.960 | and the various attachment styles

00:23:03.880 | that emerge from that task,

00:23:06.240 | are those still considered valid?

00:23:08.240 | And indeed all three of them said,

00:23:09.860 | if ever there was a literature in psychology

00:23:12.160 | that is absolutely tamped down and has a firm basis

00:23:17.140 | in both data and real world principles

00:23:20.120 | and real world examples,

00:23:21.960 | it's this notion of attachment styles.

00:23:25.500 | So what is the strange situation task?

00:23:27.560 | The strange situation task involves a parent,

00:23:30.160 | typically a mother in the studies that were done,

00:23:32.740 | but a parent or other caregiver bringing their child,

00:23:36.880 | their actual child into a laboratory.

00:23:39.520 | And there's a room with a stranger

00:23:43.040 | and the mother enters the room with the child

00:23:45.840 | and there's some toys in the room

00:23:48.040 | and typically the mother and the stranger will talk,

00:23:51.400 | obviously the stranger is part of the experiment,

00:23:53.240 | it's not just some random person off the street,

00:23:55.640 | and the child is allowed to move about the room,

00:23:58.140 | they can observe the mother

00:23:59.480 | interacting with the other person or not,

00:24:01.720 | they can play with toys or not,

00:24:03.480 | but then at some point the mother leaves

00:24:06.760 | and then at some point later,

00:24:08.160 | designated by the experimenter, the mother comes back.

00:24:11.520 | And what is measured in these studies

00:24:14.380 | is both how the child, the toddler,

00:24:17.800 | reacts to the mother leaving

00:24:19.960 | and how the child reacts to the mother returning

00:24:24.000 | at the end of the experiment.

00:24:25.960 | And oftentimes this will have two or three different phases

00:24:29.680 | where the mother will bring the child in,

00:24:31.680 | then leave, then come back in and leave.

00:24:35.440 | There are also studies in which the behavior of the child

00:24:39.240 | with the stranger is also examined.

00:24:42.080 | So there are a lot of variations of this,

00:24:43.540 | but the basic findings are that toddlers, children,

00:24:48.540 | fall into four different categories of attachment style

00:24:54.580 | and that these attachment styles

00:24:56.640 | can predict many features of adolescent,

00:24:59.680 | teen, young adult, and even adult attachment styles,

00:25:03.480 | not in strange situations of the sort that I just described,

00:25:06.640 | but in romantic attachments.

00:25:08.580 | I should mention also that attachment style is plastic,

00:25:14.560 | meaning it can change across the lifespan.

00:25:17.240 | So as I described the results,

00:25:18.660 | I described the different attachment styles

00:25:20.680 | that are out there.

00:25:21.640 | And if any of those resonate with you

00:25:25.880 | or bring to mind certain people in your life,

00:25:28.880 | please do not assume that those attachment styles

00:25:31.600 | are rigid and fixed for the entire lifespan.

00:25:34.240 | There are also terrific data that indicate

00:25:36.920 | that through specific processes,

00:25:39.520 | both psychological and some biological adjustments,

00:25:43.500 | that people can change their attachment style

00:25:46.000 | and that indeed people who have different attachment styles

00:25:48.580 | can change the attachment styles of others.

00:25:50.880 | But just to make very clear

00:25:52.300 | what the results of the study were,

00:25:53.720 | I want to review what the four different attachment styles

00:25:56.400 | are and typically people fall into one group or another,

00:25:59.640 | but not several.

00:26:00.960 | So the four patterns of attachment

00:26:02.820 | that were revealed by these studies,

00:26:05.120 | again, were revealed by examining the behavior of the child

00:26:08.780 | in response to the mother leaving and the mother returning

00:26:12.160 | and the child's response to the stranger

00:26:15.320 | that is in the room with them.

00:26:16.680 | The first style is the so-called secure attachment style.

00:26:21.080 | In the nomenclature of this kind of study,

00:26:23.560 | these are the so-called B babies as in the letter B,

00:26:26.200 | bulldog, B, not for bulldogs,

00:26:28.440 | but just to designate this category.

00:26:30.960 | The secure attachment style is one in which the child

00:26:35.800 | will engage with the stranger, with the experimenter

00:26:39.040 | while the parent is present in the room,

00:26:42.280 | but that when the parent, typically it's a mother,

00:26:44.480 | but when the parent or other caregiver leaves,

00:26:47.840 | the child does get visibly upset.

00:26:49.960 | They might whine, they might cry,

00:26:51.440 | they might even tantrum a bit.

00:26:53.440 | However, when the caregiver,

00:26:55.840 | meaning the mother or father or other caregiver returns,

00:26:59.320 | the child visibly expresses happiness

00:27:02.220 | that the caregiver has returned, okay?

00:27:04.000 | So that's the hallmark of the secure attachment style.

00:27:07.680 | And again, this is all preverbal.

00:27:09.580 | This is happening long before the child can express

00:27:11.680 | how they feel with words.

00:27:13.800 | And the interpretation of this is that the secure child

00:27:16.720 | feels confident that the caregiver is available

00:27:19.800 | and will be responsive to their needs

00:27:22.320 | and their communications.

00:27:24.160 | So that when the child whines or is distressed,

00:27:28.120 | the parent doesn't come right back into the room,

00:27:29.860 | but at some point they do.

00:27:31.160 | And they seem to have a sense of trust

00:27:33.320 | that if the parent or caregiver leaves,

00:27:35.520 | that the parent will come back

00:27:37.240 | and that they're happy that they do.

00:27:39.780 | These children are also very good

00:27:42.020 | at exploring novel environments after the parent is gone

00:27:45.300 | and while the parent is there.

00:27:46.880 | And almost always when the parent is there,

00:27:49.540 | they will explore more broadly, literally in space,

00:27:52.080 | they'll venture out further than they will

00:27:54.600 | when the parent is gone.

00:27:55.920 | They also tend to engage with the caregiver in a way

00:27:59.520 | that's not immediately and completely trusting,

00:28:01.840 | but that over time seems to evolve

00:28:04.280 | from one in which they're kind of suspicious of this person

00:28:06.340 | to one in which they're at least somewhat trusting, okay?

00:28:09.880 | So those are the general contours

00:28:11.940 | of the secure attachment style.

00:28:13.680 | And fortunately, nowadays there are physiological studies

00:28:16.560 | measuring things like heart rate and breathing

00:28:18.680 | and other measures that correlate with the subjective

00:28:22.400 | assessment of what these children are feeling.

00:28:25.040 | Okay, so first category is secure attached.

00:28:27.120 | The second category is a so-called anxious avoidant

00:28:30.760 | or insecurely attached, which are the category A babies.

00:28:35.560 | The children with anxious avoidant

00:28:37.620 | insecure attachment patterns generally tend to avoid

00:28:41.160 | or ignore the caregiver, all right?

00:28:43.560 | Meaning the parent and show very little emotion

00:28:47.660 | when the parent leaves or returns.

00:28:51.220 | So this is the reason they call them avoidant

00:28:53.960 | or anxious avoidant and kind of insecure.

00:28:56.380 | There isn't this happiness or joy that the parent is back.

00:28:59.360 | They don't seem to express that.

00:29:01.280 | They do not exhibit distress on separation,

00:29:04.540 | and they generally tend to have some tendency

00:29:08.480 | to approach the caregiver when they return,

00:29:11.020 | but there doesn't seem to be a general expression of joy.

00:29:14.280 | And again, physiological measures support that as well.

00:29:16.920 | Things like changes in heart rate tend to be less dramatic

00:29:20.700 | in the anxious avoidant insecure attachment style

00:29:24.200 | than in the secure attachment style.

00:29:25.940 | Okay, so that's the second one.

00:29:27.680 | The third category is the so-called anxious ambivalent

00:29:32.420 | slash resistant insecure category.

00:29:35.400 | Okay, I didn't name these categories,

00:29:36.720 | so you have to blame others in this one instance.

00:29:39.780 | For everything else, blame me.

00:29:40.760 | But in this instance, you have to blame the psychologists

00:29:43.720 | that named this category.

00:29:44.880 | The anxious ambivalent slash resistant insecure category,

00:29:48.680 | also called the C babies,

00:29:51.000 | for the letter C, just as a categorization.

00:29:54.020 | The anxious ambivalent resistant insecure toddlers, really,

00:29:58.760 | show distress even before separation from their mother

00:30:01.920 | or other caregiver, and they tend to be very clingy

00:30:04.840 | and difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns.

00:30:08.880 | Okay, so they're distressed

00:30:10.240 | even before the mother leaves the room,

00:30:12.160 | and they tend to be very clingy

00:30:14.040 | and really hard to calm down when the mother returns.

00:30:16.740 | They tend to show either what seems to be resentment

00:30:21.560 | in response to the parents' absence,

00:30:23.440 | we don't really know what they're feeling,

00:30:24.920 | or some sort of helpless passivity.

00:30:26.940 | And there's actually subcategorizations

00:30:28.520 | that the psychologists have come up with

00:30:29.840 | with C1 subtypes and C2 subtypes.

00:30:31.920 | We don't have to get bogged down in that.

00:30:33.560 | But just know that there isn't one absolute measure

00:30:36.960 | that says, oh, well, this person is anxious ambivalent,

00:30:40.360 | resistant, insecure.

00:30:41.620 | They could be somewhat passive, or they could be somewhat

00:30:46.340 | angry at the caregiver.

00:30:47.740 | But the basic idea is that before and after the separation,

00:30:52.740 | they are clingy and difficult to comfort.

00:30:55.260 | They just can't seem to calm themselves down.

00:30:56.920 | And physiological measures of heart rate

00:30:58.900 | and hormone measurements, such as cortisol,

00:31:01.000 | also support that statement.

00:31:02.820 | And the third category of attachment style

00:31:05.500 | is the so-called disorganized or disoriented,

00:31:08.300 | or D for the letter D, babies.

00:31:11.120 | This is a categorization that was added later

00:31:13.760 | to this strange situation task that is a real hallmark

00:31:16.660 | of developmental psychology studies.

00:31:19.400 | It was developed by Mary Ainsworth graduate student,

00:31:23.320 | Mary Main, who I actually had the great fortune

00:31:25.600 | of taking a course from and learning from

00:31:27.240 | when I was a graduate student at Berkeley many years ago.

00:31:30.700 | And this fourth categorization was controversial

00:31:32.820 | for a while, but now is generally accepted.

00:31:35.760 | The key feature of the disorganized, disoriented category

00:31:40.160 | is that the toddlers tend to be tense

00:31:43.420 | and they tend to encompass a lot

00:31:45.300 | of kind of odd physical postures.

00:31:47.580 | They tend to hunch their shoulders.

00:31:49.920 | They'll put their hands behind their neck.

00:31:51.680 | They'll cock their head to the side.

00:31:54.200 | For those of you listening,

00:31:55.100 | I'm doing this on the video version.

00:31:56.700 | It's not where you don't have to go see that.

00:31:58.980 | But for those of you that are watching this on video,

00:32:01.420 | they tend to kind of constrain their body size a bit

00:32:04.300 | and go into odd postures that they normally

00:32:06.500 | wouldn't do anywhere else.

00:32:09.820 | So this is why it's called the disorganized

00:32:12.500 | or disoriented category.

00:32:15.020 | It seems like these children just don't really know

00:32:17.140 | how to react to a separation.

00:32:19.100 | And they just start to manifest behaviors

00:32:21.740 | and emotional tones that aren't observed

00:32:24.060 | in other situations.

00:32:25.680 | Okay, so we've got our four categories.

00:32:27.780 | I'll try and use the shortest possible names

00:32:29.500 | for each category.

00:32:30.340 | We've got category one, which is securely attached.

00:32:32.640 | We've got category two, which is insecurely attached,

00:32:35.720 | also sometimes called anxious avoidant.

00:32:38.120 | Then we've got category three,

00:32:39.520 | which is the resistant insecure category,

00:32:42.700 | which is anxious ambivalent.

00:32:44.020 | And then there's this fourth category,

00:32:45.840 | the disorganized disoriented category

00:32:48.420 | where the so-called D babies.

00:32:50.900 | Now, what's interesting about this from the perspective

00:32:54.700 | of desire, love and attachment is that the categorizations

00:32:59.700 | of children into one of these four different categories

00:33:03.500 | as toddlers is strongly predictive

00:33:06.540 | of their attachment style

00:33:08.280 | in romantic partnerships later in life,

00:33:11.280 | which is to me both amazing and surprising

00:33:14.880 | and not surprising all at the same time.

00:33:17.080 | Amazing because it means that, first of all,

00:33:20.880 | we are relatively hardwired for attachment.

00:33:23.680 | I think that that's incredible and beautiful

00:33:26.640 | that we have designated neurons, nerve cells

00:33:29.660 | and hormonal systems that are there to ensure

00:33:32.600 | that we have some sort of response to a caregiver being there

00:33:37.060 | or not being there or returning or leaving,

00:33:40.160 | but also that the same neural circuitries,

00:33:42.800 | the same hormonal responses are at least in some way

00:33:45.940 | repurposed for entirely different types

00:33:49.340 | of attachments later in life.

00:33:51.260 | So when we hear the psychologists talk about

00:33:54.740 | how we formed a template early in life

00:33:57.680 | based on experiences that were even pre-verbal

00:34:00.080 | before we had language and those templates

00:34:03.060 | are superimposed on our relationships,

00:34:05.300 | or we should say our later relationships

00:34:07.380 | are superimposed on those templates,

00:34:09.060 | there really is a basis for that.

00:34:10.660 | We now have neuroimaging studies to support,

00:34:13.380 | for instance, the work of Alan Shore from UCLA,

00:34:16.740 | showing that when a mother and child interact,

00:34:20.220 | either through very soothing interactions

00:34:23.060 | like bottle feeding or breastfeeding

00:34:25.160 | or singing to one's baby or putting them to sleep,

00:34:28.240 | that the brain of the child and the brain of the mother

00:34:31.540 | are entering a coordinated state of relaxation.

00:34:34.620 | And it's not one direction mother to child,

00:34:36.900 | the child is also calming the mother.

00:34:39.260 | Typically these studies were done with mothers,

00:34:42.100 | again, sometimes with fathers, but typically with mothers.

00:34:45.120 | And in addition to that,

00:34:46.540 | when the mother or other caregiver acts very excited

00:34:50.400 | and raises their voice or puts a lilt in their voice

00:34:53.340 | or widens their eyes, that the child will do the same.

00:34:56.460 | And again, there's a bi-directional interaction

00:34:59.080 | in that case of excitement.

00:35:01.120 | And there's the release of neurochemicals

00:35:03.180 | like dopamine into the bloodstream,

00:35:04.760 | whereas in the relaxation scenario

00:35:06.600 | and the soothing scenario,

00:35:08.100 | we know the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin.

00:35:11.820 | So the neural systems for attachment

00:35:15.500 | and the neural systems for what we call autonomic arousal

00:35:18.860 | for being alert and calm don't act in a vacuum.

00:35:23.700 | They are tethered to other people in our environment.

00:35:26.380 | And of course we know this, right?

00:35:27.880 | We sometimes hear the statement,

00:35:29.060 | "No one can make you feel anything."

00:35:30.740 | I've always had a little bit of a problem

00:35:31.960 | with that statement.

00:35:32.960 | I don't think I'm contradicting anyone in particular,

00:35:36.860 | but you hear that a lot.

00:35:37.700 | No one can make you feel anything.

00:35:39.380 | Indeed they can, right?

00:35:40.620 | A physical injury can make you feel something.

00:35:43.220 | If somebody says something that you very much like,

00:35:45.420 | it can make you feel something.

00:35:46.680 | And if somebody says something that you very much dislike,

00:35:49.300 | it will make you feel something.

00:35:50.560 | So the idea that no one can make us feel anything

00:35:52.940 | isn't actually true.

00:35:54.060 | Our nervous system is tethered

00:35:56.340 | to the nervous systems of others.

00:35:58.260 | And that is true from the very earliest stages of our lives.

00:36:01.540 | And in this case, we're talking about

00:36:03.180 | how our templates for attachment in romantic relationships,

00:36:06.920 | how we find them, how we maintain them,

00:36:09.220 | and indeed how we break them and reform them

00:36:11.980 | is based on a template that was established

00:36:14.300 | through an entirely different set of priorities,

00:36:16.580 | which was how we feel safe and secure in novel environments

00:36:20.340 | depending on whether or not our primary caregiver

00:36:22.220 | is there or not.

00:36:23.220 | Neuroimaging supports that.

00:36:24.900 | When I say neuroimaging, I mean brain scans support that.

00:36:27.420 | Measures of hormones in the body and brain support that.

00:36:30.100 | Measures of neurochemicals support that.

00:36:32.020 | There's simply no way around this truth

00:36:34.260 | that we have a set of roadmaps in our mind

00:36:37.080 | that are reused for entirely different purposes

00:36:40.260 | later in life.

00:36:41.180 | That is vitally important to understand

00:36:43.740 | because if one is successful in forming romantic attachments,

00:36:48.740 | maintaining them, et cetera, or not,

00:36:52.820 | does in fact reflect the earlier templates

00:36:55.840 | that you've created.

00:36:57.100 | But as I've mentioned before, the good news is

00:36:59.500 | that these templates can shift over time.

00:37:01.620 | And one of the more powerful ways

00:37:03.160 | to shift those templates over time

00:37:05.140 | is purely by the knowledge that they exist

00:37:07.980 | and the understanding that those templates are malleable.

00:37:11.880 | They can change through the process of neuroplasticity.

00:37:15.580 | Again, neuroplasticity is just a rewiring

00:37:17.540 | of nerve connections that is very much present in childhood,

00:37:21.740 | but also very much present in adulthood.

00:37:23.900 | So if you're somebody who you think falls

00:37:26.460 | into category one, two, three, or four,

00:37:28.700 | or you know somebody or involved with somebody

00:37:30.780 | who falls into category one, two, three, and four,

00:37:33.220 | the mere knowledge of that can be very useful.

00:37:37.100 | But you might ask, well, what do I do with that knowledge?

00:37:39.140 | Well, fortunately, both psychologists and biologists

00:37:41.380 | have started to leverage that knowledge

00:37:43.420 | toward establishing better, more secure bonds

00:37:46.500 | in adult romantic relationships.

00:37:48.260 | And there's a book that has really tapped into this.

00:37:51.220 | I think it's the first book

00:37:52.140 | that has really addressed this head on.

00:37:53.860 | And that book comes from two Columbia professors.

00:37:57.460 | And the title of the book is "Attached,

00:38:01.460 | "The New Science of Adult Attachment

00:38:04.260 | "and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love."

00:38:07.060 | The authors of this book are Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

00:38:11.180 | Again, both of them are skilled academics and researchers

00:38:15.020 | who have really taken the literature that I described

00:38:17.660 | on the strange situation task

00:38:19.060 | and mapped it to adult attachment styles.

00:38:21.100 | And also they've mapped out ways

00:38:23.900 | that they've observed in their clinical practice

00:38:26.260 | and that is laboratory supported for, for instance,

00:38:30.480 | people that have an anxious ambivalent

00:38:32.540 | or what we would call an insecure attachment style,

00:38:34.820 | or for people that fall into the disorganized

00:38:38.180 | or disoriented attachment style,

00:38:39.780 | how they can modify that attachment style

00:38:42.180 | in or out of relationships in order to establish

00:38:45.820 | what I think everybody wants, which is secure attachment.

00:38:48.860 | Why does everybody want that?

00:38:50.100 | Well, secure attachment allows people

00:38:52.020 | to be both in relationship,

00:38:54.020 | or if they choose to be on their own,

00:38:56.180 | or to be in relationship,

00:38:57.580 | but physically separated from somebody else,

00:38:59.460 | or even emotionally separated from somebody else,

00:39:01.540 | and maintain what we call a stable autonomic equilibrium,

00:39:05.500 | the ability to remain calm, clear-headed.

00:39:08.300 | You might not like what's happening,

00:39:09.960 | but you're able to navigate that with some sense of clarity

00:39:12.660 | and not excessive discomfort.

00:39:14.740 | So is there a goal in all of this stuff about love, desire,

00:39:18.700 | and attachment?

00:39:19.540 | Indeed, there is.

00:39:20.580 | The secure attachment style is the one that leads

00:39:24.460 | to the most stable and predictable long-term relationships.

00:39:28.100 | Put differently, babies, toddlers, adolescents, teens,

00:39:32.700 | and young adults that have a secure attachment style

00:39:35.320 | are more likely to find and form long-term relationships

00:39:38.480 | than are people in the other categories.

00:39:40.780 | But people in other categories can learn

00:39:43.740 | and eventually migrate into the secure attachment style.

00:39:47.660 | And I think that book "Attached,"

00:39:49.900 | I have no affiliation to the authors or the book itself,

00:39:52.540 | I should just mention that,

00:39:53.840 | "Attached, The New Science of Adult Attachment

00:39:55.700 | and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love,"

00:39:57.500 | really, it sounds very pop psychology-esque,

00:40:00.740 | but it is really grounded

00:40:02.020 | in the research psychology literature,

00:40:03.840 | and there's also some interesting biology there.

00:40:06.920 | Another point to make about attachment styles

00:40:09.760 | is that it is possible,

00:40:12.300 | and some of you may be familiar with circumstances,

00:40:14.900 | whereby people who are securely attached,

00:40:18.060 | either because they grew up in an environment

00:40:19.900 | where secure attachment was cultivated

00:40:22.060 | or because they developed that on their own,

00:40:24.560 | can also migrate out of the securely attached category

00:40:28.980 | into insecurely attached

00:40:30.560 | or into avoidant types of attachment styles

00:40:34.340 | as teens or as young adults

00:40:36.300 | or as adults at any age or any stage of life,

00:40:40.740 | by virtue of being with somebody who has a different,

00:40:43.760 | perhaps less adaptive attachment style, right?

00:40:47.280 | What this means is that if you have

00:40:49.620 | or you develop a secure attachment style,

00:40:51.920 | it's vitally important to protect that attachment style

00:40:55.600 | because it is possible to become anxiously attached

00:40:58.160 | even if you grew up in a stable attachment framework,

00:41:01.180 | and again, this can happen at any stage.

00:41:03.660 | So if you're interested in attachment styles

00:41:05.460 | and how they influence adult romantic attachments,

00:41:08.680 | and certainly if you are a parent,

00:41:11.380 | I would encourage you to check out the book "Attached."

00:41:14.700 | Again, it's quite good,

00:41:16.000 | and I think that it offers a number of actionable tools

00:41:18.760 | to both form and hold on to secure attachment styles.

00:41:22.460 | So I mentioned that the neural circuits

00:41:24.000 | for child-parent or child-caregiver attachment

00:41:28.240 | are repurposed for romantic attachment later in life,

00:41:32.420 | but what are these neural circuits?

00:41:34.800 | What do they do?

00:41:35.740 | I mean, it's so attractive, if you will,

00:41:39.100 | to think about a brain area that controls love

00:41:41.660 | or a brain area that controls desire

00:41:43.760 | or a brain area that controls attachment,

00:41:45.360 | but it simply doesn't work that way.

00:41:47.220 | As I've talked about before on this podcast,

00:41:49.480 | and I will say again and again,

00:41:50.800 | because it will persist to be true long after I'm gone,

00:41:53.860 | is that no one brain area can give rise

00:41:56.680 | to anything as complex as desire, love, or attachment.

00:42:01.020 | Instead, there are multiple brain areas

00:42:03.300 | that through their coordinated action

00:42:05.520 | create a sort of a song that we call desire

00:42:08.260 | or a song that we call love

00:42:09.920 | or a song that we call attachment, not a literal song,

00:42:12.920 | although there are songs about desire, love, and attachment,

00:42:14.960 | of course, many songs, some good, some not so good,

00:42:19.100 | but rather different brain areas being active

00:42:22.240 | in different sequences and with different intensities

00:42:25.120 | can make us feel as if we are in the mode

00:42:28.620 | that we call desire or in the mode of love

00:42:30.700 | or in the mode of attachment.

00:42:32.560 | But beneath all of that is this element

00:42:36.360 | of autonomic arousal, and I want to focus

00:42:38.760 | on autonomic arousal just for a bit longer

00:42:41.460 | because it really is one of the three core elements

00:42:45.240 | by which we form and maintain loving attachments

00:42:48.660 | and by which we break loving attachments.

00:42:51.360 | The autonomic nervous system, as the name suggests,

00:42:55.160 | is automatic, in fact, that's what autonomic means.

00:42:59.040 | Now, it's actually the case

00:43:01.040 | that we can control our autonomic nervous system

00:43:02.880 | to some degree or another,

00:43:04.140 | but the autonomic nervous system controls things

00:43:06.260 | like digestion, our breathing,

00:43:09.340 | whether or not we're conscious of that breathing or not.

00:43:11.860 | It controls things like how alert we are

00:43:14.220 | or how sleepy we are.

00:43:15.940 | And the autonomic nervous system,

00:43:18.080 | as I just briefly described earlier,

00:43:19.940 | is really something that we come into the world with.

00:43:22.700 | It's hardwired, all the elements are there,

00:43:25.440 | but through interactions with our parent,

00:43:28.420 | either soothing interactions or fun, playful interactions,

00:43:32.740 | or dare I say, scary interactions,

00:43:35.460 | our autonomic nervous system gets tuned up,

00:43:38.700 | meaning we each develop a tendency

00:43:41.560 | to either be more alert and anxious or more calm

00:43:44.900 | or kind of a balance of alert and calm.

00:43:47.020 | Now, of course, this changes across each day

00:43:49.020 | and depending how tired we are late in the day,

00:43:50.740 | if we've been awake for a while, we tend to get sleepy.

00:43:52.740 | Early in the day, if we're very rested,

00:43:54.160 | we tend to wake up and feel very alert.

00:43:56.280 | So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system

00:43:58.040 | is it's kind of a seesaw.

00:43:59.500 | We go back and forth between being very alert,

00:44:02.140 | we can be alert and calm, or we can be very, very alert,

00:44:04.760 | we can be in a state of panic, we can be fast asleep,

00:44:07.900 | so we can be extremely calm,

00:44:09.220 | or we can just be kind of sleepy, semi-calm,

00:44:13.060 | but still also alert.

00:44:14.900 | So think about it like a seesaw.

00:44:17.020 | And that seesaw has a hinge.

00:44:19.940 | And that hinge defines how tight or loose that seesaw is,

00:44:23.220 | how readily it can tilt back and forth.

00:44:26.100 | Our autonomic tone is how tight that hinge is.

00:44:30.140 | And there are biological mechanisms to explain this,

00:44:32.140 | but here I just want to stay with the analogy

00:44:33.740 | of the seesaw for now.

00:44:35.020 | The interactions between child and caregiver early in life

00:44:41.680 | take the child and the caregiver

00:44:44.240 | from one end of the seesaw to the other,

00:44:47.020 | from being very alert in a state of play, for instance,

00:44:50.140 | to being nursed and being very soothed until we go to sleep.

00:44:53.980 | And of course, we each have a seesaw,

00:44:55.940 | the parent and the child has a seesaw,

00:44:57.340 | and they're interacting.

00:44:58.180 | What do I mean by that?

00:44:59.360 | Well, there are beautiful studies and beautiful,

00:45:02.940 | not in the sense that they focused on a pleasant topic,

00:45:05.240 | but beautiful because they were done so beautifully well,

00:45:08.380 | that looked at, for instance,

00:45:09.980 | the response of mothers and their physiologies

00:45:13.740 | and the response of children and their physiologies

00:45:16.820 | during the bombing of cities during World War II.

00:45:19.520 | So an unpleasant situation,

00:45:21.500 | but what was revealed during the course of these studies

00:45:25.100 | was that if the mothers were very stressed

00:45:28.700 | during an onslaught of bombing of the city,

00:45:31.540 | the children's physiologies tended to be stressed also

00:45:34.880 | and persisted in being stressed

00:45:37.420 | long after that stressful episode was done.

00:45:41.560 | They actually followed that these children well out

00:45:45.020 | for many decades afterwards.

00:45:47.360 | Conversely, if the parent, and in this case, again,

00:45:50.800 | it was mothers that were explored in these studies,

00:45:53.700 | had turned this whole business

00:45:55.460 | of going into the bomb shelters into somewhat of a game,

00:45:59.100 | taking it seriously, but essentially telling the children,

00:46:01.660 | okay, it's time to go,

00:46:02.500 | but not expressing much stress or distress.

00:46:05.820 | The children also didn't develop much stress

00:46:07.560 | or distress or trauma.

00:46:09.340 | Now, there were exceptions to this, of course,

00:46:10.940 | but in general, that was the rule

00:46:12.480 | that the autonomic nervous systems of children

00:46:14.860 | tend to mimic the autonomic nervous systems

00:46:16.900 | of the primary caregiver.

00:46:18.760 | And the mechanisms by which this occurs has been explored.

00:46:22.580 | And again, I just refer to the beautiful work of Alan Shore

00:46:25.580 | at University of California, Los Angeles.

00:46:28.120 | And then again, his name is Shore, spelled S-C-H-O-R-E.

00:46:32.240 | I'm looking down briefly at the floor here

00:46:33.880 | because I'll just reach for the book.

00:46:36.540 | He has a wonderful book called "Right Brain Psychotherapy."

00:46:39.700 | It's a little bit technical,

00:46:40.720 | but if you're interested in some of the studies,

00:46:43.180 | this book, "Right Brain Psychotherapy,"

00:46:44.940 | details how everything from nursing of children

00:46:48.380 | to playtime behavior,

00:46:50.300 | to strange situation type task behavior

00:46:52.820 | that we talked about before,

00:46:53.660 | which of course occurs when children get dropped off

00:46:56.100 | at daycare or nursery school or with babysitters, et cetera.

00:46:59.580 | And indeed, all types of caregiver-child interactions

00:47:04.040 | tune up that autonomic nervous system

00:47:06.860 | so that the child ends up with an autonomic nervous system

00:47:10.180 | that either tends to lean more towards alert and anxious,

00:47:14.660 | or can be very alert but calm,

00:47:16.540 | or can be very calm and hard to budge.

00:47:18.420 | Again, it's the tightness of that hinge

00:47:20.780 | that really underlies these attachment styles

00:47:23.740 | that we were talking about earlier.

00:47:25.220 | And not on this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:47:27.980 | but on many other previous episodes,

00:47:29.580 | such as the Master Stress episode,

00:47:31.700 | or some of the Optimize Health episodes.

00:47:34.620 | You can find these if you want at hubermanlab.com.

00:47:36.940 | A lot of the tools and techniques that are recommended there

00:47:40.180 | have to do with readjusting the autonomic nervous system

00:47:43.860 | in deliberate ways as an adult.

00:47:45.540 | Again, I won't go into the specific tools,

00:47:48.560 | but for instance, the physiological sigh,

00:47:52.620 | this tool that I've talked about extensively

00:47:55.140 | of two inhales through the nose,

00:47:57.320 | as deeply as you can on the first one,

00:47:58.860 | sneaking in a little bit more air on the second one,

00:48:00.820 | and then a long exhale through the mouth,

00:48:02.860 | is a way of adjusting that autonomic seesaw.

00:48:05.660 | It tends to make us more calm.

00:48:07.300 | It activates what we call the parasympathetic arm

00:48:10.420 | of the autonomic nervous system,

00:48:11.840 | which is just fancy nerd speak

00:48:13.220 | for it's a quick way to calm yourself down, right?

00:48:16.260 | Things like ice baths, or cold showers,

00:48:19.420 | or cold immersion, or hyperventilate hyperventilation,

00:48:23.460 | by contrast, are ways in which we can deliberately increase

00:48:27.820 | the level of our so-called sympathetic arm

00:48:30.540 | of our autonomic nervous system to make ourselves more alert.

00:48:32.820 | Why would you want to do that?

00:48:33.860 | Well, you can do that to be more alert,

00:48:35.800 | to be more awake if you like,

00:48:37.240 | or as a form of self-induced stress inoculation

00:48:40.460 | to be able to tolerate higher levels of adrenaline

00:48:43.740 | by making it a practice that you self-direct.

00:48:46.320 | The reason those tools are out there is because many of us,

00:48:51.460 | for whatever reason, we don't have to blame anyone,

00:48:54.340 | but because of our childhood templates,

00:48:56.840 | because of things that happened and didn't happen

00:48:58.740 | in terms of our interactions with caregivers,

00:49:00.740 | have autonomic nervous systems that are tilted

00:49:02.740 | to one side or the other more than we would like,

00:49:05.380 | or in which the hinge that I'm talking about

00:49:09.140 | in this analogy is too loose or that is too tight,

00:49:13.000 | and we're sort of stuck in a mode of anxiousness

00:49:14.960 | or stuck in a mode of lack of energy.

00:49:17.140 | That's what those tools are really about.

00:49:19.520 | But at a deeper level, the autonomic nervous system

00:49:24.520 | is really the system that governs how we will react

00:49:27.860 | in response to a romantic partner being present or leaving.

00:49:32.860 | And I don't necessarily mean leaving the relationship

00:49:35.640 | entirely, although it could mean that, right?

00:49:37.740 | We know people, I'm sure you know people,

00:49:39.620 | that upon the end of a relationship

00:49:42.080 | that they wanted very much are absolutely crushed.

00:49:44.940 | And actually, in researching this episode there,

00:49:47.540 | I discovered there's an extensive literature finding

00:49:50.180 | that the feelings that one has after a breakup

00:49:53.960 | are very much like a clinical depression in many cases.

00:49:57.300 | But there are individuals that can look at a breakup

00:49:59.820 | as a transient event that they don't interpret

00:50:03.300 | as going to mean so much for all aspects of their life

00:50:07.220 | or reshaping their view of themselves.

00:50:09.600 | Why?

00:50:10.440 | Well, we have different levels of autonomic function.

00:50:14.120 | And depending on where our seesaw is, if you will,

00:50:17.760 | some of us become extremely distraught

00:50:20.060 | and can't recalibrate ourselves,

00:50:21.760 | can't adjust ourselves down from stress to calm,

00:50:25.340 | or can't take ourselves from exhausted to more alert

00:50:28.700 | if we need to do that on our own.

00:50:30.420 | And so that's why tools for doing that exist.

00:50:32.820 | But attachment itself is about

00:50:37.160 | where our autonomic nervous system resides.

00:50:39.700 | So if I were to offer a set of tools

00:50:41.820 | around these topics of desire, love, and attachment,

00:50:44.620 | I would say, first of all, you might want to think about

00:50:46.340 | whether or not you fall into the secure, insecure

00:50:48.700 | or other attachment styles.

00:50:51.340 | Second, I think it is vitally important for all of us,

00:50:55.340 | but certainly for people that are in relationships

00:50:58.120 | or seeking relationships,

00:50:59.460 | to be able to at least have some recognition

00:51:03.020 | of where our autonomic nervous system tends to reside,

00:51:06.780 | both in terms of when we are with somebody

00:51:08.900 | and when they leave.

00:51:10.380 | When we are apart for long periods of time,

00:51:12.300 | can we calm ourselves?

00:51:13.280 | Can we self-soothe?

00:51:14.860 | Or are we very much dependent on the presence of another

00:51:17.940 | in order to feel soothed?

00:51:19.460 | Now, I absolutely want to emphasize

00:51:21.900 | that there is nothing wrong.

00:51:23.340 | In fact, there's everything right with feeling great

00:51:26.140 | in the presence of somebody else.

00:51:27.540 | That is actually a hallmark of strong

00:51:30.560 | and quality attachments.

00:51:32.060 | These days, we hear the term codependent a lot.

00:51:34.860 | This was a, I believe the term was first coined

00:51:37.160 | by Pia Mellody, and it actually does occupy

00:51:39.780 | an important role in the world of trauma, trauma healing,

00:51:44.520 | so-called trauma bonding, topics of another episode.

00:51:47.160 | I actually did an episode on fear and trauma,

00:51:48.900 | and we will do one all about trauma bonding

00:51:50.620 | with an expert at some point in the future.

00:51:52.900 | But codependence and codependency,

00:51:55.980 | the term can sometimes be misinterpreted

00:51:59.660 | as any dependence on another isn't good.

00:52:03.500 | Interdependence, healthy interdependence, of course, is good.

00:52:07.060 | It is the hallmark of healthy child-parent relations,

00:52:09.700 | sibling relations, and romantic relations.

00:52:12.480 | But a key element of healthy interdependence is that yes,

00:52:17.020 | our autonomic nervous system is adjusted

00:52:19.180 | by the presence of another,

00:52:20.780 | but that also that we can adjust

00:52:22.460 | our own autonomic nervous system

00:52:24.020 | even in the absence of that person.

00:52:26.380 | That if the person goes away temporarily or permanently,

00:52:30.140 | that we can still regulate our own autonomic nervous system,

00:52:33.600 | both from states of stress to states of calm,

00:52:35.900 | both from states of exhaustion to states of more alertness.

00:52:40.340 | And of course, we all need sleep

00:52:41.620 | to go from exhaustion to alertness.

00:52:43.820 | But what I'm referring to here is the ability

00:52:45.740 | to regulate when distraught or regulate when fatigued

00:52:50.740 | or feeling depressed.

00:52:52.820 | And that is and is all about the autonomic nervous system.

00:52:56.980 | So as we talk about attachment styles

00:52:58.660 | and we talk about infant and toddler

00:53:00.860 | and adult attachment styles,

00:53:01.920 | what we are really talking about

00:53:03.880 | is a complex set of neural circuitries.

00:53:05.780 | And one of those neural circuitries,

00:53:07.760 | which is absolutely crucial,

00:53:09.020 | is this autonomic nervous system.

00:53:11.020 | So if the autonomic nervous system is one key component

00:53:14.780 | of desire, love, and attachment, what are the other two?

00:53:18.840 | And what I'm going to tell you next

00:53:20.860 | is largely the pioneering work of Helen Fisher,

00:53:24.620 | who is really an anthropologist

00:53:26.640 | who's become a bit of a neuroscientist

00:53:28.580 | and has collaborated with neuroscientists

00:53:30.740 | to establish brain areas and neural circuits

00:53:33.460 | that are associated with different aspects

00:53:35.180 | of attachment, love, and desire.

00:53:36.980 | I think the first really high quality study

00:53:39.660 | of neural circuits associated with these themes

00:53:42.700 | was a paper published in 2005

00:53:45.540 | in a very fine anatomical journal,

00:53:47.740 | perhaps the best neuroanatomical journal,

00:53:50.420 | which is the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

00:53:53.220 | The Journal of Comparative Neurology

00:53:54.480 | has been around for more than a hundred years

00:53:56.780 | and is considered the archival location

00:53:59.940 | for placing really high quality anatomy.

00:54:02.740 | They have tremendously high standards.

00:54:04.580 | And the study that I'm referring to

00:54:06.740 | is entitled "Romantic Love and fMRI,"

00:54:09.460 | meaning functional magnetic resonance imaging study

00:54:12.500 | of a neural mechanism for mate choice.

00:54:14.860 | And Dr. Fisher is a author on this paper,

00:54:19.100 | as is Arthur Aaron and Lucy Brown,

00:54:21.940 | so all very fine researchers.

00:54:23.980 | And this study, as well as several other studies

00:54:27.540 | using magnetic resonance imaging,

00:54:30.500 | things like EEG, neuroanatomical tracing, et cetera,

00:54:33.700 | have identified a large number of brain areas

00:54:35.660 | that are associated with different aspects

00:54:37.100 | of desire, love, and attachment.

00:54:38.500 | And I'll just throw out a few names

00:54:39.820 | of those brain areas and what they control,

00:54:41.580 | and then I'll tell you how those anchor

00:54:43.860 | to the other two categories of neural circuits

00:54:46.380 | essential for desire, love, and attachment.

00:54:48.540 | So not surprisingly, the dopamine system in the brain

00:54:53.340 | is associated with desire, love, and attachment,

00:54:55.880 | and mainly with desire, although to some extent love.

00:54:58.720 | Dopamine is a neurochemical sometimes associated

00:55:00.900 | with reward, but as some of you have heard me say before,

00:55:05.100 | it is mainly a molecule of motivation, craving, and pursuit.

00:55:09.620 | And that motivation, craving, and pursuit

00:55:11.940 | that relates to dopamine is not unique

00:55:14.100 | to attachment or love or sex or mating, et cetera.

00:55:17.020 | It is a universal generic currency in the brain

00:55:20.840 | for pursuing something.

00:55:22.300 | Food when you're hungry, a mate when you want one,

00:55:25.300 | two mate when you want two,

00:55:27.060 | warmth when you're cold, et cetera, et cetera, okay?

00:55:30.200 | So it's not for one specific purpose,

00:55:31.940 | but the brain areas associated with dopamine involve,

00:55:35.960 | for instance, the ventral tegmental area,

00:55:38.540 | the substantia nigra, areas of that sort, the basal ganglia.

00:55:42.860 | You don't need to know these names.

00:55:44.020 | Just understand that these are networks of neurons

00:55:46.540 | that tend to put the person, you,

00:55:49.100 | into a state of forward action and pursuit

00:55:51.660 | and craving and motivation.

00:55:53.980 | They are not about being quiescent, relaxed, et cetera.

00:55:57.140 | The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation

00:56:01.740 | are most associated with love and attachment,

00:56:04.740 | not surprisingly, and they're the neurochemical serotonin

00:56:07.900 | and to some extent oxytocin

00:56:09.780 | are the predominant neurochemicals involved.

00:56:12.260 | And those are released from brain areas

00:56:13.800 | such as the raphe nucleus in the back of the brain.

00:56:16.460 | You may have heard that the majority of serotonin

00:56:18.780 | in your body is made in your gut, and indeed that's true,

00:56:22.060 | but I hate to break it to you.

00:56:23.580 | The serotonin in your gut is not responsible

00:56:27.060 | for your feelings of love and attachment,

00:56:28.740 | at least not to a high degree.

00:56:30.120 | That's mainly going to be the reflection of neurons

00:56:32.760 | in your brain that make serotonin.

00:56:35.100 | And there are other areas of the brain

00:56:36.540 | that make serotonin as well and oxytocin as well,

00:56:39.960 | but they tend to be associated with the kind of warmth

00:56:42.340 | and calm and the soothing that we feel

00:56:45.380 | in the presence of another.

00:56:46.540 | And again, these are not strictly divided circuits.

00:56:49.920 | We can have dopamine and serotonin present

00:56:51.900 | in our brain and body at the same time

00:56:53.700 | to equal or different degrees.

00:56:56.020 | And we will return in a little bit to what happens

00:56:58.320 | when levels of dopamine are very high

00:57:00.220 | and levels of serotonin are low and vice versa and so on,

00:57:03.140 | including in states of neurochemically modified states

00:57:08.140 | as it were in when we talk about things like MDMA,

00:57:11.620 | so-called ecstasy.

00:57:13.420 | But in the meantime, I want to just discuss

00:57:16.920 | the two neural circuits that use dopamine,

00:57:20.480 | that use serotonin and oxytocin,

00:57:22.740 | and that collaborate with the autonomic nervous system

00:57:26.100 | to drive what we call desire, love, and attachment.

00:57:29.320 | And the three circuits are autonomic nervous system,

00:57:33.740 | we talked about that one.

00:57:35.280 | Then there's the nervous system components

00:57:37.880 | or the neural circuits for empathy,

00:57:40.040 | for being able to see and respond to

00:57:43.660 | and indeed match the emotional tone

00:57:46.680 | or the autonomic tone of another.

00:57:49.460 | And then there's the third category,

00:57:51.200 | and this might surprise some of you,

00:57:52.320 | it certainly surprised me,

00:57:53.760 | but the data point to the fact

00:57:55.360 | that the third neural circuit

00:57:56.840 | that's very important for establishing bonds

00:57:59.820 | is one associated with positive delusions.

00:58:02.740 | So given that the neural circuits for empathy

00:58:04.520 | are absolutely crucial for falling in love

00:58:07.420 | and maintaining stable attachments,

00:58:10.300 | I'd like to talk about those neural circuits

00:58:11.740 | and what they are.

00:58:13.260 | Now, often when we hear empathy,

00:58:15.140 | we think, oh, empathy is really about listening to

00:58:18.500 | and really understanding what somebody else is feeling,

00:58:21.580 | maybe even feeling what they're feeling.

00:58:23.940 | And indeed that's the case,

00:58:25.460 | but what do we mean by that, right?

00:58:27.540 | What is it to feel what another feels?

00:58:29.820 | Well, what it means is that their seesaw

00:58:33.140 | is driving your seesaw or your seesaw

00:58:37.600 | is somehow driving their seesaw,

00:58:39.660 | that there's a match in terms of the tilt of those seesaws.

00:58:42.620 | Now, it doesn't have to be an exact match, right?

00:58:44.620 | If someone that you really care about is very, very stressed,

00:58:47.620 | you could also become very stressed.

00:58:50.300 | That's a form of empathic matching,

00:58:52.900 | and there are indeed neural circuits for that.

00:58:54.700 | I'll describe what those neural circuits are in a moment,

00:58:57.180 | but sometimes the best role for us to take

00:58:59.660 | is actually one in which we are calm

00:59:02.540 | when the person that we care about

00:59:03.820 | or that we are romantically involved with

00:59:05.720 | is very, very anxious.

00:59:07.060 | And in a few minutes,

00:59:08.380 | I'll talk about how matching of emotional tone

00:59:11.140 | can be good or bad for the stability of a relationship.

00:59:14.840 | And complementarity of autonomic matching

00:59:19.880 | can be good or bad.

00:59:21.340 | In other words,

00:59:22.380 | sometimes it's beneficial for a relationship

00:59:25.300 | to go into the same state as the other.

00:59:27.900 | And sometimes it's more beneficial for us

00:59:29.900 | to not go into the same state as the other.

00:59:33.660 | But the important feature here

00:59:35.900 | is that when we talk about emotional matching or empathy

00:59:39.020 | or going into the same state

00:59:40.300 | or not going into the same state,

00:59:41.740 | what we're really talking about

00:59:43.340 | is whether or not the autonomic seesaw of one individual

00:59:48.340 | is driving the autonomic seesaw of the other individual.

00:59:52.180 | And this is a vital principle

00:59:54.500 | for how we fall in love and form attachments.

00:59:57.540 | And it's actually part of the desire and mating process

01:00:00.420 | itself.

01:00:01.260 | I would go so far as to say

01:00:04.420 | that one of the prerequisites

01:00:07.740 | to the propagation and expansion of our species

01:00:11.840 | is this notion of autonomic regulation

01:00:15.440 | and to some extent matching of autonomic nervous systems.

01:00:18.720 | Let me explain what I mean.

01:00:20.900 | Last I checked,

01:00:22.320 | the only way that new humans can be created

01:00:24.680 | is by way of sperm meeting egg,

01:00:27.060 | either in body or in dish,

01:00:29.800 | but sperm meets egg.

01:00:31.220 | And then typically nine months later,

01:00:33.940 | we have a human baby.

01:00:35.100 | The process of bringing sperm to egg,

01:00:39.360 | mating behavior, sex behavior in humans

01:00:43.060 | is one of autonomic regulation.

01:00:46.640 | And what I mean by that is

01:00:49.740 | the process of finding a mate.

01:00:54.140 | And in this case,

01:00:54.980 | there's actually someone to mate with typically,

01:00:57.140 | while scenarios vary,

01:00:58.220 | typically is one of elevated autonomic arousal,

01:01:03.080 | meaning increased activation

01:01:04.880 | of the so-called sympathetic nervous system.

01:01:07.060 | This is related to dopamine release

01:01:09.140 | and it's related to epinephrine release.

01:01:11.300 | There has to be a pursuit

01:01:13.100 | or at least there has to be a mobilization

01:01:16.260 | to arrive in the same location whereby one can mate, right?

01:01:20.700 | That almost always is the case.

01:01:23.640 | However, the sexual arousal itself

01:01:28.540 | is in both males and females

01:01:31.800 | is actually driven primarily by the parasympathetic arm

01:01:36.800 | of the autonomic nervous system.

01:01:38.980 | So while pursuit is one of alertness

01:01:42.720 | and sympathetic drive, as we say,

01:01:45.420 | again, sympathy is not really what's at play here,

01:01:48.400 | the word simpa means together

01:01:49.980 | and the activation of the autonomic nervous system

01:01:52.500 | toward more alert state

01:01:53.780 | is because of a sympathetic nervous system,

01:01:55.800 | meaning the co-activation together of many neurons

01:01:58.520 | in the brain and spinal cord.

01:02:00.320 | But then the actual physiological arousal state

01:02:04.480 | that we call sexual arousal

01:02:05.820 | is predominantly parasympathetically driven, okay?

01:02:09.960 | To be quite direct about this,

01:02:11.400 | if the sympathetic nervous system activation is too high,

01:02:14.320 | the sexual arousal response cannot happen

01:02:16.580 | in either males or in females, it's inhibited.

01:02:20.120 | However, the orgasm and ejaculation response,

01:02:25.000 | which if you think about it is required

01:02:27.720 | for sperm to meet egg is sympathetic driven.

01:02:32.720 | And then after orgasm and ejaculation,

01:02:37.380 | the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back in

01:02:40.040 | and there's a calming and relaxation.

01:02:42.320 | So the arc of mating involves sympathetic arousal, okay?

01:02:48.740 | Not sympathy, but alertness and arousal for pursuit.

01:02:52.240 | Then a tilt of the seesaw, at least to some degree

01:02:55.200 | for arousal of the sort that we typically hear of,

01:02:58.160 | of sexual arousal.

01:03:00.000 | Then at the point of orgasm and ejaculation

01:03:03.640 | is back to a sympathetic response.

01:03:06.200 | And how can I say that?

01:03:07.400 | How do I know that?

01:03:08.660 | The sympathetic nervous system,

01:03:10.380 | meaning neurons within the sympathetic arm

01:03:12.280 | of the autonomic nervous system

01:03:13.580 | are what drive ejaculation and orgasm.

01:03:17.400 | And then afterward there's a return

01:03:20.800 | to increased parasympathetic activation.

01:03:24.000 | And we don't know for sure why that happens,

01:03:26.600 | but it's thought that in species that pair bond,

01:03:30.700 | humans generally pair bond, not always,

01:03:33.000 | the return to more parasympathetic activation

01:03:36.900 | after orgasm and ejaculation is thought to increase

01:03:39.840 | the exchange of pheromone orders, odors, excuse me,

01:03:43.120 | and to increase pillow talk

01:03:44.980 | and pair bonding of different kinds, okay?

01:03:47.260 | So that's the seesaw going back and forth

01:03:51.440 | is actually built into the process

01:03:53.500 | by which our entire species propagates.

01:03:57.100 | So in some ways, every human is required

01:04:01.620 | to navigate that process

01:04:03.320 | if they want their offspring to persist.

01:04:05.320 | And of course, nowadays there are technologies

01:04:07.600 | like in vitro fertilization and intrauterine insemination.

01:04:12.600 | There are a variety of ways that technology

01:04:14.740 | has allowed people to circumvent the actual physical mating

01:04:17.460 | process in the way that I described.

01:04:19.140 | But by and large, that's the way it's done.

01:04:21.700 | And certainly that's the way it was done historically

01:04:23.900 | for if not tens of thousands

01:04:25.700 | or hundreds of thousands of years.

01:04:27.740 | That process is also what happens

01:04:30.920 | in all mammalian species that mate, okay?

01:04:34.000 | So I'm overlooking an entire literature of animal studies.

01:04:38.640 | The classic studies of this were done by two individuals.

01:04:41.740 | I'll just briefly mention them

01:04:42.740 | in case you want to look at the literature.

01:04:44.980 | There's a guy at the Rockefeller University

01:04:47.420 | named Donald Pfaff, P-F-A-F-F,

01:04:50.880 | who has done beautiful studies

01:04:52.380 | identifying the neural circuitry

01:04:53.800 | of what's called the lordosis response.

01:04:56.020 | Unlike in humans, the mating behavior of animals

01:04:59.580 | is rather stereotyped in terms of the positions

01:05:01.800 | that they occupy.

01:05:02.700 | And the lordosis response is a kind of a U-shaping

01:05:05.420 | or a bending up of the hindquarters of typically of rodents

01:05:08.860 | but of other animals as well.

01:05:10.380 | The male mounting is almost always from behind

01:05:13.640 | except in some species of primates.

01:05:15.520 | And that lordosis response is only going to occur

01:05:19.500 | during particular phases of the estrus cycle.

01:05:22.300 | The estrus cycle is sort of the analog

01:05:25.900 | to the menstrual cycle, but it's not 28 days,

01:05:28.180 | it's four days or some other duration in other animals,

01:05:31.220 | depending on the animal.

01:05:32.720 | The lordosis response is strongly regulated by odors,

01:05:36.020 | by contact and is estrogen and testosterone controlled.

01:05:40.100 | And then the male portion of the mating sequence in animals,

01:05:45.100 | the mounting and thrusting and ejaculation as they're called

01:05:47.740 | or mounting, thrusting, intromission and ejaculation.

01:05:49.980 | Those are the four scientific categories

01:05:51.740 | that have been described.

01:05:53.740 | That's presence in rodents and also in dogs

01:05:56.220 | where it was primarily studied by Frank Beach,

01:05:58.420 | who was at University of California Berkeley for a long time.

01:06:02.540 | And the entire literature around the neural circuitry

01:06:05.980 | for sexual and mating behavior in animals largely stemmed

01:06:09.940 | from the work of Donald Pfaff and Frank Beach

01:06:13.540 | and their scientific offspring, not their actual offspring.

01:06:17.320 | You can look at that literature if you like.

01:06:19.600 | There have been human neuroimaging studies

01:06:22.780 | of the process that I described a few minutes ago,

01:06:25.260 | believe it or not, of people in brain scanners,

01:06:29.400 | not necessarily mating with other people,

01:06:31.300 | but going through that arc of arousal,

01:06:34.560 | sympathetic activation during orgasm or ejaculation,

01:06:38.980 | and then the post ejaculatory or orgasmic phase

01:06:42.420 | in both men and women.

01:06:43.660 | And the brain areas associated with those

01:06:46.580 | have all been mapped out now.

01:06:49.480 | The spinal cord areas that control things like erection,

01:06:54.460 | vaginal lubrication, ejaculation, and orgasm,

01:06:57.100 | those have also been mapped out.

01:06:58.660 | And this has all been explored

01:07:00.180 | from the perspective of both basic science,

01:07:02.340 | just to get an understanding of how our species

01:07:05.160 | has sexual interactions and reproduces,

01:07:07.780 | but also from the perspective of, for instance,

01:07:10.380 | trying to repair sexual function after spinal cord injury,

01:07:14.780 | which is a prominent concern for a lot of people,

01:07:18.080 | depending on where they have their injury,

01:07:19.740 | but in the number of people that have spinal cord injuries.

01:07:22.820 | So this is both vital biological and clinical data.

01:07:27.340 | The neural circuits for everything that I just described

01:07:32.500 | reside in the autonomic nervous system

01:07:34.560 | and are coordinated with the neural circuits

01:07:36.500 | that are associated with empathy.

01:07:38.340 | The neural circuits for empathy, again, there are many,

01:07:41.420 | but mainly two structures that you should know about,

01:07:43.600 | the prefrontal cortex,

01:07:44.660 | which is how we perceive things outside of us

01:07:47.460 | and make decisions on the basis of those perceptions,

01:07:49.860 | how we organize those decisions,

01:07:52.040 | and an area of the brain called the insula, I-N-S-U-L-A.

01:07:55.500 | The insula is a really interesting brain area

01:07:58.460 | that allows us to interocept to pay attention

01:08:01.920 | to what's going on inside our body

01:08:04.080 | and to split some of our attention to exterocept.

01:08:07.420 | And the mating dance,

01:08:09.080 | whether or not it's the dinner and date portion

01:08:11.820 | of the mating dance or the actual physical dance part

01:08:14.440 | of the main dance or actual mating and sexual behavior,

01:08:18.640 | kissing or otherwise,

01:08:20.240 | that is a coordinated activity of two bodies.

01:08:25.000 | Typically it's two.

01:08:26.080 | I realize sometimes it's more, sometimes it's only one,

01:08:28.280 | but typically it's two bodies,

01:08:30.800 | at least in the framework we're using here.

01:08:33.240 | That coordinated dance is one in which

01:08:35.760 | the autonomic nervous system of one individual

01:08:38.400 | in general is coordinating

01:08:40.760 | with the autonomic nervous system of the other individual.

01:08:42.880 | And the insula is essentially splitting one's attention

01:08:47.400 | between how we feel ourselves,

01:08:51.120 | how our body feels, what we're thinking,

01:08:53.180 | with the thinking and the bodily sensations of the other.

01:08:57.320 | And that can be communicated obviously through words.

01:09:00.620 | It can be communicated through sounds.

01:09:02.300 | It can be communicated through touch

01:09:04.080 | and it can be communicated

01:09:05.320 | through a number of kind of more subtle cues

01:09:07.920 | like pupil size or whether or not,

01:09:10.320 | certainly in cases where we recognize the person

01:09:12.360 | and we kind of know their responses,

01:09:14.500 | their autonomic responses under different conditions,

01:09:16.420 | we can assess it.

01:09:17.620 | Is the person comfortable?

01:09:18.880 | Are they uncomfortable?

01:09:20.060 | Are they more focused on me or on themselves?

01:09:23.180 | This is the coordinated silent dance

01:09:25.520 | that if we look at in neurobiological terms,

01:09:28.600 | we can really see is all about the autonomic nervous system,

01:09:32.780 | whether or not it's time to tip the seesaw

01:09:36.020 | to one side or the other,

01:09:37.740 | depending on whether or not the other person's seesaw

01:09:39.980 | is tilted higher or lower than the other.

01:09:42.400 | Okay, so we have the autonomic nervous system

01:09:44.220 | and then we have this thing that we're calling empathy,

01:09:46.680 | which is really about autonomic matching.

01:09:49.400 | And again, the insula and the prefrontal cortex

01:09:52.000 | are neural circuits that are crucial for autonomic matching

01:09:55.700 | because they allow us to say what's out there

01:09:58.440 | and do I want to match to it or not, okay?

01:10:01.740 | And then the third category of neural circuit

01:10:04.400 | that Helen Fisher and others have found to be important

01:10:06.880 | for desire, love, and attachment

01:10:08.520 | is the neural circuit associated with self-delusion.

01:10:12.280 | What do we mean by that?

01:10:14.060 | Well, first of all,

01:10:15.620 | self-delusion implies a kind of cynicism

01:10:20.420 | about love and attachment.

01:10:21.640 | And I think it was George Bernard Shaw that said,

01:10:24.580 | "Love is really about overestimating the differences

01:10:27.440 | between individuals."

01:10:29.200 | Actually, when I hear that and as I say it,

01:10:30.960 | I really don't like that quote.

01:10:32.840 | I have no bone to pick with George Bernard Shaw,

01:10:34.880 | but what it suggests and I think what he meant

01:10:38.280 | was that in love and attachment,

01:10:41.920 | we tend to put so much value in the other

01:10:44.600 | that we forget that many of the processes

01:10:46.920 | that are going on in our brain and body

01:10:49.120 | actually could be evoked by many other people too.

01:10:51.720 | But I think it somewhat overlooks

01:10:54.040 | the enormous power of attachment

01:10:55.720 | and the ways in which somebody's smell,

01:10:58.360 | somebody's voice, somebody's everything,

01:11:01.820 | or somebody's particular thing or things

01:11:04.320 | can really become so vital for our autonomic nervous system

01:11:08.340 | to feel soothed and to feel elated, et cetera.

01:11:10.980 | So I think that while the quote is accurate

01:11:15.640 | in the one sense,

01:11:16.480 | I think it does overlook the neural circuits for attachment

01:11:19.680 | and just how deeply wired those can become for us.

01:11:23.140 | So I will balance that quote

01:11:25.980 | with an enormous number of other quotes

01:11:27.820 | that I won't mention, but that you can find out there

01:11:30.780 | that really point to how incredible the person is

01:11:35.760 | that one tends to be attached to,

01:11:37.260 | that there's really only one or several people

01:11:41.220 | that could ever exist

01:11:42.060 | that could evoke those feelings from us.

01:11:43.600 | And of course you can read your Neruda poetry

01:11:47.420 | and you can find these things all over the place

01:11:49.060 | in music and poetry and writing.

01:11:51.380 | So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits

01:11:55.020 | being generic and could be activated by anybody,

01:11:57.940 | I think you'll find an ample number of opposing quotes

01:12:02.540 | that these neural circuits can only be activated

01:12:04.900 | by that special someone or that particular person,

01:12:07.780 | or maybe in just a small set of those people.

01:12:10.020 | So what of delusion?

01:12:11.740 | Well, the work of Helen Fisher and others

01:12:15.520 | has really pointed to the fact that desire, love,

01:12:19.540 | and attachment are three separate phases

01:12:22.480 | of what we call romantic relationships

01:12:25.380 | that typically, not always,

01:12:27.660 | but typically desire tends to come first

01:12:29.820 | or falls in the early phase,

01:12:31.380 | that the process of romantic/sexual interactions,

01:12:36.860 | it doesn't necessarily have to be sex itself,

01:12:38.720 | but certainly something that involves intimacy of some kind

01:12:43.720 | and generally touch of some kind

01:12:46.900 | eventually transitions into what we call love,

01:12:49.260 | which eventually transitions into what we call attachment.

01:12:53.020 | And I should just mention touch

01:12:55.060 | because touch is a fundamental aspect of this whole process.

01:12:59.600 | There's an article, a research article, I should say,

01:13:03.260 | the title of it is "Relationship-specific encoding

01:13:05.820 | of social touch in somatosensory and insular cortices,"

01:13:10.060 | cortices being cortex, cortex is plural, cortices.

01:13:13.940 | And again, there's our friend, the insula.

01:13:16.100 | So this is a study that explored what brain areas

01:13:18.900 | and what body areas are activated

01:13:21.960 | by specific forms of attachment and social touch.

01:13:25.740 | And what they found, not surprisingly,

01:13:27.460 | is that the areas of the brain

01:13:29.500 | that are associated with touch, the somatosensory areas,

01:13:32.060 | but more interestingly, the insula cortex

01:13:35.320 | are strongly activated by touch.

01:13:38.860 | So touch and the amount of touching

01:13:41.060 | and proximity and skin contact,

01:13:43.540 | not surprisingly activates brain areas

01:13:45.540 | associated with somatosensory touch,

01:13:48.400 | but also the insular cortex,

01:13:50.140 | which again is this brain area that links the internal,

01:13:53.660 | our feelings about what's going on inside us

01:13:55.760 | and at the surface of our skin with events external.

01:13:58.860 | And they found activation of a number of brain areas,

01:14:02.000 | the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and so on and so on.

01:14:05.620 | That's not as essential as just understanding

01:14:07.420 | that the insula is the place in which we start

01:14:10.200 | to take our experience of our internal landscape,

01:14:13.760 | attach that to our perceptions of the external landscape,

01:14:16.700 | and then assign that a value

01:14:19.080 | or assign that some sort of interpretation.

01:14:22.060 | And positive delusion is predictive

01:14:26.540 | of long-term attachment.

01:14:28.240 | What do we mean by positive delusion?

01:14:29.620 | Positive delusion is the contradiction

01:14:32.820 | of that George Bernard Shaw quote.

01:14:34.960 | It's the belief that only this person

01:14:38.600 | can make me feel this way.

01:14:40.580 | This other person holds the capacity

01:14:43.380 | to make me feel this way physically or emotionally or both.

01:14:47.700 | And so as we move from desire to love to attachment,

01:14:52.700 | our brain circuitry is literally getting tuned up

01:14:55.860 | such that that individual that we happen to be attached to,

01:14:59.060 | again, here thinking about monogamous relationships,

01:15:01.460 | but I guess for non-monogamous relationship be individuals,

01:15:05.640 | is and are the way in which our autonomic nervous system

01:15:10.260 | can be regulated.

01:15:11.140 | They actually get access to our control panel.

01:15:14.220 | So it's our autonomic nervous system, empathy,

01:15:16.900 | and this positive delusion.

01:15:19.540 | Now, positive delusion is critical.

01:15:21.940 | If you look at the stability of relationships over time,

01:15:25.840 | something that's been extensively studied

01:15:27.800 | mainly by psychologists, but now also by neurobiologists,

01:15:31.600 | what you find is that there are some key features

01:15:36.280 | of interactions between individuals

01:15:38.240 | that predict that a relationship will last.

01:15:41.520 | And those are many,

01:15:43.040 | but mainly fall under this category of positive delusions.

01:15:46.440 | I'll return to those and what those exactly look like,

01:15:48.940 | but there are also just a handful of things

01:15:51.940 | that predict that a relationship will fail over time.

01:15:55.320 | This is largely the work of the Gottman's.

01:15:58.160 | It's actually a husband and wife team

01:15:59.760 | up at the University of Washington in Seattle.

01:16:03.200 | The Gottman's have run a laboratory

01:16:06.180 | in the Department of Psychology for a long time.

01:16:08.020 | They've also done a lot of public facing work

01:16:09.860 | around relationships.

01:16:11.580 | And they've talked about the various aspects

01:16:15.600 | of relationships and interactions between people

01:16:17.880 | that predict either staying together or breaking up.

01:16:20.260 | So much so that they've established a method

01:16:24.040 | by which they can look at video interactions

01:16:26.720 | between couples and with very high degree of certainty,

01:16:30.540 | predict whether or not those couples will stay together

01:16:32.680 | or break up over time.

01:16:33.980 | And they've identified what they call

01:16:35.480 | the four horsemen of relationships.

01:16:37.920 | These are things that essentially almost always predict

01:16:42.920 | that a couple will break up.

01:16:45.140 | And I think the current number on this

01:16:47.560 | is that Gottman can predict divorce with 94% accuracy,

01:16:52.560 | which if you think about it is pretty remarkable.

01:16:55.080 | So even though these are purely psychological studies,

01:16:57.920 | I'm not aware of any analysis of underlying physiology.

01:17:01.480 | There are some things that they can observe

01:17:04.160 | between couples that can lead them to predict

01:17:07.260 | whether or not a couple will stay together

01:17:08.760 | or break up with 94% accuracy.

01:17:11.380 | So what are those things?

01:17:12.760 | Those four behaviors, what they call

01:17:14.420 | the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships

01:17:18.640 | are one, criticism, two, defensiveness,

01:17:24.200 | three, stonewalling, and four, contempt,

01:17:27.560 | with contempt being the most powerful predictor

01:17:31.560 | of breaking up.

01:17:34.080 | Criticism, of course, does not mean that there's no place

01:17:38.400 | for criticism in stable relationships.

01:17:40.880 | Of course there is, it has to do with how frequent

01:17:43.800 | and how intensely that criticism is voiced.

01:17:46.100 | Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness we know

01:17:49.820 | as the sort of lack of ability to hear another

01:17:54.240 | or to adopt their stance.

01:17:55.540 | So lack of empathy I think is one way

01:17:58.740 | to interpret defensiveness.

01:18:00.380 | Stonewalling, which is actually another form

01:18:03.220 | of lack of empathy.

01:18:04.100 | It's a turning off of this neural circuit

01:18:06.180 | that's so critical for desire, love, and attachment.

01:18:09.180 | The stonewalling essentially means the emotional response

01:18:13.580 | or the request of another is completely cut off.

01:18:15.500 | So it's, I don't think there's been brain imaging of this,

01:18:18.800 | but I think we can reasonably imagine

01:18:20.840 | that it involves untethering your insular response

01:18:24.060 | from the other and what they're dealing with

01:18:26.900 | and focusing your insular response, no pun intended,

01:18:31.440 | on your own internal state or perhaps the state

01:18:34.200 | of someone else entirely.

01:18:36.000 | We'll talk about infidelity in a moment.

01:18:37.400 | And then contempt.

01:18:38.560 | And contempt has actually been referred to

01:18:40.760 | as the sulfuric acid of relationship.

01:18:43.280 | I didn't say that, but Gottman and colleagues have,

01:18:45.840 | that it is such a powerful predictor of divorce

01:18:49.200 | and breakups in the future.

01:18:51.760 | And contempt, of course, by definition is the feeling

01:18:55.300 | that a person or thing is beneath consideration,

01:18:57.840 | worthlessness, or deserving scorn.

01:19:00.820 | And apparently they can identify this in the videos

01:19:03.480 | of couples having discussions and interacting

01:19:06.120 | by very elaborate eye rolls,

01:19:09.160 | by expressions of anger in one individual

01:19:12.760 | when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm

01:19:15.480 | or excitement about something.

01:19:16.960 | It's the, oh yeah, you would say that,

01:19:20.000 | or deep-seated resentment toward the other,

01:19:23.440 | so much so that it's apparent that one kind of actively

01:19:27.440 | dislikes the other partner.

01:19:30.100 | So contempt, disregard for something that should be taken

01:19:33.940 | into account is the other way to think about it.

01:19:36.520 | Runs counter to all of the neural circuits,

01:19:39.400 | all three of the neural circuits

01:19:40.700 | that we talked about before.

01:19:41.700 | It certainly is, it is the antithesis of empathy.

01:19:45.300 | It is anything but a positive delusion.

01:19:47.520 | It's really looking at the other individual,

01:19:49.520 | either accurately or inaccurately,

01:19:51.440 | as somebody that you kind of despise.

01:19:53.800 | And then it is an absolute inversion

01:19:57.380 | of the autonomic seesaw matching

01:19:59.160 | that I was talking about before.

01:20:00.800 | It's a dissociating of your seesaw from their seesaw.

01:20:03.560 | They're very excited about something,

01:20:05.100 | you're unexcited by it.

01:20:06.900 | In fact, it's an inversion of their seesaw

01:20:09.100 | where they're excited, you're down.

01:20:12.700 | They're down, you're up, okay?

01:20:14.880 | So it's basically an inversion of all of the neural circuits

01:20:19.600 | that Helen Fisher and others have identified as critical

01:20:22.700 | for desire, love, and attachment.

01:20:24.420 | And therefore it's not surprising

01:20:27.240 | that it is so strongly predictive of breakups

01:20:29.460 | and in the case of married couples of divorce.

01:20:32.080 | For those of you that are interested

01:20:33.480 | in the work of the Gottman's and similar work,

01:20:37.000 | they've written several popular books.

01:20:39.180 | They're fairly easy to find.

01:20:40.800 | We can link to one of those in the caption,

01:20:43.980 | but they've also developed

01:20:44.960 | some quite interesting online resources

01:20:48.460 | in their so-called love lab.

01:20:50.460 | I guess it's fortunate that they didn't call it

01:20:52.240 | the hate lab or the breakup lab

01:20:54.400 | 'cause they focused a lot on what predicts breakups,

01:20:56.900 | but they've also written extensively

01:20:59.320 | and researched extensively in peer-reviewed studies

01:21:02.500 | what makes people find appropriate partners for them

01:21:08.160 | and to maintain those partnerships over time.

01:21:12.440 | So you can go, you can search for love lab,

01:21:15.040 | University of Washington, Gottman,

01:21:17.160 | or any number of their various books.

01:21:19.340 | I think you'll find some useful resources there.

01:21:24.120 | I want to shift back to the work of Helen Fisher.

01:21:27.140 | She's made some very interesting statements

01:21:31.120 | and some very interesting observations

01:21:33.280 | that at least to my mind map very well

01:21:35.820 | onto the knowledge of neural circuitry,

01:21:38.560 | both in humans and in non-human primates

01:21:40.520 | and in other species.

01:21:41.600 | I realized that she's not the only name in the game,

01:21:44.640 | but she's made some observations that I think are very,

01:21:49.760 | as we say, parsimonious,

01:21:51.040 | meaning they allow us to organize a lot of this stuff

01:21:53.660 | into some distinct frameworks.

01:21:55.800 | She's also done some really beautiful studies

01:21:58.800 | that involve data from millions

01:22:00.740 | or even tens of millions of individuals on dating sites.

01:22:04.000 | So I'm going to share those with you in a moment.

01:22:05.720 | But before I do that,

01:22:07.120 | I just want to paraphrase Dr. Fisher,

01:22:11.640 | who said that sex drive or desire,

01:22:15.960 | the pursuit of someone to mate with,

01:22:18.040 | meaning to mate the verb, not necessarily to find a mate,

01:22:23.000 | may be, she didn't say definitively,

01:22:26.520 | but maybe a way to forage for potential love partners.

01:22:29.380 | That the arc of this whole business

01:22:32.480 | is really the order that we're describing it,

01:22:34.540 | that it's desire, then love, and then attachment.

01:22:39.360 | And that oftentimes people can get confused.

01:22:43.060 | You may know some of these people,

01:22:44.640 | you may be one of these individuals

01:22:46.700 | who might confuse desire for attachment

01:22:49.480 | or might confuse love for attachment,

01:22:53.780 | but that there's a sequence of recruitment

01:22:56.740 | of these neural circuits that's established first

01:22:59.580 | from the pursuit of someone to mate with.

01:23:02.400 | And she's placed this in the context

01:23:05.020 | of kind of more modern dating themes

01:23:07.260 | where depending on culture,

01:23:09.860 | people might explore several, maybe many, many individuals

01:23:14.860 | before quote-unquote settling down with somebody,

01:23:18.720 | at least for some period of time.

01:23:21.060 | I think that's an interesting framework

01:23:23.440 | because it circumvents a lot of the, frankly,

01:23:27.380 | unanswerable questions about whether or not, you know,

01:23:31.540 | humans were meant to be monogamous

01:23:33.120 | or whether or not they weren't.

01:23:34.180 | Those are conversations that hold cultural context,

01:23:37.060 | that hold all sorts of contexts

01:23:39.740 | that really can't be addressed in a laboratory setting.

01:23:42.700 | But this idea that sex drive is a way to forage

01:23:46.720 | for potential love partners and that love

01:23:49.380 | is a kind of a litmus test for whether or not longer

01:23:52.540 | or term or deeper attachments can and will form

01:23:55.860 | is one that at least makes sense to me.

01:23:58.340 | Later in the episode,

01:23:59.180 | we'll talk about this notion of sex drive and desire.

01:24:02.740 | I'll actually talk about some tools

01:24:04.980 | that have very strong data really to support them

01:24:08.960 | in terms of things that people can do or take

01:24:11.340 | to increase libido, both men and women,

01:24:14.540 | because there's actually quite good data on that now.

01:24:17.320 | But in the meantime, I want to talk about some of the work

01:24:20.440 | that Dr. Fisher has done in terms of categorizing people

01:24:24.600 | into, again, we have four groups.

01:24:27.120 | These are distinct from the A, B, C, and D

01:24:30.240 | attachment styles described earlier,

01:24:32.180 | although as I described them,

01:24:33.620 | you might be able to map them somewhat onto those.

01:24:36.520 | And these four groups are groups that were defined

01:24:41.440 | through her studies of people that were or are,

01:24:44.940 | I don't know if they were or if they are still on match.com,

01:24:49.560 | but a very extensive data set.

01:24:51.600 | So again, millions, if not tens of millions of individuals,

01:24:55.120 | the number I heard her quote,

01:24:56.640 | and forgive me if this is not accurate,

01:24:59.220 | is that in upwards of 40 million individuals

01:25:02.580 | in terms of whether or not their neurochemical

01:25:06.800 | and hormone systems are tuned

01:25:08.780 | toward particular types of behaviors.

01:25:11.860 | What do I mean by that?

01:25:13.280 | Well, both men and women, males and females,

01:25:17.180 | have both testosterone and estrogen.

01:25:19.260 | Typically, again, these are averages,

01:25:21.480 | but typically men have more testosterone

01:25:23.300 | than they do estrogen,

01:25:24.620 | and they have more testosterone than do women

01:25:26.860 | and less estrogen than do women.

01:25:28.600 | Typically women have more estrogen

01:25:30.620 | than they do testosterone, again, averages,

01:25:33.160 | and they have less testosterone than men,

01:25:38.220 | more estrogen than men, and so on and so forth.

01:25:40.860 | But both hormone systems are active

01:25:42.920 | in both sets of individuals.

01:25:46.100 | And of course, all humans, as far as we know,

01:25:50.260 | manufacture both dopamine and serotonin.

01:25:53.020 | Dopamine, as I mentioned earlier,

01:25:54.400 | has a number of effects in the brain and body,

01:25:57.300 | but one of the primary effects is that it places us

01:25:59.400 | into states of motivation and pursuit for various things.

01:26:03.340 | There is a somewhat close relationship

01:26:06.120 | between the dopamine system and the testosterone system

01:26:10.480 | in the hypothalamus,

01:26:11.760 | this brain area above the roof of your mouth,

01:26:13.320 | and the pituitary gland,

01:26:14.660 | which is responsible for making hormones

01:26:17.040 | that make the ovaries and/or testes

01:26:20.100 | secrete testosterone or estrogen.

01:26:24.100 | So there's a lot of signaling that occurs

01:26:26.540 | such that dopamine and testosterone tend to operate

01:26:29.940 | as kind of close cousins in a system of pursuit.

01:26:33.360 | And conversely, the serotonin system tends to,

01:26:36.660 | on average, collaborate with the estrogen system

01:26:39.660 | to impart certain physiological functions and behaviors.

01:26:43.420 | So these aren't hard and fast, or I guess better stated,

01:26:48.380 | these aren't strict black and white categorizations,

01:26:51.420 | but I think those general themes hold

01:26:53.480 | when you look at the animal and human data.

01:26:56.460 | So Dr. Fisher has taken some liberties,

01:27:00.500 | but I think they are what I would call

01:27:02.580 | logically and scientifically

01:27:04.160 | and neurobiologically grounded liberties

01:27:06.780 | in classifying individuals who are on these dating sites

01:27:10.520 | according to the types of things they report

01:27:12.960 | about themselves and the type of people

01:27:15.100 | they tend to match with on these dating sites

01:27:19.060 | and created these four categories.

01:27:22.580 | The four categories are,

01:27:24.500 | she calls one the dopamine category.

01:27:27.740 | So these are people who would have high dopamine.

01:27:30.420 | And again, that's just a name.

01:27:33.940 | It doesn't mean they have low anything else,

01:27:36.760 | but they are high on the dopamine scale.

01:27:39.460 | People who rate high on the dopamine scale

01:27:42.580 | tend to be what the scientists and psychologists

01:27:44.860 | call high sensation seeking, novel seeking.

01:27:47.060 | They like new things, they like spontaneity,

01:27:49.800 | they tend to be very adventurous.

01:27:51.300 | And I think that's largely true.

01:27:52.900 | If you look at conditions

01:27:55.060 | where dopamine is super physiological,

01:27:59.460 | it's elevated beyond abnormal levels, things like mania,

01:28:04.460 | or when people take certain drugs of abuse

01:28:07.360 | like cocaine or amphetamine

01:28:08.660 | that really raise dopamine levels up very, very high

01:28:12.500 | for some period of time,

01:28:13.780 | they do tend to increase energy motivation

01:28:17.100 | and novelty seeking.

01:28:18.060 | And of course, drugs like amphetamine and cocaine

01:28:20.060 | have all sorts of deleterious effects

01:28:22.120 | that I don't need to go into here,

01:28:23.160 | but it's worth pointing out.

01:28:24.860 | But they don't tend to make people calm and relaxed

01:28:27.260 | and seek soothing interactions.

01:28:30.700 | Conversely, the group that Dr. Fisher calls

01:28:34.100 | the serotonin group,

01:28:36.540 | tend to be more grounded in soothing activities,

01:28:41.540 | quiescent type activities.

01:28:43.400 | They actually tend to be on average,

01:28:45.580 | they tend to like rules and follow rules.

01:28:47.760 | They tend to be home bodies, this sort of thing.

01:28:50.180 | They're really, you can imagine them

01:28:51.820 | the sort of stable types, but they really like stability.

01:28:54.980 | They're not really into spontaneity as much,

01:28:57.280 | again, averages.

01:28:58.260 | And then she created two other categories,

01:29:01.380 | the testosterone category of high testosterone.

01:29:04.580 | This again could be males or females.

01:29:07.620 | And then the estrogen category again

01:29:11.000 | could be males or females.

01:29:12.080 | And she gave these different names

01:29:14.500 | that I won't go into here.

01:29:15.700 | You can look up her work online,

01:29:16.980 | but she, you know, names like the director

01:29:18.860 | and the follower and things like that.

01:29:20.940 | But I don't really want to use those

01:29:22.160 | as much as I want to stick to the biological terms.

01:29:24.620 | So we have dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen.

01:29:28.420 | Now that might seem like an unfair

01:29:31.460 | kind of overgeneralization,

01:29:33.620 | but what's interesting is not necessarily the name

01:29:36.860 | or the neurochemical system, right?

01:29:38.600 | Those could have just been called category one, two, three,

01:29:41.300 | and four for all that matters here.

01:29:45.280 | What is interesting is seeing how those different groups

01:29:49.540 | of individuals that she absolutely can categorize

01:29:53.260 | based on their self-reported preferences

01:29:57.100 | about behaviors and certain kinds of interactions,

01:29:59.920 | how those groups tend to pair up

01:30:02.300 | with people in the same or opposite categories.

01:30:05.380 | So what her studies reveal is that people

01:30:07.960 | that fall into the high sensation seeking,

01:30:09.980 | novelty seeking, spontaneity category,

01:30:12.340 | the one that she calls the high dopamine category,

01:30:15.780 | tend to pair up with, at least in the short term,

01:30:19.000 | tend to pair up with people who are also

01:30:22.020 | in that dopaminergic category.

01:30:23.700 | So these would be people that would spontaneously

01:30:26.940 | take a trip or explore something new or a new restaurant.

01:30:29.980 | They tend to be creative and explorative types.

01:30:34.460 | So that group on average tends to date and mate

01:30:39.460 | and potentially form long-term relationships

01:30:42.900 | within category, again, averages.

01:30:46.020 | Individuals that she placed into the serotonin group

01:30:49.900 | or what she hypothesized would be a high serotonin group,

01:30:52.920 | again, they didn't measure serotonin,

01:30:54.780 | but people that tend to place value on stability,

01:30:58.460 | on rules, on certain forms of kind of traditional

01:31:02.300 | organization at home and in relationships,

01:31:05.540 | those people also tended to pair up with select, date,

01:31:10.540 | we presume mate with, and form stable relationships

01:31:14.680 | with people in the same category.

01:31:17.240 | Now, individuals in the other two categories,

01:31:19.740 | the high testosterone group, and again,

01:31:21.980 | testosterone wasn't measured,

01:31:23.480 | but she called it the high testosterone group,

01:31:25.540 | but these are people that tend to be very directive.

01:31:30.540 | They tend to know what they want

01:31:32.340 | and are comfortable telling other people what they want

01:31:35.540 | and from them, these are individuals that in her studies

01:31:40.540 | and in other studies tend to be a little bit challenging,

01:31:44.200 | meaning they not necessarily challenging to be around,

01:31:47.200 | but they tend to challenge other people,

01:31:49.180 | kind of push them in order to expand their boundaries,

01:31:52.740 | either for sake of the relationship or just in general.

01:31:55.860 | And the people they tend to push are the people

01:31:57.580 | that they pair up with,

01:31:59.200 | which are the people in the estrogen category,

01:32:01.260 | what she called high estrogen.

01:32:02.300 | Again, they didn't measure estrogen,

01:32:03.800 | but the people in the estrogen category were the ones

01:32:07.600 | that describe themselves and their choices in life

01:32:10.860 | and their preferences as being nurturing.

01:32:13.460 | They actually seem to like it when someone else

01:32:16.040 | is making the major decisions, not every decision.

01:32:19.760 | They certainly like to be heard, of course,

01:32:22.120 | in terms of their preferences, but that those two types,

01:32:25.120 | the, what she called the testosterone

01:32:27.280 | and the estrogen type tend to pair up.

01:32:29.800 | So why are these categorizations

01:32:31.520 | and these averages interesting to me,

01:32:33.600 | at least interesting enough to convey to you?

01:32:36.260 | The reason they're interesting to me is,

01:32:38.900 | again, not because of their names,

01:32:40.460 | these molecules were not measured in these individuals,

01:32:43.240 | but that they once again bring us to the themes

01:32:46.500 | that we addressed before,

01:32:48.140 | which are the autonomic nervous system

01:32:50.880 | and whether or not it tends to be shifted

01:32:52.760 | more towards alertness in action

01:32:54.860 | or more towards kind of a stable equilibrium

01:32:57.520 | or more towards kind of calm

01:32:59.580 | and whether or not individuals are selecting

01:33:03.520 | for people who have autonomic nervous systems

01:33:06.200 | that are more or less like theirs

01:33:08.920 | before they even meet, right?

01:33:10.740 | So again, going back to this seesaw analogy,

01:33:13.920 | it's almost like people who have the kind of flat seesaw,

01:33:16.640 | alert but calm, but not extremely alert,

01:33:19.600 | not extremely overly calm in situations,

01:33:23.940 | but kind of in the middle seem to be seeking out people

01:33:26.780 | that are also at that kind of autonomic equilibrium.

01:33:31.340 | People in the, what she called the dopamine category,

01:33:33.740 | which really can just be described

01:33:35.100 | as high sensation seeking, novelty seeking,

01:33:37.300 | they seem to want to pair with one another.

01:33:39.040 | So there's a selection for similar

01:33:42.520 | in two of the groups, autonomic tone.

01:33:45.680 | I find that very interesting because in that decision

01:33:50.380 | or that preference for similar autonomic tone,

01:33:53.400 | it essentially eliminates a lot of the requirement

01:33:58.300 | for figuring out how to match

01:34:01.960 | one's autonomic nervous system to another.

01:34:03.680 | They simply find someone with a similar tendency, okay?

01:34:07.580 | Whereas in the other two groups

01:34:10.120 | that she called testosterone and estrogen,

01:34:11.720 | the director type and the nurturing

01:34:13.540 | kind of somewhat follower type,

01:34:16.240 | there's an establishment of balance,

01:34:18.980 | but not between two individuals as a match,

01:34:23.980 | but rather on the whole in the relationship.

01:34:26.920 | One person is kind of driving the novelty seeking

01:34:29.420 | in the course of decisions and actions,

01:34:30.960 | and the other person is essentially agreeing to those.

01:34:33.800 | Now, assuming that those decisions are good for both people.

01:34:37.420 | And I emphasize good for both people

01:34:39.200 | because one of the themes that Dr. Fisher underscores

01:34:41.880 | that I'd like to underscore here as well

01:34:44.040 | is that it need not be the case that people pair up

01:34:48.780 | exactly according to these categorizations

01:34:51.000 | that I've described.

01:34:52.680 | Dopamine with dopamine, serotonin with serotonin,

01:34:54.960 | testosterone with estrogen and so on.

01:34:57.720 | What is important is that there be a recognition

01:35:00.920 | and a respect for the other types

01:35:03.760 | or a recognition and a respect for the fact

01:35:06.320 | that both are of the same type.

01:35:08.160 | You could actually imagine, for instance,

01:35:09.880 | that two people of this high sensation seeking,

01:35:12.500 | novelty seeking could have a terrifically

01:35:15.400 | exciting relationship,

01:35:16.520 | but that it actually might be a relationship

01:35:19.740 | in which the financial stability isn't quite there

01:35:23.620 | or in which the basic stability isn't there.

01:35:27.000 | You could imagine, for instance,

01:35:29.120 | a situation in which a relationship between two people

01:35:32.900 | of what she called the high serotonin preference

01:35:37.180 | would have a relationship that was actually kind of dull

01:35:39.620 | in which both of them found themselves kind of bored

01:35:41.760 | at some point or in which there wasn't enough

01:35:45.100 | of the dynamic tension that sometimes is required

01:35:49.080 | in order to keep this cycle of desire,

01:35:51.540 | love and attachment going,

01:35:52.540 | something that we will talk about in a moment.

01:35:55.020 | So the point here is not that one should necessarily pair up

01:35:59.900 | according to these arrangements that I described.

01:36:02.900 | The point is that on average, that's what tends to happen

01:36:06.600 | and that through a recognition

01:36:09.280 | that these categorizations exist,

01:36:11.760 | similar to the recognition that the type A, B, C, and D

01:36:16.760 | infant and toddler type attachments exist,

01:36:19.940 | that we can gain better self-awareness of who we are

01:36:23.640 | and how we tend to show up in romantic attachments

01:36:26.800 | and thereby navigate healthier mate-seeking,

01:36:31.800 | healthier breakups, if the case dictates it,

01:36:36.380 | and in some cases, healthy long-term relationships

01:36:39.340 | by understanding that the other person

01:36:41.280 | can either be similar or complimentary to us.

01:36:44.680 | One is neither better than the other.

01:36:47.060 | It's simply the case that in all romantic attachments,

01:36:50.680 | from the initial inception of that romantic attachment,

01:36:54.540 | desire, love and attachment,

01:36:58.080 | there is an autonomic coordination.

01:37:01.020 | And of course there's coordination

01:37:02.820 | of all sorts of other things like food, sex and sleep

01:37:06.580 | and finances and where people are going to live

01:37:09.260 | and many other features.

01:37:10.620 | But that at the core of all that

01:37:12.580 | is a seeking of either autonomic likeness

01:37:16.820 | or autonomic differences.

01:37:19.100 | And I think that recognition can be extremely valuable

01:37:22.660 | in thinking about tools to enter and maintain relationships.

01:37:27.060 | If one thinks about their autonomic nervous system,

01:37:30.400 | not simply as something that is driven by external people

01:37:34.380 | and events, but that we can actually gain some control over

01:37:37.940 | through techniques of the sort that I talked about earlier

01:37:40.420 | and on previous podcasts, but also generally,

01:37:43.160 | if we are able to adjust our autonomic nervous system

01:37:46.780 | in order to at least appreciate or get some empathy

01:37:50.720 | into what someone else is experiencing,

01:37:53.120 | then we gain actual cognitive empathy.

01:37:56.380 | And this episode isn't about empathy per se,

01:38:00.100 | but the theme keeps coming up again and again.

01:38:01.900 | And I think it's worth mentioning

01:38:03.380 | that when you talk to psychologists,

01:38:06.140 | whether or not they're psychoanalysts

01:38:07.500 | or from another source of training,

01:38:09.980 | what you find is that they don't talk about empathy

01:38:12.300 | as a general term, they will talk about emotional empathy.

01:38:16.620 | They'll talk about cognitive empathy.

01:38:18.260 | And what I'm talking about here today

01:38:19.900 | is that yet a third category

01:38:21.600 | that is very strongly determinant of relationship dynamics,

01:38:25.780 | and that's autonomic empathy.

01:38:27.920 | I'm a biologist, I'm not a psychologist,

01:38:30.580 | so I love mechanism.

01:38:32.300 | And fortunately, there are studies that have been done

01:38:35.660 | recently using modern techniques

01:38:37.840 | to look at neural mechanisms of romantic attachment.

01:38:41.600 | I mentioned earlier some of the brain imaging studies

01:38:44.760 | that have been done on child and mother,

01:38:48.380 | literally imaging the activity of neurons in the brain

01:38:51.240 | as child is nursing or as a mother is soothing baby.

01:38:54.960 | And as you learned earlier,

01:38:56.540 | baby is soothing mother as well.

01:38:59.260 | Those are remarkable studies.

01:39:00.400 | You may have seen some of these pictures online.

01:39:02.100 | You can see the kind of silhouette of the infant and mother

01:39:04.540 | and their brains and even some of the brain activation

01:39:07.340 | patterns, really, really beautiful studies.

01:39:09.580 | Similar studies have been done in romantic couples

01:39:13.900 | with those couples either touching one another,

01:39:17.140 | touching and kissing or in kind of clever,

01:39:20.360 | I think control experiments of the person

01:39:22.520 | just touching a pillow or something or kissing a pillow

01:39:26.420 | in order to try and create the most reasonable control

01:39:30.460 | for what are actually pretty complicated

01:39:32.700 | interpersonal dynamics to do in a brain imaging scanner.

01:39:35.620 | But some of the other studies that have been done recently

01:39:40.020 | involved so-called EEG.

01:39:41.540 | So these are electrical recordings

01:39:42.920 | that are done noninvasively,

01:39:44.900 | putting a bunch of electrodes on the outside of the scalp.

01:39:47.540 | EEG is useful in that you can do it noninvasively.

01:39:52.300 | You can do it while people are moving and doing things,

01:39:56.340 | kissing, touching, et cetera.

01:39:58.800 | It doesn't allow one to image or to evaluate neural activity

01:40:03.120 | very deeply in the brain.

01:40:04.600 | So you can miss out on a lot of things.

01:40:06.360 | It's sort of like looking at the wave structure on the ocean

01:40:08.900 | without actually looking into the depths of the ocean.

01:40:12.280 | So you can miss certain things,

01:40:13.600 | but if you see things, generally you trust they are there,

01:40:16.980 | but you can't see what you don't see.

01:40:18.620 | Nonetheless, there are some studies

01:40:21.060 | that I'll just point you to,

01:40:22.940 | and that form the segue

01:40:24.660 | for what I'm going to discuss in a moment,

01:40:27.380 | which is a study published in Scientific Reports in 2021,

01:40:32.380 | entitled "Investigating Real-Life Emotions

01:40:35.240 | in Romantic Couples, a Mobile EEG Study."

01:40:37.940 | So this is, as the title suggests,

01:40:41.220 | I think people wear these EEG caps of electrodes,

01:40:43.760 | get engaged in very passionate emotional kisses,

01:40:48.920 | emotional speech toward one another,

01:40:50.520 | standing at different distances.

01:40:51.680 | So a lot of cool stuff that you can do

01:40:53.560 | that you really couldn't do in a brain scanner,

01:40:55.840 | because in a brain scanner,

01:40:56.840 | people have to be there, usually in a bite bar,

01:40:58.920 | they're actually jaw hooks like this.

01:41:00.400 | I've been in one of these things.

01:41:02.380 | There's not a lot of moving around to be had,

01:41:04.320 | at least not using the current technology.

01:41:07.040 | In any case, what they found was

01:41:09.480 | there is a shift in brain waves, brain states,

01:41:14.200 | things like alpha waves,

01:41:15.480 | which is a particular frequency of brain waves

01:41:17.300 | in the neocortex, the kind of outer shell of the brain

01:41:20.060 | just beneath the skull.

01:41:22.160 | And in people that are kissing

01:41:25.600 | or in people that are engaged in romantic speech,

01:41:27.700 | or I didn't actually hear what they said to one another,

01:41:31.740 | but what the couple seems exciting,

01:41:34.500 | romantic, and arousing to them,

01:41:36.740 | they see more alpha wave activity

01:41:38.640 | compared to the control conditions.

01:41:40.280 | And there was some what we call lateralization

01:41:42.660 | where the left hemisphere was more active than the right

01:41:44.720 | and so forth.

01:41:45.560 | And these studies are important

01:41:48.800 | because we know that the autonomic nervous systems

01:41:52.260 | of individuals tend to start to collaborate

01:41:56.040 | and actually synchronize at the level of heartbeats,

01:41:59.280 | at the level of breathing

01:42:01.200 | during romantic interactions of different kinds.

01:42:03.560 | But these studies are some of the first of their kind

01:42:05.920 | to start looking at neural synchronization

01:42:08.140 | between individuals.

01:42:09.900 | Now, the simple version of looking at this

01:42:14.220 | and the way I would have thought this would all go

01:42:16.760 | was, okay, two people start kissing,

01:42:18.740 | they start talking about what they find

01:42:20.540 | particularly romantic and arousing for them,

01:42:22.380 | and their brainwaves will just match to one another.

01:42:24.800 | And that's really the basis of romantic attachment

01:42:28.560 | and romantic engagement in that sort of thing.

01:42:32.260 | But it turns out that the opposite is true.

01:42:36.280 | So a really nice study published in a really fine journal,

01:42:40.800 | Cerebral Cortex is a journal

01:42:42.160 | that I've known about for many years.

01:42:43.600 | They published Strong Anatomy, Physiology, and Neuroimaging.

01:42:46.720 | There's a study that was published,

01:42:48.940 | first author Kajimura in,

01:42:52.540 | and this paper really points, again, this is 2021.

01:42:56.940 | And the title of this paper is,

01:42:58.580 | "Brain knows who is on the same wavelength.

01:43:01.000 | "Resting state connectivity can predict compatibility

01:43:03.920 | "of female-male relationship."

01:43:06.380 | Now, what this study did was a little bit different.

01:43:08.800 | They looked at the resting

01:43:10.100 | or default mode activity of the brain.

01:43:12.860 | So rather than evoked activity, as it's called,

01:43:15.860 | where people are kissing

01:43:16.960 | or are engaged in some sort of activity,

01:43:19.400 | this was a neuroimaging study, not EEG,

01:43:23.100 | but fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging,

01:43:25.780 | which is similar to EEG in principle,

01:43:29.160 | but allows you to look deep into the brain.

01:43:31.360 | And it has a very good resolution in time and space.

01:43:35.460 | So fast events can be monitored,

01:43:37.780 | and the precise location of those events can be monitored

01:43:42.100 | somewhat better than EEG, and there are exceptions to this.

01:43:44.740 | So for you EEGers out there,

01:43:46.360 | EEG, don't come after me with electrodes.

01:43:50.340 | Just understand that fMRI gives you a fuller picture

01:43:54.160 | of what's going on.

01:43:55.080 | And what Kajimura et al found was that,

01:43:58.920 | contrary to what your reflexive prediction might be,

01:44:03.840 | people tend to select people that have resting brain states

01:44:09.980 | that are different than theirs,

01:44:11.940 | or sometimes they found that are actually opposite

01:44:15.200 | to their own resting brain state.

01:44:17.260 | And you might say, "Well, that doesn't make any sense.

01:44:19.220 | "I thought this is all about autonomic coordination."

01:44:22.240 | But actually, if we go back

01:44:23.540 | to Helen Fisher's categorizations of the dopamine types,

01:44:27.280 | the sensation-seeking types, that is serotonin,

01:44:30.420 | the kind of stable rule-following types,

01:44:33.180 | testosterone and estrogen types,

01:44:34.480 | remember that the two categories

01:44:36.420 | that she called testosterone and estrogen type,

01:44:38.140 | the director and the follower, the nurturer,

01:44:40.700 | I guess it would be the more accurate way,

01:44:42.140 | the director and the nurturer,

01:44:43.900 | those tend to pair up across categories, not within category.

01:44:48.420 | And so I think what's really needed for this field,

01:44:51.420 | which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet,

01:44:53.660 | is to really start to map the neuroanatomical

01:44:58.000 | and neurophysiological findings of, in this case,

01:45:01.120 | that resting brain state is in one form, in one individual,

01:45:06.120 | and they tend to seek out people whose resting brain state

01:45:09.260 | is different than theirs, not similar.

01:45:11.880 | That needs to be mapped

01:45:13.080 | onto the more subjective psychological categorizations

01:45:18.040 | that Helen Fisher and indeed the Gottmans

01:45:20.400 | and others have created.

01:45:21.980 | That's sort of the state of the field now.

01:45:24.000 | And I mentioned this, not to confuse you,

01:45:26.380 | but to the contrary, to illustrate

01:45:28.600 | that it's not just about finding someone just like you,

01:45:32.060 | and it's not just about finding someone

01:45:34.400 | who's opposite to you.

01:45:35.880 | This is actually the reason that I decided

01:45:37.560 | to become a biologist at some point in my life,

01:45:40.240 | which is that we can find verbal sayings and stories

01:45:43.920 | and examples to support just about anything.

01:45:46.880 | This is not a knock on the field of psychology,

01:45:49.140 | as you can probably tell from today's episode,

01:45:50.820 | I have great respect for and reverence

01:45:52.560 | for the field of psychology,

01:45:53.640 | especially its collaboration with neuroscience

01:45:56.720 | and vice versa.

01:45:58.060 | But in the popular culture, we can find examples

01:46:02.040 | and sayings that support essentially anything

01:46:04.440 | as it relates to a relationship.

01:46:06.380 | For instance, I've heard, and you've probably heard,

01:46:08.880 | absence makes the heart grow fonder,

01:46:10.840 | and indeed I've experienced that, and I believe it's true.

01:46:13.920 | But I also have experienced, and I believe to be true,

01:46:16.380 | that out of sight, out of mind also exists

01:46:18.800 | and that there will be a biological mechanism for that.

01:46:21.640 | The point here is that matching of same to same

01:46:24.760 | or same to different can both be effective

01:46:27.260 | in creating the desire-love attachment process.

01:46:32.260 | It's a matter of who is looking for same

01:46:36.140 | and who is looking for different.

01:46:37.360 | And there, I think Dr. Fisher and the work

01:46:40.120 | of these neurophysiologists and brain imagers

01:46:42.680 | really does point in a direction whereby

01:46:45.220 | there is not one form of attachment

01:46:48.920 | that is going to be wholly above all else

01:46:51.060 | and will predict good outcomes.

01:46:53.080 | There is not going to be a case in which opposites attract,

01:46:56.500 | and that's always the best rule to follow.

01:46:58.820 | Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't.

01:47:01.280 | There is also not the case that people tend

01:47:03.280 | to pair up with similar.

01:47:05.300 | Sometimes it will be the case, sometimes it won't.

01:47:08.100 | Now, there are certain statistics

01:47:10.040 | that support that statement.

01:47:11.300 | For instance, people, on average,

01:47:13.660 | people pair up with individuals

01:47:15.840 | of similar educational background, income,

01:47:18.280 | and attractiveness.

01:47:19.120 | That is true on average, but it's not always the case.

01:47:22.380 | And again, a knowledge of and a respect

01:47:25.140 | for the different categorizations of attachment,

01:47:27.740 | the different categorizations of mate-seeking,

01:47:30.160 | described by Fisher and others,

01:47:31.580 | and the recognition that matching

01:47:33.560 | of autonomic nervous systems,

01:47:34.760 | but also mismatching of resting state brain networks

01:47:38.560 | are all at play in driving what we are calling

01:47:41.600 | desire, love, and attachment.

01:47:43.440 | So in keeping with the exploration of the fact

01:47:45.480 | that there's a saying, or a book, or a song,

01:47:48.460 | or an example of pretty much any relationship dynamic,

01:47:52.280 | I want to now talk about an article that came out

01:47:55.200 | a little over 10 years ago that talked about

01:47:58.660 | the universality of love and the ability to fall in love.

01:48:02.800 | So this would be very much in line

01:48:04.120 | with the George Bernard Shaw quote that I mentioned earlier,

01:48:06.560 | that love is really overestimating the differences

01:48:09.600 | between individuals.

01:48:10.600 | And again, I should say that is not something

01:48:12.020 | that I personally believe,

01:48:13.680 | although maybe I'm just deluding myself.

01:48:15.600 | I like to think that the people that we fall in love with

01:48:18.680 | are really special for us,

01:48:21.940 | that they could not easily be replaced with anybody else.

01:48:25.580 | That's simply my stance.

01:48:26.960 | I'm not basing that on any

01:48:28.740 | hardcore neurobiological mechanism.

01:48:31.580 | But nonetheless, an article was published

01:48:35.200 | in the New York Times in 2015

01:48:37.620 | that related to some psychological studies

01:48:41.880 | that were done, as well as some clinical work,

01:48:43.620 | as well as some, what I would call pop psychology

01:48:47.460 | or things that fall outside the domains of academic science.

01:48:50.680 | And the whole basis of this article

01:48:54.720 | was 36 questions that lead to love.

01:48:58.940 | And it involved a listing out, indeed, of 36 questions,

01:49:02.900 | a set divided into set one, set two, and set three,

01:49:06.020 | that progress from somewhat ordinary questions

01:49:09.880 | about life experience and self-report

01:49:12.800 | to more, let's call them deep questions

01:49:15.920 | about people's values

01:49:18.120 | and things that are emotionally close to them.

01:49:20.200 | And I'll just give an example of a few of these.

01:49:21.960 | You can find this easily online

01:49:23.280 | by just putting into your search engine

01:49:25.700 | 36 questions that lead to love.

01:49:27.920 | Some of the questions in set number one were, for instance,

01:49:31.680 | what would constitute a perfect day for you?

01:49:34.000 | For what in your life do you feel most grateful,

01:49:37.080 | kind of standard questionnaire stuff.

01:49:38.640 | In set two, what is your most treasured memory?

01:49:41.920 | What is your most terrible memory?

01:49:43.380 | So these are, as you can tell,

01:49:44.860 | are drilling a little bit deeper

01:49:45.980 | into one's personal experience and emotional system.

01:49:49.240 | And then set three, questions 25 through 36,

01:49:54.240 | are things, what is a very embarrassing moment in your life?

01:49:59.540 | When did you last cry in front of another person

01:50:03.240 | and by yourself?

01:50:04.920 | What is something that's too serious to be joked about?

01:50:07.060 | So it's going deeper into one's emotional system.

01:50:10.980 | And even questions like of all the people in your family,

01:50:13.760 | whose death would you find most disturbing and why?

01:50:16.660 | So pretty heavy stuff there at the end.

01:50:19.160 | Now, the reason this article got so much traction

01:50:21.720 | and the reason I'm bringing it up today

01:50:22.920 | is that there was a statement

01:50:26.200 | that was made in and around this article

01:50:28.160 | that if two people went on a date

01:50:32.360 | or simply sat down and asked each other these questions

01:50:36.480 | and each answered these questions

01:50:39.420 | and the other was paying attention carefully

01:50:43.200 | and at some level, emotionally responding or not responding,

01:50:48.080 | but certainly paying attention

01:50:49.240 | to the answers of the other person,

01:50:51.140 | that by the end of that exchange

01:50:53.980 | where one person asks 36 questions

01:50:56.740 | and the other person answers all 36,

01:50:58.560 | and then the other person asks all 36

01:51:01.280 | and the other person answers all 36,

01:51:03.340 | that they would fall in love, right?

01:51:05.620 | Which seems like kind of a ridiculous thing.

01:51:08.140 | And yet it is the case

01:51:10.820 | that people who go through this exercise

01:51:13.900 | report feeling as if they know the other person quite well

01:51:17.620 | and feeling certain levels of attachment

01:51:21.260 | or even love and desire for the other person

01:51:23.780 | that they would not have predicted, excuse me,

01:51:27.200 | would not have predicted

01:51:29.200 | had they not gone through that process.

01:51:31.180 | So what's going on in this exchange of questions and answers

01:51:33.760 | of a progressively more emotional and deep level?

01:51:38.540 | Well, what I predict is going on

01:51:40.020 | is that inside of that exchange,

01:51:43.060 | people are creating a sort of delusional story

01:51:46.100 | about the nature of the exchange

01:51:48.180 | being a reflection of some deeper attachment.

01:51:51.260 | And so even though people are just exchanging words,

01:51:53.960 | they're not physically touching,

01:51:56.540 | they are not, at least not at the point

01:51:58.220 | where they're running these kinds of questionnaire studies,

01:52:03.480 | they may touch afterwards for all I know

01:52:05.380 | and probably did in some cases,

01:52:07.320 | but they're not exchanging life experience

01:52:09.740 | in an immediate way.

01:52:11.320 | They're not actually going off into the world

01:52:13.080 | and doing things together yet.

01:52:15.020 | They are simply exchanging narrative.

01:52:17.780 | But we know based on recent studies,

01:52:21.220 | and I've covered this before on this podcast,

01:52:23.460 | but I'll mention again,

01:52:24.280 | there was a study published in Cell Reports,

01:52:27.220 | a cell press journal, excellent journal,

01:52:29.360 | showing that when individuals listen to the same narrative,

01:52:33.900 | their heart rates tend to synchronize

01:52:35.560 | or at least follow a very similar pattern,

01:52:37.780 | even if they're not in the same room

01:52:39.500 | listening to a given narrative.

01:52:41.100 | Whereas in this case, people are facing one another,

01:52:44.180 | listening to the narratives of each other,

01:52:46.660 | certainly they are having autonomic responses.

01:52:49.940 | And it stands to reason

01:52:51.500 | that their autonomic nervous systems are synchronizing

01:52:54.140 | much in the same way that the Cell Reports study found

01:52:56.660 | that people will synchronize their autonomic nervous systems

01:52:59.880 | to a shared heard story from another.

01:53:03.800 | In other words, whether or not we hear a story,

01:53:06.240 | watch a movie, listen to a song,

01:53:08.480 | or exchange our own individual stories,

01:53:11.280 | our autonomic nervous systems have the potential

01:53:13.560 | to map onto one another.

01:53:15.000 | So I'm not all that surprised

01:53:17.160 | that people find that they fall in love, in quotes,

01:53:21.840 | after answering these questions to one another,

01:53:24.200 | because essentially the way these questions are laid out

01:53:26.820 | is they establish a narrative,

01:53:28.940 | they establish a very personal narrative,

01:53:30.900 | and the other person is listening very closely.

01:53:32.800 | And we don't have physiological or brain imaging studies

01:53:35.940 | to support what I'm about to say,

01:53:38.640 | but the reasonable interpretation

01:53:41.600 | is that that's causing

01:53:42.900 | some sort of autonomic synchronization.

01:53:45.420 | So if you want to try this on a date,

01:53:47.460 | or even it's actually been hypothesized

01:53:50.340 | that this could be useful for existing couples,

01:53:53.580 | even if they already know the answers

01:53:54.940 | to some of these questions,

01:53:55.940 | and that doesn't surprise me either.

01:53:57.740 | I think that autonomic coordination

01:53:59.240 | is present during mating behavior,

01:54:02.380 | it's present during shared experience of the outside world,

01:54:05.880 | movies, concerts, watching one's children

01:54:08.760 | with somebody else, et cetera,

01:54:10.320 | and it's established by sharing one's own narrative

01:54:13.400 | of their own personal experience.

01:54:15.140 | So I don't want to seem overly reductionist.

01:54:17.380 | I'll never propose that all of our sensation, perception,

01:54:21.500 | action, and experience in life

01:54:22.860 | boils down to us just being bags of chemicals

01:54:26.300 | and the action of those chemicals

01:54:28.020 | or any aspect of our nervous system.

01:54:29.620 | And yet in looking across the psychological literature

01:54:34.540 | of development of attachment,

01:54:36.140 | in the psychological literature

01:54:37.820 | of adult and romantic attachment,

01:54:40.060 | and what makes and breaks those attachments,

01:54:43.360 | it's very clear to me,

01:54:44.940 | and I think courses through the literature

01:54:47.060 | at multiple levels,

01:54:48.380 | that autonomic coordination is absolutely key

01:54:52.360 | for the establishment of desire, love, and attachment.

01:54:55.620 | In fact, I talked earlier about how our actual conception

01:54:58.540 | is born out of autonomic coordination

01:55:00.820 | of one sort or another.

01:55:02.540 | So again, it doesn't necessarily mean

01:55:05.580 | that autonomic nervous systems always be synchronized.

01:55:08.600 | In the case of the two categorizations

01:55:10.340 | that Fisher proposed of the director/testosterone type

01:55:14.340 | and the nurturing follower/estrogen type,

01:55:20.180 | it was actually the coordination,

01:55:22.440 | but in opposite directions of individuals

01:55:25.920 | that fall into each of those categories

01:55:27.280 | that led to more stable attachments

01:55:29.000 | or the seeking out of those attachments, as you'd say.

01:55:31.800 | But nonetheless, it's, at least to my mind,

01:55:34.580 | very clear that autonomic coordination

01:55:37.140 | is a hallmark feature of desire,

01:55:41.420 | a hallmark feature of what we call love,

01:55:44.200 | and a hallmark feature of what we call attachment,

01:55:47.080 | and that the breaking of attachments

01:55:49.500 | or the failures of desire, the failures of love,

01:55:53.920 | and the failures of attachment over time

01:55:56.700 | in line with the work of Gottman and others,

01:55:58.620 | and even just simply what's required for mating behavior

01:56:02.520 | is also reflected in the autonomic nervous system,

01:56:05.660 | but in that case,

01:56:06.500 | a failure to coordinate the autonomic nervous systems

01:56:09.020 | in some sort of concerted way.

01:56:11.340 | Any discussion about desire, love, and attachment

01:56:14.200 | would be incomplete if we didn't talk about

01:56:17.580 | the dreaded infidelity and cheating.

01:56:20.240 | You know, much has been made of infidelity and cheating,

01:56:22.320 | and whether or not people who are higher on dopamine

01:56:24.720 | and sensation seeking tend to cheat more or less.

01:56:27.380 | Frankly, I don't think there's any solid evidence for that.

01:56:30.680 | I think there are a lot of examples that we can draw from

01:56:33.960 | in our own lives and in the lives of others

01:56:36.780 | that would generally support one or the other model,

01:56:39.560 | but I'm not aware of any decent physiological studies

01:56:43.380 | or psychological studies that really point to that.

01:56:46.240 | For instance, I would never say that

01:56:49.220 | the serotonergic phenotype as described by Fisher

01:56:51.780 | is less prone to cheat or that the, you know,

01:56:57.000 | people who have an insecure attachment

01:56:58.600 | are more likely to cheat, for instance.

01:57:01.980 | I don't think those correlations have been drawn

01:57:04.420 | in any kind of meaningful way yet,

01:57:05.840 | so I would be cautious about assigning them

01:57:09.300 | without that evidence.

01:57:11.360 | However, there are some interesting studies involving,

01:57:14.600 | again, neuroimaging and some subjective measures in humans,

01:57:18.880 | meaning asking them questions that they're good ways

01:57:21.980 | to tease out lies from truths in these sorts of studies,

01:57:25.520 | and whether or not people tend to find their partner

01:57:30.280 | or others more or less attractive,

01:57:33.460 | depending on how people feel about themselves.

01:57:36.760 | And I think this is a very interesting aspect

01:57:39.440 | to desire, love, and attachment for the following reason.

01:57:43.880 | You hear a lot out there that, you know,

01:57:46.600 | in order to form a really strong relationship,

01:57:49.880 | you have to have a good relationship with yourself,

01:57:52.120 | or you have to love yourself,

01:57:54.360 | or you often hear, for instance,

01:57:57.400 | that, you know, it's exactly when you're not looking

01:58:00.280 | for a relationship that you're going to find

01:58:01.880 | when you hear this stuff, right?

01:58:03.380 | But none of that is really grounded in any studies.

01:58:05.760 | Again, that's like out of sight, out of mind,

01:58:07.480 | or absence makes the heart grow fonder.

01:58:09.320 | There are many life examples to support those statements,

01:58:13.480 | and there are many life examples

01:58:15.380 | to support statements to the opposite.

01:58:17.280 | There's a particular study that I found,

01:58:21.640 | this was published in Frontiers in Psychology,

01:58:23.920 | but it's a experimental study that involves neuroimaging.

01:58:27.980 | The title of this study is "Manipulation of Self-Expansion

01:58:31.760 | Alters Responses to Attractive Alternative Partners."

01:58:35.460 | And I love the design of this study.

01:58:37.140 | What they did in this study is they took couples

01:58:40.520 | and they evaluated members of that relationship

01:58:44.520 | for what's called self-expansion.

01:58:46.480 | Now, self-expansion is a metric

01:58:48.760 | that involves one's perception of self

01:58:53.360 | as seen through the relationship to the other.

01:58:56.800 | And this is something that was developed

01:58:58.680 | by the authors are Aaron and Aaron,

01:59:02.340 | so they have the same last name.

01:59:03.440 | So I'm assuming this was either a sibling team

01:59:05.920 | or a somehow related team or a romantic couple team.

01:59:10.160 | A-R-O-N and A-R-O-N.

01:59:13.240 | Aaron and Aaron in 1986 proposed

01:59:16.160 | the self-expansion model of close relationships.

01:59:18.680 | And they proposed that people are motivated

01:59:20.600 | to enter relationships, I'm reading here,

01:59:22.520 | in order to enhance the self and increase self-efficacy.

01:59:25.800 | In other words, that one of the reasons

01:59:27.960 | why many people enter relationships

01:59:29.860 | is that it makes us feel good about ourselves

01:59:31.680 | and more capable.

01:59:32.520 | And I would see that as a healthy interdependence,

01:59:34.860 | not necessarily co-dependence.

01:59:38.340 | This is especially strong at the beginning of a relationship,

01:59:41.000 | it turns out, when people are forming pair bonds.

01:59:43.660 | And it's the case that pleasure, arousal, and excitement,

01:59:48.300 | again, all hallmark features

01:59:50.660 | of autonomic nervous system function,

01:59:52.460 | pleasure, arousal, and excitement,

01:59:54.500 | give rise to self-expansion, meaning to self-efficacy.

01:59:59.100 | So what this self-expansion model is really about

02:00:02.240 | is how great other people that we are close to

02:00:05.460 | and romantically attached to can potentially make us feel

02:00:08.560 | in terms of what they say, in terms of what they do,

02:00:12.700 | in terms of the way in which we believe they feel about us.

02:00:17.700 | So it doesn't necessarily have to involve

02:00:20.320 | explicit statements of them telling us how great we are

02:00:24.040 | or them doing great gestures for us,

02:00:27.040 | but how we actually feel they feel about us

02:00:30.240 | turns out to be a very strong parameter

02:00:32.400 | in terms of how we feel about ourselves

02:00:33.920 | and the relationship overall.

02:00:36.220 | Now, some of you out there are probably thinking,

02:00:37.740 | oh yeah, isn't there this thing, the love languages, right?

02:00:40.800 | I don't have any neuroscience to support that.

02:00:42.560 | I think the love languages,

02:00:43.600 | I'm not super familiar with this, I didn't list it out,

02:00:45.820 | but that some people, their autonomic nervous system,

02:00:50.780 | if you will, tends to be very responsive to gifts

02:00:54.440 | or to quality time or to physical touch or acts of kindness.

02:00:58.200 | I think I've got a few of these, right?

02:00:59.280 | I probably have a few wrong.

02:01:00.240 | Anyway, they're easy to find online.

02:01:01.800 | And people do tend to have a kind of a bias

02:01:04.480 | toward two or three of these things

02:01:05.900 | that are especially meaningful for them.

02:01:07.840 | And when I hear meaningful,

02:01:09.060 | I hear they tend to push the autonomic nervous system

02:01:11.860 | and neurochemical systems of the brain and body

02:01:13.820 | in a direction that makes us feel good

02:01:15.500 | as opposed to lousy or neutral.

02:01:18.020 | In any event, this study looked at

02:01:21.480 | whether or not people have high levels of self-expansion

02:01:26.360 | through the actions or statements

02:01:29.040 | of their significant other,

02:01:30.360 | and how that influences their perception

02:01:33.800 | of people outside the relationship,

02:01:36.200 | meaning how attractive they perceive people

02:01:38.940 | outside the relationship to be,

02:01:40.840 | turns out to be strongly influenced by A,

02:01:44.840 | whether or not their self-expansion

02:01:47.880 | is very strongly driven by the other person

02:01:51.600 | that they are involved with,

02:01:53.240 | that they're in the romantic relationship with,

02:01:55.440 | and whether or not that's being expressed to them.

02:01:57.560 | So here's how the study went.

02:01:59.920 | First of all, they rated or categorized individuals

02:02:03.880 | on the basis of the self-expansion metric.

02:02:06.120 | Some people have more of a potential

02:02:08.700 | to experience self-expansion through others, right?

02:02:11.800 | Some of us feel great about ourselves

02:02:13.680 | and we're kind of topped off at that.

02:02:15.440 | Others don't feel so great about themselves,

02:02:17.840 | but they can feel much better in response to praise,

02:02:20.340 | in particular praise or self-expansion type behaviors

02:02:23.820 | or statements from people that we really care about.

02:02:25.840 | And still other people are a mixture of the two,

02:02:28.180 | the kind of moderate levels of both.

02:02:30.320 | So they rated them on this scale,

02:02:32.360 | and then they had people experience

02:02:34.900 | self-expansion narratives.

02:02:37.220 | They heard their significant other

02:02:38.540 | say really terrific things about them

02:02:40.840 | and about the relationship in particular,

02:02:42.820 | that the relationship that they have

02:02:45.260 | was exciting, novel, and challenging.

02:02:47.320 | So that was one form of self-expansion.

02:02:49.060 | And they went into some detail as to why

02:02:50.940 | that was the case in their particular relationship.

02:02:53.340 | Or they heard a narrative from their significant other

02:02:57.860 | about strong feelings of love between the two

02:03:02.180 | that had been experienced previously in the relationship.

02:03:04.600 | So in the one case, it's sort of directed more towards them.

02:03:07.620 | And in the other case,

02:03:08.460 | it's more about the relationship itself.

02:03:10.580 | And then they did brain imaging

02:03:12.820 | of one person in the relationship,

02:03:15.680 | while that person assessed the attractiveness

02:03:18.640 | of people outside the relationship.

02:03:21.140 | And what they found was that people who were primed

02:03:23.840 | for this self-expansion had lower activation

02:03:28.680 | of brain areas associated

02:03:30.240 | with assessing other's attractiveness

02:03:32.560 | than did the people who experienced a lot of self-expansion.

02:03:36.600 | Now, the takeaway from that,

02:03:38.880 | at least the way I read this study,

02:03:40.480 | is if you're with somebody who really benefits

02:03:44.040 | from or experiences a lot of self-expansion,

02:03:47.240 | unless you really want them to pay attention

02:03:50.500 | to the attractiveness of other people,

02:03:52.680 | it stands to reason that they would benefit

02:03:56.320 | from more self-expansion type gestures or statements.

02:04:01.160 | Not so much centered on the relationship.

02:04:03.260 | We have such a great relationship.

02:04:04.560 | There's so much love, it's so great.

02:04:06.000 | That too, but in the context of this study

02:04:08.520 | and these findings that the person is really terrific,

02:04:12.160 | that the relationship that they've created together

02:04:14.040 | is really exciting, novel, and challenging,

02:04:16.360 | that there's a narrative around the relationship

02:04:18.640 | that really has a lot to do with the dynamics

02:04:21.120 | between the individuals, in particular,

02:04:22.960 | that the person who really likes self-expansion

02:04:25.360 | is vital to that dynamic, okay?

02:04:27.180 | So it's not looking down at the relationship

02:04:28.840 | as a set of equals.

02:04:30.080 | There is sort of this bias written into this

02:04:32.000 | of that this person is really essential for the relationship.

02:04:34.980 | I'm not saying this is something that anyone has to do.

02:04:36.760 | I'm not saying this is right or wrong.

02:04:38.040 | This is just what the data say.

02:04:40.120 | But what's remarkable is that

02:04:42.240 | in the absence of those statements,

02:04:44.340 | people who have, or that rate high

02:04:48.480 | on this scale of self-expansion

02:04:50.680 | rate attractive alternative partners as more attractive.

02:04:54.460 | Now, that's interesting to me because it means

02:04:57.120 | that their actual perception of others is changing.

02:05:00.860 | It's not that their opportunity to see others is changing.

02:05:04.920 | This is not a matter of them somehow getting access

02:05:08.400 | or no access to attractive alternative partners.

02:05:11.140 | Again, attractive alternative partner

02:05:12.440 | is literally the language in the title of this paper.

02:05:14.940 | They're still seeing all these attractive people.

02:05:17.140 | It's just that if they're feeling filled up in air quotes,

02:05:21.460 | psychologically filled up, emotionally filled up,

02:05:24.500 | autonomically filled, enhanced in the language

02:05:28.420 | that we're using today by the self-expansion narrative,

02:05:31.480 | well then the same set of attractive faces

02:05:34.740 | appear less attractive to a given individual.

02:05:38.460 | Now, whether or not this predicts cheating or loyalty,

02:05:41.460 | I certainly can't say.

02:05:42.980 | That would be very hard to assess in neuroimaging.

02:05:45.740 | And there, of course, people rarely,

02:05:49.920 | if ever report accurately their cheating behavior.

02:05:53.220 | There are some studies in which confidentiality is assured

02:05:56.200 | to the point where people seem to be more trusting

02:05:59.160 | and willing to reveal cheating behavior.

02:06:01.780 | But if you look at the statistics on cheating behavior,

02:06:03.560 | it's very hard to track because people lie all the time

02:06:07.100 | about their cheating in and outside of the context

02:06:09.220 | of psychological and neuroimaging studies.

02:06:12.560 | But I find this study, again,

02:06:14.900 | the title Manipulation of Self-Expansion

02:06:16.700 | alters responses to attractive alternative partners

02:06:19.140 | to be absolutely fascinating because, again,

02:06:21.940 | it points to the fact that the interactions

02:06:25.540 | with our significant others shapes our autonomic arousal,

02:06:29.380 | shapes our perception of self,

02:06:31.540 | and thereby shapes our perception

02:06:34.000 | of other potential partners in the outside world,

02:06:36.740 | or shuts us down to the potential of other people

02:06:40.100 | in the outside world.

02:06:41.460 | So when I hear statements such as,

02:06:43.020 | it's important that you love yourself

02:06:44.620 | in order to really fall in love with somebody else,

02:06:47.180 | or it is when one is not looking for a relationship

02:06:51.300 | that they're most likely to fall in love

02:06:53.060 | and form a stable relationship,

02:06:54.620 | I can filter that through these findings

02:06:58.060 | to say that it's really the person

02:07:01.460 | who needs a lot of self-expansion stimulating statements

02:07:06.460 | or actions coming from other people

02:07:09.100 | that is most prone to seeing other potential partners

02:07:13.740 | out in the world as attractive.

02:07:15.700 | And in this sense,

02:07:17.580 | we can return to the autonomic nervous system

02:07:19.660 | as kind of a glass that it can be filled up

02:07:23.380 | through various contexts.

02:07:24.500 | It can be filled up through our own ability to regulate it.

02:07:27.260 | It can be filled up through other people's ability

02:07:30.600 | to enhance our sense of wellbeing.

02:07:32.820 | And in some sense, this points to an idea

02:07:35.500 | where it is true that the better that we can feel

02:07:38.320 | about ourselves in the absence of any self-expansion type

02:07:43.100 | input from somebody else really does place us

02:07:45.620 | on more stable ground such that when we do receive

02:07:48.140 | that praise or we do receive those acts of kindness

02:07:50.500 | or service or physical touch or whatever they are,

02:07:53.220 | that we are able to further enhance the way that we feel,

02:07:58.220 | but that we don't necessarily tether all of our feelings

02:08:02.140 | of self-worth or self-expansion to that one individual.

02:08:06.660 | So you might think that if person A can only receive

02:08:10.220 | the self-expansion from the statements,

02:08:13.580 | from the action of the person they're involved with,

02:08:15.740 | person B, that that will form a very stable bond.

02:08:19.600 | But what this study points to is the fact

02:08:21.220 | that that's a very unstable bond,

02:08:23.500 | that person A is actually very susceptible

02:08:26.140 | to the attractiveness of others

02:08:27.420 | because they're so desperately attached

02:08:29.660 | to this notion of self-expansion,

02:08:31.180 | even if they don't realize it.

02:08:32.540 | And so this really does point to the idea

02:08:34.300 | that while it is important to link

02:08:37.560 | our autonomic nervous systems to establish desire,

02:08:40.880 | love, and attachment, that we want to have

02:08:43.120 | a stable internal representation of ourselves,

02:08:46.920 | a stable autonomic nervous system to some degree or another,

02:08:50.460 | so that we can be in stable romantic partnership

02:08:54.620 | with another individual

02:08:55.680 | if that's what we're really trying to do.

02:08:57.380 | So until now, I've been weaving together studies

02:08:59.220 | from the field of experimental psychology

02:09:01.960 | and the fields of neuroscience, in particular, neuroimaging.

02:09:06.120 | But if you recall back to the very beginning of the episode,

02:09:10.460 | when I was discussing how odors and how hormones

02:09:15.400 | and how even birth control can shape people's ratings

02:09:18.460 | of attractiveness of others,

02:09:20.660 | you'll realize that there's a deeper layer to all this,

02:09:24.660 | which is that our biology

02:09:27.620 | that resides below our conscious awareness,

02:09:31.540 | things like our hormones, things like pheromones even,

02:09:36.180 | are shaping the way that we choose, interpret, and act

02:09:41.180 | with other potential romantic partners

02:09:45.060 | or the romantic partners that we already have.

02:09:48.340 | Now, this cannot be overemphasized, right?

02:09:52.640 | No matter how much we would like to create

02:09:56.020 | a sort of top-down description,

02:09:58.420 | meaning from the cortex and our understanding of things

02:10:01.820 | onto what we find attractive, who we find attractive,

02:10:04.640 | what we enjoy, what we don't enjoy

02:10:06.740 | in the pursuit and romantic interactions with others,

02:10:10.700 | there always seems to be, and indeed there always is,

02:10:14.140 | a deeper layer in which our subconscious processing

02:10:18.060 | drives us to find a particular person

02:10:20.820 | to be particularly attractive

02:10:22.540 | or in which we have chemistry with somebody

02:10:26.000 | or in which we lack chemistry with somebody.

02:10:29.200 | And I would say that one of the more exciting,

02:10:31.660 | fascinating, and indeed mysterious aspects

02:10:35.920 | of desire, love, and attachment

02:10:39.360 | are those subconscious processes,

02:10:41.360 | those things that we call chemistry, right?

02:10:44.040 | I mean, people will report, for instance,

02:10:46.260 | that somebody's smell

02:10:48.180 | is just absolutely positively intoxicating for them

02:10:51.440 | or that somebody's smell is absolutely repulsive to them

02:10:53.840 | and they don't know why.

02:10:55.720 | That the taste of someone's breath,

02:10:58.280 | and I don't mean that in any kind of poetic sense,

02:11:00.600 | I literally mean the taste of somebody's breath

02:11:03.560 | in some cases can be very exciting to somebody.

02:11:07.320 | And believe it or not, we can taste each other's breath.

02:11:09.860 | I talked about this in the chemical sensing episode

02:11:12.460 | some months back, but we actually have receptors

02:11:17.080 | for taste and smell that engage in coordinated action

02:11:20.320 | such that we can't really separate taste and smell

02:11:23.280 | at some level, and this is especially true

02:11:25.700 | when it comes to the formation of romantic relationships

02:11:28.360 | and what we call chemistry.

02:11:30.040 | Now, is chemistry absolutely required

02:11:32.800 | for forming stable attachments for love and for desire?

02:11:36.880 | No, of course they're not.

02:11:38.800 | But in general, these are primitive mechanisms

02:11:42.820 | that exist in all animals.

02:11:44.440 | They exist in special forms in humans,

02:11:47.340 | but that they drive us toward behaviors that will,

02:11:51.020 | as the theory goes, lead to love and attachment,

02:11:55.560 | not always, as Dr. Fisher pointed out,

02:11:58.220 | that sex and sex drive is one way

02:12:00.780 | to explore potential love relationships

02:12:03.200 | and to explore potential attachments,

02:12:05.800 | which of course are major investments

02:12:08.440 | that extend well beyond one night or a week

02:12:11.240 | or a vacation or even a year.

02:12:13.420 | When we talk about stable attachments in general,

02:12:15.920 | that means long-term attachments in humans.

02:12:18.860 | Now, there is a biology to all of that chemistry stuff,

02:12:24.340 | and the studies of oral contraception

02:12:27.300 | and men finding women more attractive

02:12:29.440 | at certain phases of their menstrual cycle

02:12:31.540 | and women finding men more attractive

02:12:34.540 | at certain phases of the woman's menstrual cycle

02:12:36.980 | point to the incredible power

02:12:39.580 | of those deeper biological mechanisms.

02:12:41.520 | In the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:12:44.620 | I discussed both science and science-based tools,

02:12:47.600 | and so I'd be remiss if I didn't actually cover

02:12:50.740 | some of the tools that relate

02:12:52.300 | to those deeper biological mechanisms.

02:12:55.100 | Now, the hormones testosterone and estrogen

02:12:59.100 | are almost always the first biological chemicals

02:13:02.660 | and hormones that are mentioned and described and explored

02:13:06.580 | when thinking about desire

02:13:09.820 | and love and attachment too, for that matter,

02:13:12.380 | since love and attachment stem from desire.

02:13:15.160 | I did an entire episode

02:13:18.300 | about the biology of testosterone and estrogen

02:13:21.540 | and ways to optimize testosterone and estrogen.

02:13:25.140 | You can easily find that episode at HubermanLab.com.

02:13:28.500 | It's timestamped.

02:13:29.400 | There you can find all sorts of information

02:13:31.220 | about how certain behaviors or absence of behaviors

02:13:34.820 | drive up or down testosterone and estrogen.

02:13:37.680 | I also dispel some myths about sexual behavior

02:13:41.120 | and things like masturbation

02:13:42.560 | and how they relate to testosterone and estrogen,

02:13:45.700 | as well as some myths about how those hormones change

02:13:48.480 | across the lifespan.

02:13:49.560 | I also talk about the role of exercise.

02:13:52.580 | I talk about supplementation,

02:13:54.040 | and I also talk a little bit

02:13:55.580 | about hormone replacement therapy,

02:13:57.100 | although that will be the topic for a future episode.

02:13:59.660 | So if you're interested

02:14:00.500 | in the biology of testosterone and estrogen,

02:14:02.600 | two hormones that absolutely influence things

02:14:05.460 | like libido and desire,

02:14:07.700 | please check out that episode

02:14:08.920 | as well as what I'm going to talk about

02:14:10.980 | in just a moment here.

02:14:12.220 | The simple stereotyped version

02:14:13.920 | of the hormones testosterone and estrogen

02:14:16.860 | are that testosterone drives libido

02:14:19.680 | or increases it, AKA sex drive,

02:14:21.820 | and that estrogen somehow blunts it

02:14:23.980 | or is not involved in libido and sex drive.

02:14:26.820 | And that is simply not the case.

02:14:29.000 | As I described in that testosterone

02:14:31.260 | and estrogen optimization episode,

02:14:33.180 | and as I'll tell you now,

02:14:35.020 | yes, testosterone and some of its other forms

02:14:38.820 | like dihydrotestosterone are strongly related

02:14:42.120 | to libido and sex drive and the pursuit

02:14:45.400 | and ability to mate.

02:14:46.580 | However, the hormone estrogen is also strongly associated

02:14:51.460 | with libido and mating behavior.

02:14:53.620 | So much so that for people that either chemically

02:14:57.780 | or for some other reason have very low estrogen,

02:15:00.940 | libido can severely suffer.

02:15:02.920 | So it's a coordinated dance of estrogen

02:15:05.540 | and testosterone in both males and females

02:15:07.380 | that leads to libido or sex drive.

02:15:10.380 | So I absolutely wanted to make clear

02:15:13.380 | that it's not a simple relationship

02:15:16.620 | between testosterone and sex drive

02:15:18.520 | or estrogen and sex drive.

02:15:19.580 | Both are required at appropriate ratios.

02:15:23.260 | Now, with that said,

02:15:26.060 | there are things that can shift libido

02:15:30.400 | in both men and women in the direction of more desire

02:15:35.340 | or more desire to mate either to seek mates

02:15:38.580 | or to mate with existing partners.

02:15:41.700 | And there's a quite solid literature

02:15:44.300 | around a few of those substances.

02:15:46.720 | Now, a common misconception is that because dopamine

02:15:49.580 | is involved in motivation and drive,

02:15:52.200 | that simply increasing dopamine

02:15:54.220 | through any number of different mechanisms or tools

02:15:57.440 | will increase libido and sex drive.

02:15:59.860 | And that's simply not the case either.

02:16:02.320 | It is true that some level of dopamine

02:16:08.460 | or increase in dopamine is required

02:16:11.080 | for increases in libido.

02:16:14.220 | However, because of dopamine's relationship

02:16:16.620 | to the autonomic nervous system,

02:16:18.380 | and because the autonomic nervous system

02:16:21.220 | is so intimately involved, no pun intended,

02:16:24.420 | in sexual activity, in seeking and actual mating behavior,

02:16:28.760 | as I described earlier, it's actually the case

02:16:31.540 | that if people drive their dopamine system too high,

02:16:35.660 | they will be in states of arousal that are high enough,

02:16:40.660 | such that they seek and want sexual activity,

02:16:44.400 | but they can't actually engage the parasympathetic arm

02:16:47.420 | of the autonomic nervous system sufficient

02:16:49.240 | to become physically aroused.

02:16:51.200 | Now, there's a whole description of this

02:16:53.800 | that awaits us in a future episode,

02:16:55.540 | but I'll summarize now by saying,

02:16:58.060 | for people that are taking substances

02:17:01.180 | just simply to increase dopamine,

02:17:03.320 | in order to increase libido,

02:17:06.520 | that can be a potentially hazardous route to follow,

02:17:09.780 | because depending on whether or not that dopamine level

02:17:13.860 | is high enough that it puts them into a mode

02:17:16.820 | of seeking mates or mating,

02:17:20.880 | but they can't adjust their autonomic nervous system

02:17:23.820 | during actual mating behavior,

02:17:25.440 | what essentially is I'm saying is it can place people

02:17:27.440 | into a chronic pursuit,

02:17:29.020 | but an inability to perform sexually,

02:17:30.980 | and this is true for men and women, okay?

02:17:33.520 | So I would just caution people against just thinking,

02:17:37.200 | oh, a lack of libido is simply a lack of dopamine.

02:17:40.780 | That is not the case.

02:17:41.920 | It could be from lower levels of dopamine,

02:17:44.820 | but it could also be for other reasons.

02:17:47.680 | And so these systems, these signaling systems

02:17:50.040 | and these neurochemicals are very intricate,

02:17:53.120 | and just simply ramping up dopamine

02:17:55.800 | has actually been found, for instance,

02:17:57.260 | in amphetamine and cocaine users,

02:18:00.060 | there is a phenomenon in which they become hyper aroused,

02:18:02.480 | but can't perform sexually.

02:18:03.720 | This is also true for people who take elevated levels

02:18:06.720 | of other recreational drugs or who take antidepressants

02:18:11.040 | that increase the dopamine system too much, right?

02:18:14.200 | Dosage has to be worked out with your physician,

02:18:17.000 | with your psychiatrist, such that, you know,

02:18:19.840 | mood is enhanced and the various aspects

02:18:23.000 | of a healthy wellbeing, mind and body are enhanced,

02:18:26.020 | but not so much so that that what we call the arousal arc

02:18:29.400 | is locked with the seesaw in the sympathetic drive position

02:18:34.520 | such that sexual arousal can't occur, okay?

02:18:37.560 | So this is an important point to make

02:18:39.900 | because I think that a lot of people are under the impression

02:18:43.320 | that if they just drive up testosterone, increase dopamine,

02:18:47.080 | and generally get themselves into high states

02:18:49.240 | of autonomic arousal,

02:18:50.240 | that that's going to increase the libido,

02:18:52.520 | but that's simply not the way the system works.

02:18:54.620 | It's that seesaw and that seesawing back and forth

02:18:57.580 | that is the arc of arousal that we talked about earlier.

02:19:01.280 | Now, there are substances, legal over-the-counter substances

02:19:06.280 | that fall under the categorization of supplements

02:19:09.280 | that do indeed increase libido and arousal.

02:19:13.140 | And so I'm going to talk about some of those

02:19:14.440 | in the context of peer-reviewed literature now.

02:19:17.620 | I want to be clear, however,

02:19:18.960 | that these are by no means required.

02:19:21.600 | Many people have healthy libidos or have libidos

02:19:24.280 | that are healthy for their life and what they need and want.

02:19:29.360 | And as always, in any discussion about supplementation,

02:19:32.520 | you absolutely have to check with your physician.

02:19:34.360 | I don't just say that to protect us.

02:19:35.640 | I say that to protect you.

02:19:37.120 | Your health and wellbeing is dependent on you

02:19:38.920 | doing certain things and not doing others,

02:19:40.540 | and everybody is different.

02:19:42.080 | Nonetheless, there are studies

02:19:43.640 | that point to specific substances

02:19:45.800 | that are sold over-the-counter

02:19:47.440 | that at least in the United States are legal

02:19:49.320 | and that have been shown to be statistically significant

02:19:53.540 | in increasing measures of libido.

02:19:56.160 | There are many such substances,

02:19:58.440 | but three that in particular have good peer-reviewed research

02:20:02.920 | to support them are MACA, M-A-C-A,

02:20:07.920 | which is actually a root.

02:20:10.400 | Tongat Ali, also sometimes called long jack.

02:20:13.160 | I didn't name them, forgive me.

02:20:14.960 | And tribulus or tribulus, it's sometimes called.

02:20:18.800 | I'm going to talk about each of these in sequence,

02:20:21.420 | but on the whole, the studies on MACA are quite convincing

02:20:27.960 | that consumption of two to three grams per day of MACA,

02:20:32.960 | which generally is sold as a powder or a capsule,

02:20:36.720 | typically consumed early in the day

02:20:40.000 | because it can be somewhat of a stimulant,

02:20:42.000 | meaning it can increase alertness

02:20:44.040 | and you wouldn't want it to interfere with sleep

02:20:46.940 | by taking it too late in the day.

02:20:48.640 | But in studies that include both men and women

02:20:51.940 | of durations anywhere from eight to 12 weeks

02:20:54.400 | of athletes and non-athletes,

02:20:57.480 | and different variations of MACA,

02:21:00.540 | turns out there's black MACA, red MACA, yellow MACA.

02:21:03.600 | There are a bunch of different forms of MACA,

02:21:06.080 | but that they can increase subjective reports

02:21:10.040 | of sexual desire independent of hormone systems,

02:21:15.040 | meaning it does not seem,

02:21:16.760 | at least based on the existing literature,

02:21:19.040 | that MACA increases testosterone or changes estrogen,

02:21:22.080 | at least not on the timescales that these studies were done

02:21:24.920 | or with the measures that were performed in these studies.

02:21:27.760 | But that MACA, again, consumed in doses

02:21:31.520 | of anywhere from two to three grams per day,

02:21:34.240 | has been shown to significantly increase libido.

02:21:37.520 | And in fact, those dosages of MACA have been shown

02:21:41.820 | to offset so-called SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction.

02:21:46.820 | So there are various routes to sexual dysfunction.

02:21:51.060 | The SSRIs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

02:21:55.140 | They go by name brands like Prozac and Zoloft,

02:21:57.260 | and there are many others now,

02:21:58.640 | and generic forms and so forth.

02:22:00.660 | Those don't always, I should point out,

02:22:03.620 | lead to sexual dysfunction.

02:22:04.900 | There's a dose dependence.

02:22:06.880 | Some people do quite well on SSRIs

02:22:09.660 | and don't have any issues with sexual function.

02:22:11.660 | Other people suffer quite a lot from sexual dysfunction

02:22:15.260 | while taking SSRIs, highly variable.

02:22:18.040 | You need to work with a physician, a qualified psychiatrist.

02:22:22.840 | But nonetheless, everything I've been saying

02:22:25.300 | about MACA thus far has also been explored

02:22:29.400 | in the context of SSRI-induced sexual dysfunction.

02:22:32.000 | The paper that I'm referring to here

02:22:34.960 | is a double-blind randomized pilot dose-finding study

02:22:37.840 | of MACA root.

02:22:39.020 | It goes by the name L. Mayeni.

02:22:41.920 | These always have fancy names,

02:22:43.160 | and the Latin names in biology are always more complicated,

02:22:45.780 | but it's MACA root for the management of SSRI-induced

02:22:48.740 | sexual dysfunction.

02:22:49.880 | First author is Dording, D-O-R-D-I-N-G.

02:22:52.680 | This was a study done at Mass General,

02:22:56.040 | which is one of the satellite locations

02:22:59.300 | around Harvard Med, it's associated with Harvard Med,

02:23:02.740 | that found significant improvements in libido

02:23:06.940 | when people were taking a pretty low dose.

02:23:08.900 | It was actually, in this case, just 1.5 grams per day

02:23:13.260 | up to a high dose, three grams per day, of MACA.

02:23:17.120 | And they were doing this in 20 remitted depressed

02:23:19.960 | outpatients, so these are people that had depression.

02:23:22.120 | Their depression was successfully treated with SSRIs,

02:23:25.000 | but they were suffering from some of these SSRI-related

02:23:27.820 | sexual effects, and MACA seemed to offset

02:23:30.120 | some of those effects significantly in this population.

02:23:33.660 | The other studies exploring the lack of effect

02:23:37.380 | on serum testosterone in adult healthy men

02:23:41.200 | was a 12-week study, again, consuming anywhere

02:23:44.260 | from 1.5 to 3 milligrams, meaning 1, excuse me,

02:23:48.020 | 1,500 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams or placebo.

02:23:51.240 | So again, this is 1.5 up to three grams of MACA or placebo,

02:23:56.240 | and they rated sexual desire, depression,

02:24:00.660 | and other measures such as testosterone in the blood.

02:24:04.580 | Again, no change in testosterone or estrogen,

02:24:08.500 | estradiol levels in men treated with MACA,

02:24:11.020 | and those treated with placebo, but nonetheless,

02:24:14.160 | there was a significant and positive effect on libido

02:24:17.400 | with this dosage of 1.5 to three grams per day of MACA.

02:24:21.160 | And there are several other studies that also show this,

02:24:24.900 | again, in people that are taking SRIs

02:24:28.500 | and people that are not taking SSRIs

02:24:31.220 | in chronically over-trained athletes.

02:24:34.980 | This was also found to be the case.

02:24:36.260 | So it seems like across the board MACA

02:24:39.260 | is a fairly useful supplement

02:24:42.060 | for those that are seeking to increase their libido.

02:24:44.700 | And there are fewer studies involving women,

02:24:47.460 | but there are a few such studies that also point

02:24:50.580 | to the same general positive effect on libido

02:24:53.420 | in women taking MACA at equivalent doses

02:24:56.000 | to those I just described.

02:24:57.460 | I think it's noteworthy that MACA supplementation

02:25:00.140 | does not seem to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels

02:25:04.220 | to any significant degree, but it does change libido.

02:25:07.460 | I think that points to the fact

02:25:09.460 | that there are multiple systems in the brain and body

02:25:11.840 | that influence libido, not just testosterone and estrogen.

02:25:15.180 | And indeed, we know that to be the case.

02:25:16.460 | Things like PEA, which is a substance found in chocolate

02:25:21.020 | and is a substance that some people supplement

02:25:23.700 | is known for instance, to increase sexual desire,

02:25:27.100 | but also the perception of sexual experiences

02:25:30.220 | as more stimulating, for instance.

02:25:32.660 | So there are a lot of pathways in the brain,

02:25:34.520 | in particular in the hypothalamus,

02:25:36.860 | this ancient area of our brain that harbors neurons

02:25:39.900 | and hormone secreting cells, including neurons,

02:25:43.580 | that can shape our perceptions of our,

02:25:46.740 | even just our tactile experience of others

02:25:50.540 | and their attractiveness and indeed can shift levels

02:25:53.340 | of desire independent of changing levels

02:25:56.620 | of circulating hormones.

02:25:58.140 | Another substance that has been shown to increase libido

02:26:01.100 | across a range of human populations is so-called

02:26:05.380 | tongkat ali.

02:26:06.780 | I've talked a little bit about this before

02:26:09.060 | on the Huberman Lab podcast in reference to testosterone.

02:26:13.380 | And I've talked about it extensively as a guest

02:26:15.340 | on other podcasts.

02:26:16.580 | Tongkat ali goes by a number of different names.

02:26:19.100 | One of them is exceedingly difficult for me to pronounce.

02:26:22.660 | It's uricoma longifolia, also called longjack,

02:26:26.780 | but tongkat ali is the typical name.

02:26:30.380 | This is an herb.

02:26:31.380 | There's a Malaysian version and an Indonesian version.

02:26:34.860 | My understanding is that the Indonesian variety

02:26:37.500 | of tongkat ali is the one that is most potent

02:26:39.980 | for its effects on libido.

02:26:43.020 | Previously, I've talked about tongkat ali

02:26:46.280 | taken in 400 milligram per day capsules

02:26:49.740 | as a means to increase the amount of free,

02:26:53.140 | meaning unbound testosterone.

02:26:55.220 | So testosterone has a both bound form and an unbound form.

02:26:58.920 | Very briefly, the bound form is bound to albumin

02:27:02.460 | in the blood or to so-called sex hormone binding globulin.

02:27:06.440 | When it's bound, it can't be biologically active

02:27:10.620 | at many cells.

02:27:11.940 | It is important that some of it be bound

02:27:13.780 | in order to get a sort of time release

02:27:15.860 | and proper distribution of testosterone through the body,

02:27:18.380 | but it is the unbound free testosterone

02:27:21.040 | that can really have its most potent effects.

02:27:23.460 | And there's some evidence that tongkat ali

02:27:26.620 | can increase the amount of unbound so-called free testosterone

02:27:30.620 | by lowering sex hormone binding globulin,

02:27:33.180 | although it is almost certain that it has other routes

02:27:36.260 | of mechanism as well.

02:27:37.740 | Nonetheless, there are some reports

02:27:41.900 | of tongkat ali increasing libido.

02:27:44.940 | One particular article, last author,

02:27:48.400 | or I should say last name of first author, excuse me,

02:27:51.460 | Ismail, I-S-M-A-L.

02:27:53.480 | This was published in an evidence-based complimentary

02:27:57.660 | and alternative medicine.

02:27:58.900 | It's from 2012.

02:28:00.180 | Reports a significant increase in libido and sexual function.

02:28:05.140 | There are other such studies, not a lot of them,

02:28:07.900 | not as many robust controlled quality peer reviewed studies

02:28:12.820 | as there are from MACA.

02:28:14.140 | Nonetheless, a number of people, men and women

02:28:16.740 | that I know do take tongkat ali

02:28:19.340 | and it seems to work well for them.

02:28:21.180 | The question always comes up

02:28:22.580 | around discussion of supplements.

02:28:23.880 | Do you need to cycle these things?

02:28:25.420 | The only way to determine that is really

02:28:27.200 | to do your blood work, monitor liver enzymes,

02:28:29.900 | monitor hormone levels and so forth.

02:28:32.160 | So I simply can't say whether or not you need to

02:28:35.120 | or you don't need to cycle them.

02:28:36.680 | Typically, tongkat ali and MACA are not cycled

02:28:40.940 | in any regular kind of way that I'm aware of.

02:28:43.580 | But again, you really need to check with your doctor

02:28:46.280 | if you're going to initiate taking any of these things.

02:28:49.220 | And you certainly should do your best

02:28:50.940 | to monitor your blood work as well as subjective measures

02:28:53.540 | in evaluating whether or not they're working for you,

02:28:55.420 | say for you and so forth.

02:28:56.740 | The third and final substance/supplement

02:28:59.260 | that I want to touch on as it relates to libido

02:29:01.940 | is called tribulus terrestis.

02:29:04.740 | So that's T-R-I-B-U-L-U-S, terrestis, T-E-R-R-E-S, T-R-I-S.

02:29:09.740 | This is a commonly sold over-the-counter supplement

02:29:16.340 | for increasing testosterone for fitness purposes and so on.

02:29:21.340 | Whether or not it actually does that

02:29:24.660 | to a meaningful degree isn't clear,

02:29:27.680 | but I'm aware of four peer-reviewed studies

02:29:31.180 | that were focused on both males and females,

02:29:36.720 | ranging anywhere from 18 years old

02:29:39.800 | all the way up to 65 plus, they say 65 plus,

02:29:43.200 | I guess it could be 70, it could be 80, I don't know.

02:29:45.780 | But a fairly broad age range

02:29:48.640 | where people took anywhere from 750 milligrams per day

02:29:53.000 | divided into three equal doses.

02:29:57.380 | So 750 total per day divided into three equal doses

02:30:01.340 | of tribulus or placebo for 120 days.

02:30:05.400 | This particular study was focused on females.

02:30:08.720 | And according to the female sexual function

02:30:11.180 | index questionnaire, no significant difference

02:30:13.940 | between any of the groups.

02:30:15.540 | However, free and bioavailable testosterone

02:30:19.260 | increased in the group taking tribulus terrestis.

02:30:21.860 | Total testosterone did not reach statistical significance.

02:30:25.280 | So this is sort of the inverse of what we see with MACA

02:30:28.420 | where there do seem to be increases in testosterone,

02:30:31.120 | which would predict that there would be increase in libido.

02:30:34.700 | In this case, this was post-menopausal women.

02:30:37.900 | There was no increase in libido.

02:30:39.200 | There was an increase in testosterone.

02:30:41.100 | I mention it only because there might be instances

02:30:43.620 | in which people want to increase their testosterone.

02:30:47.740 | It does seem that tribulus, at least in that population,

02:30:50.200 | is capable of doing that.

02:30:51.820 | Now, there's a separate study that was done,

02:30:54.420 | a double-blind study lasting anywhere from one to six months

02:30:58.420 | that had a clear and significant increase in libido.

02:31:02.320 | Now, this was taking six grams.

02:31:05.040 | So that's 6,000 milligrams of tribulus root for 60 days.

02:31:09.460 | And it did seem to increase various aspects

02:31:11.700 | of sexual function.

02:31:12.860 | And there was what appeared to be a substantial

02:31:17.580 | 16.3% increase in testosterone.

02:31:20.260 | But in this particular study,

02:31:21.760 | because of the variability across individuals

02:31:24.640 | that did not actually arrive at statistical significance.

02:31:27.580 | Now, there were a number of other studies

02:31:29.640 | that explored the role of tribulus,

02:31:32.560 | in particular in females.

02:31:34.640 | And one of those studies was a study

02:31:37.640 | that was actually quite short.

02:31:39.220 | It was two to four weeks.

02:31:40.680 | It involved 67 subjects.

02:31:43.040 | These were subjects that had experienced a loss of libido

02:31:46.480 | and took tribulus, divided into two equal doses,

02:31:50.020 | compared that to placebo.

02:31:51.600 | And they did see a significant improvement

02:31:54.360 | in these measures of sexual desire and function

02:31:58.020 | on this female sexual function index.

02:32:00.400 | So there is some evidence that tribulus can be effective

02:32:03.160 | in increasing testosterone in certain populations,

02:32:06.080 | in increasing sexual desire and function

02:32:08.760 | in certain populations, particular in females.

02:32:12.000 | I think more studies are certainly needed,

02:32:13.920 | but these three substances/supplements,

02:32:17.880 | maca, tonga ali in particular, Indonesian tonga ali,

02:32:22.560 | and tribulus can indeed create significant increases

02:32:27.040 | in sexual desire, and in some cases,

02:32:29.520 | by adjusting the testosterone and estrogen system,

02:32:33.180 | in some cases, not by adjusting

02:32:35.000 | the testosterone and estrogen system.

02:32:36.600 | Again, pointing to the complexity of neurochemicals

02:32:40.560 | and features that adjust things like libido, aka desire.

02:32:44.600 | So we covered a lot of material today

02:32:46.720 | related to desire, love, and attachment.

02:32:49.120 | And yet I acknowledge that it is not exhaustive

02:32:52.600 | of the vast landscape that is the psychology and biology

02:32:56.760 | of desire, love, and attachment.

02:32:59.100 | Nonetheless, I hope that you found

02:33:01.360 | the information interesting and hopefully actionable

02:33:04.680 | in some cases toward the relationships of your past,

02:33:08.120 | of present, and potentially for the relationships

02:33:11.720 | of your future.

02:33:13.200 | If you're enjoying and/or learning from this podcast,

02:33:15.680 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

02:33:17.640 | That's a very straightforward, zero-cost way to support us,

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02:33:35.160 | in the comment section on YouTube.

02:33:37.120 | We do read all of those comments.

02:33:39.200 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

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02:33:42.800 | That is the best way to support the Huberman Lab Podcast.

02:33:45.900 | In addition, we have a Patreon.

02:33:47.480 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman,

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02:33:52.480 | at any level that you like.

02:33:54.500 | Please also follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

02:33:57.360 | I teach neuroscience and neuroscience-related tools

02:33:59.800 | on both Instagram and Twitter.

02:34:01.280 | Some of that material overlaps

02:34:03.000 | with material covered on the podcast.

02:34:04.920 | Some of it is unique material

02:34:06.360 | only covered on Instagram and Twitter.

02:34:08.480 | During today's episode and on many previous episodes

02:34:10.760 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:34:11.920 | we discussed supplements.

02:34:14.020 | While supplements aren't necessary

02:34:15.640 | or appropriate for everybody,

02:34:17.400 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

02:34:19.740 | for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus,

02:34:22.720 | or as discussed today, for enhancing libido and desire.

02:34:26.600 | If you want to see the supplements that I take,

02:34:28.320 | you can go to Thorne, that's T-H-O-R-N-E.com/

02:34:32.440 | the letter U/huberman,

02:34:34.240 | and there you can get 20% off any of the supplements

02:34:37.080 | that I take.

02:34:38.060 | And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site

02:34:40.280 | through that portal, thorne.com/ the letter U/huberman,

02:34:44.920 | you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements

02:34:47.860 | that Thorne makes.

02:34:48.920 | We partnered with Thorne

02:34:49.960 | because Thorne has the absolute highest standards

02:34:52.400 | with respect to the quality of the ingredients

02:34:54.680 | in their supplements and the precision of the amounts

02:34:57.080 | of those supplements.

02:34:58.240 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:35:00.560 | about desire, love, and attachment.

02:35:03.040 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:35:05.280 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:35:07.080 | [upbeat music]

02:35:09.660 | (upbeat music)

The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment | Huberman Lab Podcast #59

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