back to indexThe Science of Love, Desire and Attachment | Huberman Lab Podcast #59
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today, we are going to talk about the psychology
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and the biology of desire, love, and attachment.
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Today happens to be Valentine's Day, 2022.
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However, the themes we are going to discuss
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pertain to desire, love, and attachment
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And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss
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almost certainly were at play thousands of years ago,
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hundreds of years ago,
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and no doubt will still be at play in our minds
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and in our bodies and in our psychologies
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for the decades, centuries, and thousands of years to come.
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Indeed, today, I want to focus on core mechanisms
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that lead individuals to seek out other individuals
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with whom to mate with,
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with whom to have children with or not,
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with whom to enter short or long-term relationships with,
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and perhaps to end those relationships
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or to seek relationships on the side,
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so-called infidelity.
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I'm certainly not going to encourage or discourage
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any of these behaviors.
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I'm simply going to cover the peer-reviewed scientific data
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on all these aspects of desire, love, and attachment.
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I'm going to discuss how our childhood attachment styles,
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as they're called, influence our adult attachment styles.
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Yes, you heard that right.
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How we attached or did not attach to primary caregivers
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in our childhood has much to do with how we attach
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or fail to attach to romantic partners as adults,
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because the same neural circuits,
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the neurons and their connections in the brain and body
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that underlie attachment between infant and caregiver,
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between toddler and parent or other caregiver,
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and during adolescence and in our teenage years,
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are repurposed for adult romantic attachments.
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I know that might be a little eerie to think about,
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but indeed that is true.
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Now, the fortunate thing is that regardless
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of our childhood attachment styles and experiences,
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the neural circuits for desire, love, and attachment
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are quite plastic.
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They are amenable to change in response
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to both what we think and what we feel,
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as well as what we do.
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However, all three aspects that we're discussing today,
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desire, love, and attachment,
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are also strongly biologically driven.
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We're going to talk about biological mechanisms
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such as hormones, biological mechanisms
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such as neurochemicals, things like dopamine,
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oxytocin, and serotonin, and neural circuits, brain areas,
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and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain
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that control whether or not we desire somebody or not,
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whether or not we lose or increase our desire
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for somebody over time, whether or not we fall in love,
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what love means, and whether or not the relationships
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we form continue to include the elements of desire
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and love over time or not.
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In order to illustrate just how powerfully our biology
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can shape our perception of the attractiveness
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of other people, I want to share with you the results
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of a couple of studies.
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Both studies explore how people rate
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other people's attractiveness.
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And in both studies, the major variable is that women
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are at different stages of their menstrual cycle.
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Now, in the first study, men are rating the attractiveness
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of women according to the smell of those women.
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Now, they're not smelling them directly.
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They're smelling clothing that women wore
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for a couple of days at different phases
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of their menstrual cycle.
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And what they find is that men will rate the odors of women
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as most attractive if those women wore those shirts,
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that clothing, in the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.
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Okay, so this is not to say that men do not find women
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attractive at other stages of their cycle.
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It is to say that men find women's odors
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particularly attractive if those odors were worn by women
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that are in the pre-ovulatory phase
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of their menstrual cycle, okay?
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Now, there was also a study that was done
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where women at different stages of their menstrual cycle
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are rating the odors of men.
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And a similar but mirror symmetric result was found
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such that women who are in the pre-ovulatory phase
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of their menstrual cycle will rate men's odors
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as more attractive than at other stages of their cycle.
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So the simple way to put this is that
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there seems to be something special
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about the pre-ovulatory phase of a woman's menstrual cycle
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that makes men rate them as more attractive
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during that time and women rate men as more attractive
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during that particular time as well.
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So this is a bi-directional effect.
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The way that the second study was done
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where women are rating men was not just to smell the odors
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of those men on t-shirts, they did that,
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but they correlated that with whether or not the shirts
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were worn by men that were particularly
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physically symmetrical.
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They actually had these men divided into groups,
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it was more of a continuum rather,
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rated according to body symmetry and face symmetry.
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And women preferred more symmetrical men
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when they were doing the preference test
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during the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.
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So again, the point is that pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle
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seems to create a bi-directional mutual attractiveness.
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Now also extremely interesting is that this effect
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does really seem to have something to do with ovulation
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because in both studies,
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they had women that were taking oral contraception or not.
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And what they found was
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if a woman is taking oral contraception,
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it prevented that peak in perceived attractiveness
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by the men, meaning men no longer perceived a woman
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to be more attractive at a particular phase of their cycle.
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And also women taking oral contraception
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no longer preferred the odors of more symmetrical men
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during the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle.
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Now I want to make sure that it's especially clear
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that it is not the case that oral contraception
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reduced the perception of a woman as attractive,
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that did not happen in these studies.
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It reduced the further increase
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in a male's perception of her as attractive.
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And if women took oral contraception,
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it prevented them from preferring more symmetrical men
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based on the odors of those men.
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Now I realize there are a lot of variables here.
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We've got odors, we've got symmetry,
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we've got menstrual cycle, pre-ovulatory, non-pre-ovulatory,
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and we have whether or not
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people are taking contraception or not.
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But the basic finding is that depending on where women are
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in their menstrual cycle influences both men's perception
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of them as attractive
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and their perception of men as attractive.
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And oral contraception eliminates that effect.
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So I share with you those data to illustrate
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that we often think that somebody is attractive or not
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based on, I don't know how they look,
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their skin, their hair, et cetera.
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But it also illustrates that their odor is a powerful cue
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for some people more than others.
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Some of us tend to be more olfactory driven than others.
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Although if you watched the Huberman Lab podcast episode
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that I did with Professor David Buss
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from the University of Texas, Austin,
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who's a luminary in the field of evolutionary psychology
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and has studied mate choice
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and mate selection bias over decades.
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He's really one of the founders of that field.
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He emphasized findings that odor for many people
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is a maker or a deal breaker.
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Meaning there are some people that even if somebody
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has all the characteristics that they're looking for
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in terms of kindness and attractiveness and values
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and other features that would and should be
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of very high priority in selecting a mate,
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that if someone does not like the way that person smells,
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their innate body odor, independent of colognes
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and perfumes and soaps, et cetera,
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that that's often a complete and total deal breaker.
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I'm sure there are some of you that can relate to that.
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And there are some of you perhaps for which
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that is not the case.
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And you can't even imagine that
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being such a powerful variable.
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And yet the data suggests that indeed
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it is a powerful variable for many people out there.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
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that this podcast is separate
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from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
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and science-related tools to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Now nootropics is not a word that I'm usually a fan of
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because nootropic means smart drug.
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Let's talk about desire, love, and attachment.
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And of course, these are topics
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that grab tremendous interest,
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so it's worth us defining our terms a little bit
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before going any further.
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Of course, we can have many different kinds of loves.
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There's romantic love.
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There's love of family, so-called familial love.
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There's love of pets.
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We can even love objects,
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where we can feel as if we love objects.
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We can love certain activities.
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We can have friends that we love, and so on and so forth.
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The word love is used to encompass
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a lot of different types of relationships.
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Today, we are mainly going to be focused on romantic love
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and the neural mechanisms of romantic love.
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I want to acknowledge here at the outset
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that most of the studies of romantic love
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have focused on monogamous heterosexual love.
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And also, when we talk about studies focused on desire
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and attractiveness and attachment, that's also the case.
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And that simply reflects the general bias of the literature
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over the last 50 to 100 years.
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It does, of course, not rule out that similar
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or different mechanisms could be at play
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in non-monogamous relationships,
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in homosexual relationships,
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or in relationships of any kind or variation.
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It's also worth us defining our terms around desire.
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It can mean the desire for long-term partnership.
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So we need to define our terms.
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And throughout, I will do my best
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to very carefully define what I mean by desire,
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what I mean by love, and what I mean by attachment.
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The formal study of love and desire and attachment
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goes back to the early 1900s.
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One of the classic studies on this is entitled
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It was published in 1912 and really focused
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on two opposing themes within romance.
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One is love, which in that paper was really meant
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to include attachment and dependence
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or interdependence between individuals, right?
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And the other end of the spectrum being desire
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or the sexual desire for another.
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And romance was meant to encapsulate both those things,
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And for much of the 1900s,
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it was thought that love and desire
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were on sort of opposing ends or in kind of a push-pull.
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And it was the dynamic push and pull
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between love and desire that one could define romance.
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And that actually led to much of what's out there
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in the psychological literature.
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Today, we are going to explore some neurobiological studies,
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some studies of the endocrine system,
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meaning the hormone system,
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that actually support that general model.
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And I'll point you toward what I think is a very useful book
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in thinking about how relationships
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can both form and last over long periods of time
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and how those relationships can include
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both desire and interdependence.
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I'll also talk about some studies
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that have really focused on why relationships succeed
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and why they fail and how that relates
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to whether or not there is sufficient amounts
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of attachment and desire.
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So today we're going to talk about the science
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and indeed you'll also get some tools.
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Those tools should be useful to you
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whether or not you happen to be in a relationship or not,
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whether or not you're seeking a relationship or not.
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I'd like to begin with an anecdote,
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and this is not an anecdote about my relationship history.
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It's a anecdote about my scientific history.
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When I started graduate school,
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the chairman of the department I was in at the time
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said to me, you know,
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most PhDs last longer than most marriages.
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And indeed he was right.
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And also most marriages in this country end in divorce.
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I think it's about 50% with a slight skew
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toward more ending in divorce than persist
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until death do them part.
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But nonetheless, it's about half
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and most marriages end before the eight-year period is up.
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Most PhDs take anywhere from four to nine years.
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So there was a bit of a smearing of averages there,
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but the point he was trying to make
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really landed home for me.
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It did not scare me out of relationships,
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nor did it scare me out of a PhD, obviously.
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What it did illustrate was that there's something
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about our attachment machinery that can be very,
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very compelling such that people take on
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tremendous levels of commitment.
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I have to imagine that most people enter marriages
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assuming that they're going to stay in those marriages.
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I don't think most people enter marriages
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thinking they're going to get divorced,
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but that if 50% of those commitments end in divorce,
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there must also be mechanisms
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by which our attachments can break.
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And today we're going to talk about
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both the forming of attachments
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and the breaking of attachments,
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what can prevent those breaks in attachments,
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and indeed what can lead to reattachments.
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There are biological mechanisms
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to desire, love, and attachment.
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That's abundantly clear.
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Now, there's a robust and very large literature
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What I mean by that are field studies and laboratory studies
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in primates of different kinds,
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such as macaque monkeys or bonobos.
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People have looked at these sorts of things,
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believe it or not, in ducks, in laboratory mice,
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in different types of birds, et cetera.
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And if you look at that literature,
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you can essentially find biological examples
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in the animal kingdom for just about any behavior
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that you can easily map to human behavior.
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there's a species of animal called the prairie vole.
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In one portion of the United States,
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this prairie vole species is monogamous.
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They only mate with one other prairie vole,
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only raise young with one other prairie vole
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for their entire life.
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And in another region of the United States,
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the same species of animal, the prairie vole,
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will mate with many individuals.
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They're non-monogamous.
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And the major difference, at least as far as we know,
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between the prairie voles in one location
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and another location is the levels of a molecule
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called vasopressin in the brain and body.
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Vasopressin is present in humans.
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It has numerous biological roles.
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It's responsible, for instance,
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for controlling the amount of urine that you excrete,
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the amount of water that you retain,
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and for sexual desire, as well as mate seeking.
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Levels of vasopressin in prairie voles
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are strongly determinant of whether or not a prairie vole
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is going to be monogamous or non-monogamous.
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Why do I raise this?
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Well, I raise this because the literature on prairie voles
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is quite beautiful and has been discussed quite a lot
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in the popular press.
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You can look it up with an easily just a web engine search.
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You'll find lots of information about this,
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lots of news articles about this and lots of interpretations
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as to how vasopressin might be involved
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in similar or different mechanisms in humans.
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Now, I don't have a problem
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with mapping animal studies to humans.
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I think there's certainly a place for that.
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But if we just sort of lean back and look at the giant mass
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of studies in animals and their mating behavior
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and their mate selection behavior,
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you can essentially find examples of anything.
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You can find examples of polygamy.
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You can find examples of cheating, of infidelity.
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You can find examples of all sorts of different behaviors
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that in your own mind, you can map to human behavior.
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But it's really hard to make the leap from animal models
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to humans in any kind of direct way.
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And so thankfully there's been tremendous work done
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in the last mainly 20 years or so
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looking at human mate selection, human desire,
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human love and human attachment.
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So we're mainly going to focus on those studies today
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and where appropriate, we will map those findings
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back to the findings in animals
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to see if there are some universal truths
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or some universal principles about how the neural circuits
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and biological mechanisms work.
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But by and large, we're going to focus
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on human studies today.
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So unless I say otherwise,
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the data that I'm referring to today
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are entirely from human beings.
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So let's talk about attachment and attachment styles.
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And this will offer you the opportunity
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to answer some important questions for yourself,
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such as what is my, meaning your,
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attachment style in relationship?
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One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology
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is this notion of attachment styles.
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And this was something that was discovered
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through a beautiful set of studies
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that were done by Mary Ainsworth in the 1980s
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in which she developed a laboratory condition
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called the strange situation task.
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Now, the strange situation task has been studied
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over and over again in different cultures,
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in different locations throughout the world.
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And in preparing for this episode,
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I actually spoke to three different psychologists.
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I spoke to a psychoanalyst,
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I spoke to a cognitive behavioral psychologist,
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and I actually spoke to a psychiatrist,
link |
excuse me, not a psychologist,
link |
but a psychiatrist with a medical degree and asked,
link |
is the strange situation task
link |
and the various attachment styles
link |
that emerge from that task,
link |
are those still considered valid?
link |
And indeed all three of them said,
link |
if ever there was a literature in psychology
link |
that is absolutely tamped down and has a firm basis
link |
in both data and real world principles
link |
and real world examples,
link |
it's this notion of attachment styles.
link |
So what is the strange situation task?
link |
The strange situation task involves a parent,
link |
typically a mother in the studies that were done,
link |
but a parent or other caregiver bringing their child,
link |
their actual child into a laboratory.
link |
And there's a room with a stranger
link |
and the mother enters the room with the child
link |
and there's some toys in the room
link |
and typically the mother and the stranger will talk.
link |
Obviously the stranger is part of the experiment.
link |
It's not just some random person off the street
link |
and the child is allowed to move about the room.
link |
They can observe the mother interacting
link |
with the other person or not.
link |
They can play with toys or not,
link |
but then at some point the mother leaves
link |
and then at some point later,
link |
designated by the experimenter, the mother comes back.
link |
And what is measured in these studies
link |
is both how the child, the toddler,
link |
reacts to the mother leaving
link |
and how the child reacts to the mother returning
link |
at the end of the experiment.
link |
And oftentimes this will have two or three different phases
link |
where the mother will bring the child in,
link |
then leave, then come back in and leave.
link |
There are also studies in which the behavior
link |
of the child with the stranger is also examined.
link |
So there are a lot of variations of this,
link |
but the basic findings are that toddlers, children,
link |
fall into four different categories of attachment style
link |
and that these attachment styles can predict many features
link |
of adolescent, teen, young adult,
link |
and even adult attachment styles,
link |
not in strange situations of the sort that I just described,
link |
but in romantic attachments.
link |
I should mention also that attachment style is plastic,
link |
meaning it can change across the lifespan.
link |
So as I described the results,
link |
I described the different attachment styles
link |
that are out there.
link |
And if any of those resonate with you
link |
or bring to mind certain people in your life,
link |
please do not assume that those attachment styles
link |
are rigid and fixed for the entire lifespan.
link |
There are also terrific data that indicate
link |
that through specific processes,
link |
both psychological and some biological adjustments,
link |
that people can change their attachment style
link |
and that indeed people who have different attachment styles
link |
can change the attachment styles of others.
link |
But just to make very clear what the results
link |
of the study were,
link |
I want to review what the four different attachment styles
link |
are and typically people fall into one group or another,
link |
So the four patterns of attachment
link |
that were revealed by these studies,
link |
again, were revealed by examining the behavior of the child
link |
in response to the mother leaving and the mother returning
link |
and the child's response to the stranger
link |
that is in the room with them.
link |
The first style is the so-called secure attachment style.
link |
In the nomenclature of this kind of study,
link |
these are the so-called B babies as in the letter B,
link |
bulldog, B, not for bulldogs,
link |
but just to designate this category.
link |
The secure attachment style is one in which the child
link |
will engage with the stranger, with the experimenter,
link |
while the parent is present in the room,
link |
but that when the parent, typically it's a mother,
link |
but when the parent or other caregiver leaves,
link |
the child does get visibly upset.
link |
They might whine, they might cry,
link |
they might even tantrum a bit.
link |
However, when the caregiver,
link |
meaning the mother or father or other caregiver returns,
link |
the child visibly expresses happiness
link |
that the caregiver has returned, okay?
link |
So that's the hallmark of the secure attachment style.
link |
And again, this is all pre-verbal.
link |
This is happening long before the child can express
link |
how they feel with words.
link |
And the interpretation of this is that the secure child
link |
feels confident that the caregiver is available
link |
and will be responsive to their needs
link |
and their communications,
link |
so that when the child whines or is distressed,
link |
the parent doesn't come right back into the room,
link |
but at some point they do,
link |
and they seem to have a sense of trust
link |
that if the parent or caregiver leaves,
link |
that the parent will come back
link |
and that they're happy that they do.
link |
These children are also very good
link |
at exploring novel environments after the parent is gone
link |
and while the parent is there.
link |
And almost always when the parent is there,
link |
they will explore more broadly, literally in space,
link |
they'll venture out further than they will
link |
when the parent is gone.
link |
They also tend to engage with the caregiver in a way
link |
that's not immediately and completely trusting,
link |
but that over time seems to evolve
link |
from one in which they're kind of suspicious of this person
link |
to one in which they're at least somewhat trusting, okay?
link |
So those are the general contours
link |
of the secure attachment style.
link |
And fortunately, nowadays,
link |
there are physiological studies measuring things
link |
like heart rate and breathing and other measures
link |
that correlate with the subjective assessment
link |
of what these children are feeling.
link |
Okay, so first category is secure attached.
link |
The second category is a so-called anxious avoidant
link |
or insecurely attached, which are the category A babies.
link |
The children with anxious avoidant
link |
insecure attachment patterns generally tend to avoid
link |
or ignore the caregiver, all right?
link |
Meaning the parent and show very little emotion
link |
when the parent leaves or returns.
link |
So this is the reason they call them avoidant
link |
or anxious avoidant and kind of insecure.
link |
There isn't this happiness or joy that the parent is back.
link |
They don't seem to express that.
link |
They do not exhibit distress on separation,
link |
and they generally tend to have some tendency
link |
to approach the caregiver when they return,
link |
but there doesn't seem to be a general expression of joy.
link |
And again, physiological measures support that as well.
link |
Things like changes in heart rate tend to be less dramatic
link |
in the anxious avoidant insecure attachment style
link |
than in the secure attachment style.
link |
Okay, so that's the second one.
link |
The third category is the so-called anxious ambivalent
link |
slash resistant insecure category.
link |
Okay, I didn't name these categories,
link |
so you have to blame others in this one instance.
link |
For everything else, blame me.
link |
But in this instance, you have to blame the psychologist
link |
that named this category.
link |
The anxious ambivalent slash resistant insecure category,
link |
also called the C babies,
link |
for the letter C just as a categorization.
link |
The anxious ambivalent resistant insecure toddlers really
link |
show distress even before separation from their mother
link |
or other caregiver, and they tend to be very clingy
link |
and difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns.
link |
Okay, so they're distressed
link |
even before the mother leaves the room,
link |
and they tend to be very clingy
link |
and really hard to calm down when the mother returns.
link |
They tend to show either what seems to be resentment
link |
in response to the parent's absence,
link |
we don't really know what they're feeling,
link |
or some sort of helpless passivity.
link |
And there's actually subcategorizations
link |
that the psychologists have come up with
link |
with C1 subtypes and C2 subtypes.
link |
We don't have to get bogged down in that.
link |
But just know that there isn't one absolute measure
link |
that says, oh, well, this person is anxious ambivalent,
link |
resistant, insecure.
link |
They could be somewhat passive, or they could be somewhat
link |
angry at the caregiver.
link |
But the basic idea is that before and after the separation,
link |
they are clingy and difficult to comfort.
link |
They just can't seem to calm themselves down
link |
and physiological measures of heart rate
link |
and hormone measurements such as cortisol
link |
also support that statement.
link |
And the third category of attachment style
link |
is the so-called disorganized or disoriented or D
link |
for the letter D babies.
link |
This is a categorization that was added later
link |
to this strange situation task that is a real hallmark
link |
of developmental psychology studies.
link |
It was developed by Mary Ainsworth graduate student,
link |
Mary Main, who I actually had the great fortune
link |
of taking a course from and learning from
link |
when I was a graduate student at Berkeley many years ago.
link |
And this fourth categorization was controversial
link |
for a while, but now is generally accepted.
link |
The key feature of the disorganized disoriented category
link |
is that the toddlers tend to be tense
link |
and they tend to encompass a lot of
link |
kind of odd physical postures.
link |
They tend to hunch their shoulders.
link |
They'll put their hands behind their neck.
link |
They'll cock their head to the side.
link |
For those of you listening,
link |
I'm doing this on the video version.
link |
It's not where you don't have to go see that.
link |
But for those of you that are watching this on video,
link |
they tend to kind of constrain their body size a bit
link |
and go into odd postures that they normally
link |
wouldn't do anywhere else.
link |
So this is why it's called the disorganized
link |
or disoriented category.
link |
It seems like these children just don't really know
link |
how to react to a separation.
link |
And they just start to manifest behaviors
link |
and emotional tones that aren't observed
link |
in other situations.
link |
Okay, so we've got our four categories.
link |
I'll try and use the shortest possible names
link |
for each category.
link |
We've got category one, which is securely attached.
link |
We've got category two, which is insecurely attached,
link |
also sometimes called anxious avoidant.
link |
Then we've got category three,
link |
which is the resistant insecure category,
link |
which is anxious ambivalent.
link |
And then there's this fourth category,
link |
the disorganized disoriented category
link |
where the so-called D babies.
link |
Now, what's interesting about this from the perspective
link |
of desire, love and attachment is that the categorizations
link |
of children into one of these four different categories
link |
as toddlers is strongly predictive of their attachment style
link |
in romantic partnerships later in life,
link |
which is to me both amazing and surprising
link |
and not surprising all at the same time.
link |
Amazing because it means that, first of all,
link |
we are relatively hardwired for attachment.
link |
I think that that's incredible and beautiful
link |
that we have designated neurons, nerve cells
link |
and hormonal systems that are there to ensure
link |
that we have some sort of response
link |
to a caregiver being there or not being there
link |
or returning or leaving,
link |
but also that the same neural circuitries,
link |
the same hormonal responses are at least
link |
in some way repurposed for entirely different types
link |
of attachments later in life.
link |
So when we hear the psychologists talk
link |
about how we formed a template early in life
link |
based on experiences that were even pre-verbal
link |
before we had language and those templates
link |
are superimposed on our relationships,
link |
or we should say our later relationships
link |
are superimposed on those templates,
link |
there really is a basis for that.
link |
We now have neuroimaging studies to support,
link |
for instance, the work of Alan Shore from UCLA,
link |
showing that when a mother and child interact,
link |
either through very soothing interactions
link |
like bottle feeding or breastfeeding
link |
or singing to one's baby or putting them to sleep,
link |
that the brain of the child and the brain of the mother
link |
are entering a coordinated state of relaxation.
link |
And it's not one direction mother to child,
link |
the child is also calming the mother.
link |
Typically these studies were done with mothers,
link |
again, sometimes with fathers, but typically with mothers.
link |
And in addition to that,
link |
when the mother or other caregiver acts very excited
link |
and raises their voice or puts a lilt in their voice
link |
or widens their eyes, that the child will do the same.
link |
And again, there's a bidirectional interaction
link |
in that case of excitement.
link |
And there's the release of neurochemicals
link |
like dopamine into the bloodstream,
link |
whereas in the relaxation scenario
link |
and the soothing scenario,
link |
we know the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin.
link |
So the neural systems for attachment
link |
and the neural systems for what we call autonomic arousal
link |
for being alert and calm don't act in a vacuum.
link |
They are tethered to other people in our environment.
link |
And of course we know this, right?
link |
We sometimes hear the statement,
link |
no one can make you feel anything.
link |
I've always had a little bit of a problem
link |
with that statement.
link |
I don't think I'm contradicting anyone in particular,
link |
but you hear that a lot.
link |
No one can make you feel anything.
link |
Indeed they can, right?
link |
A physical injury can make you feel something.
link |
If somebody says something that you very much like,
link |
it can make you feel something.
link |
And if somebody says something that you very much dislike,
link |
it will make you feel something.
link |
So the idea that no one can make us feel anything
link |
isn't actually true.
link |
Our nervous system is tethered to the nervous systems
link |
of others, and that is true
link |
from the very earliest stages of our lives.
link |
And in this case, we're talking about how our templates
link |
for attachment in romantic relationships,
link |
how we find them, how we maintain them,
link |
and indeed how we break them and reform them
link |
is based on a template that was established
link |
through an entirely different set of priorities,
link |
which was how we feel safe and secure in novel environments,
link |
depending on whether or not our primary caregiver
link |
Neuroimaging supports that.
link |
When I say neuroimaging, I mean brain scans support that,
link |
measures of hormones in the body and brain support that,
link |
measures of neurochemicals support that.
link |
There's simply no way around this truth
link |
that we have a set of roadmaps in our mind
link |
that are reused for entirely different purposes
link |
That is vitally important to understand
link |
because if one is successful in forming
link |
romantic attachments, maintaining them, et cetera, or not,
link |
does in fact reflect the earlier templates
link |
that you've created.
link |
But as I've mentioned before, the good news is
link |
that these templates can shift over time.
link |
And one of the more powerful ways
link |
to shift those templates over time
link |
is purely by the knowledge that they exist
link |
and the understanding that those templates are malleable.
link |
They can change through the process of neuroplasticity.
link |
Again, neuroplasticity is just a rewiring
link |
of nerve connections that is very much present in childhood,
link |
but also very much present in adulthood.
link |
So if you're somebody who you think falls
link |
into category one, two, three, or four,
link |
or you know somebody or involved with somebody
link |
who falls into category one, two, three, and four,
link |
the mere knowledge of that can be very useful.
link |
But you might ask, well, what do I do with that knowledge?
link |
Well, fortunately, both psychologists and biologists
link |
have started to leverage that knowledge
link |
toward establishing better, more secure bonds
link |
in adult romantic relationships.
link |
And there's a book that has really tapped into this.
link |
I think it's the first book
link |
that has really addressed this head on.
link |
And that book comes from two Columbia professors.
link |
And the title of the book is Attached,
link |
The New Science of Adult Attachment
link |
and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love.
link |
The authors of this book are Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.
link |
Again, both of them are skilled academics and researchers
link |
who have really taken the literature that I described
link |
on the strange situation task
link |
and mapped it to adult attachment styles.
link |
And also they've mapped out ways
link |
that they've observed in their clinical practice
link |
and that is laboratory supported for, for instance,
link |
people that have an anxious ambivalent
link |
or what we would call an insecure attachment style,
link |
or for people that fall into the disorganized
link |
or disoriented attachment style,
link |
how they can modify that attachment style
link |
in or out of relationships
link |
in order to establish what I think everybody wants,
link |
which is secure attachment.
link |
Why does everybody want that?
link |
Well, secure attachment allows people
link |
to be both in relationship
link |
or if they choose to be on their own
link |
or to be in relationship,
link |
but physically separated from somebody else
link |
or even emotionally separated from somebody else
link |
and maintain what we call a stable autonomic equilibrium.
link |
The ability to remain calm, clear-headed,
link |
you might not like what's happening,
link |
but you're able to navigate that with some sense of clarity
link |
and not excessive discomfort.
link |
So is there a goal in all of this stuff
link |
about love, desire, and attachment?
link |
The secure attachment style is the one
link |
that leads to the most stable
link |
and predictable long-term relationships.
link |
Put differently, babies, toddlers, adolescents,
link |
teens, and young adults that have a secure attachment style
link |
are more likely to find and form long-term relationships
link |
than are people in the other categories.
link |
But people in other categories can learn
link |
and eventually migrate into the secure attachment style.
link |
And I think that book attached,
link |
I have no affiliation to the authors or the book itself,
link |
I should just mention that,
link |
attached the new science of adult attachment
link |
and how it can help you find and keep love.
link |
Really, it sounds very pop psychology-esque,
link |
but it is really grounded
link |
in the research psychology literature,
link |
and there's also some interesting biology there.
link |
Another point to make about attachment styles
link |
is that it is possible,
link |
and some of you may be familiar with circumstances,
link |
whereby people who are securely attached,
link |
either because they grew up in an environment
link |
where secure attachment was cultivated,
link |
or because they developed that on their own,
link |
can also migrate out of the securely attached category
link |
into insecurely attached
link |
or into avoidant types of attachment styles
link |
as teens or as young adults
link |
or as adults of at any age or any stage of life,
link |
by virtue of being with somebody who has a different,
link |
perhaps less adaptive attachment style, right?
link |
What this means is that if you have
link |
or you develop a secure attachment style,
link |
it's vitally important to protect that attachment style
link |
because it is possible to become anxiously attached
link |
even if you grew up in a stable attachment framework.
link |
And again, this can happen at any stage.
link |
So if you're interested in attachment styles
link |
and how they influence adult romantic attachments,
link |
and certainly if you are a parent,
link |
I would encourage you to check out the book Attached.
link |
Again, it's quite good,
link |
and I think that it offers a number of actionable tools
link |
to both form and hold on to secure attachment styles.
link |
So I mentioned that the neural circuits
link |
for child-parent or child-caregiver attachment
link |
are repurposed for romantic attachment later in life.
link |
But what are these neural circuits?
link |
I mean, it's so attractive, if you will,
link |
to think about a brain area that controls love
link |
or a brain area that controls desire
link |
or a brain area that controls attachment,
link |
but it simply doesn't work that way.
link |
As I've talked about before on this podcast,
link |
and I will say again and again,
link |
because it will persist to be true long after I'm gone,
link |
is that no one brain area can give rise
link |
to anything as complex as desire, love, or attachment.
link |
Instead, there are multiple brain areas
link |
that through their coordinated action
link |
create a sort of a song that we call desire
link |
or a song that we call love
link |
or a song that we call attachment, not a literal song,
link |
although there are songs about desire,
link |
love, and attachment, of course, many songs,
link |
some good, some not so good,
link |
but rather different brain areas
link |
being active in different sequences
link |
and with different intensities can make us feel
link |
as if we are in the mode that we call desire
link |
or in the mode of love or in the mode of attachment.
link |
But beneath all of that is this element
link |
of autonomic arousal.
link |
And I want to focus on autonomic arousal
link |
just for a bit longer,
link |
because it really is one of the three core elements
link |
by which we form and maintain loving attachments
link |
and by which we break loving attachments.
link |
The autonomic nervous system, as the name suggests,
link |
In fact, that's what autonomic means.
link |
Now, it's actually the case
link |
that we can control our autonomic nervous system
link |
to some degree or another,
link |
but the autonomic nervous system
link |
controls things like digestion, our breathing,
link |
whether or not we're conscious of that breathing or not.
link |
It controls things like how alert we are
link |
or how sleepy we are.
link |
And the autonomic nervous system,
link |
as I just briefly described earlier,
link |
is really something that we come into the world with.
link |
All the elements are there,
link |
but through interactions with our parent,
link |
either soothing interactions or fun, playful interactions,
link |
or dare I say, scary interactions,
link |
our autonomic nervous system gets tuned up,
link |
meaning we each develop a tendency
link |
to either be more alert and anxious or more calm
link |
or kind of a balance of alert and calm.
link |
Now, of course, this changes across each day,
link |
and depending how tired we are,
link |
late in the day, if we've been awake for a while,
link |
we tend to get sleepy.
link |
Early in the day, if we're very rested,
link |
we tend to wake up and feel very alert.
link |
So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system
link |
is it's kind of a seesaw.
link |
We go back and forth between being very alert.
link |
We can be alert and calm, or we can be very, very alert.
link |
We can be in a state of panic.
link |
We can be fast asleep, so we can be extremely calm,
link |
or we can just be kind of sleepy, semi-calm,
link |
but still also alert.
link |
So think about it like a seesaw.
link |
And that seesaw has a hinge,
link |
and that hinge defines how tight or loose that seesaw is,
link |
how readily it can tilt back and forth.
link |
Our autonomic tone is how tight that hinge is.
link |
And there are biological mechanisms to explain this,
link |
but here, I just want to stay with the analogy
link |
of the seesaw for now.
link |
The interactions between child and caregiver early in life
link |
take the child and the caregiver
link |
from one end of the seesaw to the other,
link |
from being very alert in a state of play, for instance,
link |
to being nursed and being very soothed until we go to sleep.
link |
And of course, we each have a seesaw.
link |
The parent and the child has a seesaw,
link |
and they're interacting.
link |
What do I mean by that?
link |
Well, there are beautiful studies and beautiful,
link |
not in the sense that they focused on a pleasant topic,
link |
but beautiful because they were done so beautifully well,
link |
that looked at, for instance,
link |
the response of mothers and their physiologies
link |
and the response of children and their physiologies
link |
during the bombing of cities during World War II,
link |
so an unpleasant situation.
link |
But what was revealed during the course of these studies
link |
was that if the mothers were very stressed
link |
during an onslaught of bombing of the city,
link |
the children's physiologies tended to be stressed also
link |
and persisted in being stressed
link |
long after that stressful episode was done.
link |
They actually followed that these children
link |
well out for many decades afterwards.
link |
Conversely, if the parent, and in this case, again,
link |
it was mothers that were explored in these studies,
link |
had turned this whole business
link |
of going into the bomb shelters
link |
into somewhat of a game, taking it seriously,
link |
but essentially telling the children,
link |
okay, it's time to go,
link |
but not expressing much stress or distress.
link |
The children also didn't develop
link |
much stress or distress or trauma.
link |
Now, there were exceptions to this, of course,
link |
but in general, that was the rule
link |
that the autonomic nervous systems of children
link |
tend to mimic the autonomic nervous systems
link |
of the primary caregiver.
link |
And the mechanisms by which this occurs has been explored.
link |
And again, I just referred to the beautiful work
link |
of Alan Shore at University of California, Los Angeles.
link |
And then again, his name is Shore, spelled S-C-H-O-R-E.
link |
I'm looking down briefly at the floor here
link |
because I'll just reach for the book.
link |
He has a wonderful book called Right Brain Psychotherapy.
link |
It's a little bit technical,
link |
but if you're interested in some of the studies,
link |
this book, Right Brain Psychotherapy,
link |
details how everything from nursing of children
link |
to playtime behavior,
link |
to strange situation type task behavior
link |
that we talked about before,
link |
which of course occurs when children get dropped off
link |
at daycare or nursery school or with babysitters, et cetera.
link |
And indeed, all types of caregiver-child interactions
link |
tune up that autonomic nervous system
link |
so that the child ends up with an autonomic nervous system
link |
that either tends to lean more towards alert and anxious
link |
or can be very alert but calm
link |
or can be very calm and hard to budge.
link |
Again, it's the tightness of that hinge
link |
that really underlies these attachment styles
link |
that we were talking about earlier.
link |
And not on this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
but on many other previous episodes,
link |
such as the Master Stress episode
link |
or some of the Optimize Health episodes.
link |
You can find these if you want at hubermanlab.com.
link |
A lot of the tools and techniques that are recommended there
link |
have to do with readjusting the autonomic nervous system
link |
in deliberate ways as an adult.
link |
Again, I won't go into the specific tools,
link |
but for instance, the physiological sigh,
link |
this tool that I've talked about extensively
link |
of two inhales through the nose as deeply as you can
link |
sneaking in a little bit more air on the second one,
link |
and then a long exhale through the mouth
link |
is a way of adjusting that autonomic seesaw.
link |
It tends to make us more calm.
link |
It activates what we call the parasympathetic arm
link |
of the autonomic nervous system,
link |
which is just fancy nerd speak
link |
for it's a quick way to calm yourself down, right?
link |
Things like ice baths or cold showers or cold immersion
link |
or hyperventilate hyperventilation by contrast
link |
are ways in which we can deliberately increase
link |
the level of our so-called sympathetic arm
link |
of our autonomic nervous system to make ourselves more alert.
link |
Why would you want to do that?
link |
Well, you can do that to be more alert,
link |
to be more awake if you like,
link |
or as a form of self-induced stress inoculation
link |
to be able to tolerate higher levels of adrenaline
link |
by making it a practice that you self-direct.
link |
The reason those tools are out there is because many of us,
link |
for whatever reason, we don't have to blame anyone,
link |
but because of our childhood templates,
link |
because of things that happened and didn't happen
link |
in terms of our interactions with caregivers,
link |
have autonomic nervous systems that are tilted
link |
to one side or the other more than we would like,
link |
or in which the hinge that I'm talking about
link |
in this analogy is too loose or that is too tight,
link |
and we're sort of stuck in a mode of anxiousness
link |
or stuck in a mode of lack of energy.
link |
That's what those tools are really about.
link |
But at a deeper level, the autonomic nervous system
link |
is really the system that governs how we will react
link |
in response to a romantic partner being present or leaving.
link |
And I don't necessarily mean leaving the relationship
link |
entirely, although it could mean that, right?
link |
We know people, I'm sure you know people,
link |
that upon the end of a relationship
link |
that they wanted very much are absolutely crushed.
link |
And actually in researching this episode there,
link |
I discovered there's an extensive literature finding
link |
that the feelings that one has after a breakup
link |
are very much like a clinical depression in many cases.
link |
But there are individuals that can look at a breakup
link |
as a transient event that they don't interpret
link |
as going to mean so much for all aspects of their life
link |
or reshaping their view of themselves.
link |
Well, we have different levels of autonomic function.
link |
And depending on where our seesaw is, if you will,
link |
some of us become extremely distraught
link |
and can't recalibrate ourselves,
link |
can't adjust ourselves down from stress to calm,
link |
or can't take ourselves from exhausted to more alert
link |
if we need to do that on our own.
link |
And so that's why tools for doing that exist.
link |
But attachment itself is about where
link |
our autonomic nervous system resides.
link |
So if I were to offer a set of tools around these topics
link |
of desire, love, and attachment,
link |
I would say, first of all, you might want to think about
link |
whether or not you fall into the secure, insecure
link |
or other attachment styles.
link |
Second, I think it is vitally important for all of us,
link |
but certainly for people that are in relationships
link |
or seeking relationships to be able to at least
link |
have some recognition of where our autonomic nervous system
link |
tends to reside, both in terms of when we are with somebody
link |
and when they leave.
link |
When we are apart for long periods of time,
link |
can we calm ourselves?
link |
Can we self-soothe?
link |
Or are we very much dependent on the presence of another
link |
in order to feel soothed?
link |
Now, I absolutely want to emphasize
link |
that there is nothing wrong.
link |
In fact, there's everything right with feeling great
link |
in the presence of somebody else.
link |
That is actually a hallmark of strong and quality
link |
These days, we hear the term codependent a lot.
link |
This was a, I believe the term was first coined
link |
by Pia Mellody, and it actually does occupy
link |
an important role in the world of trauma, trauma healing,
link |
so-called trauma bonding, topics of another episode.
link |
I actually did an episode on fear and trauma,
link |
and we will do one all about trauma bonding with an expert
link |
at some point in the future.
link |
But codependence and codependency,
link |
the term can sometimes be misinterpreted
link |
as any dependence on another isn't good.
link |
Interdependence, healthy interdependence, of course, is good.
link |
It is the hallmark of healthy child-parent relations,
link |
sibling relations, and romantic relations.
link |
But a key element of healthy interdependence is that,
link |
yes, our autonomic nervous system is adjusted
link |
by the presence of another,
link |
but that also that we can adjust
link |
our own autonomic nervous system
link |
even in the absence of that person.
link |
That if the person goes away temporarily or permanently,
link |
that we can still regulate our own autonomic nervous system,
link |
both from states of stress to states of calm,
link |
both from states of exhaustion to states of more alertness.
link |
And of course, we all need sleep
link |
to go from exhaustion to alertness.
link |
But what I'm referring to here is the ability to regulate
link |
when distraught or regulate when fatigued
link |
or feeling depressed.
link |
And that is and is all about the autonomic nervous system.
link |
So as we talk about attachment styles
link |
and we talk about infant and toddler
link |
and adult attachment styles,
link |
what we are really talking about
link |
is a complex set of neural circuitries.
link |
And one of those neural circuitries,
link |
which is absolutely crucial,
link |
is this autonomic nervous system.
link |
So if the autonomic nervous system is one key component
link |
of desire, love, and attachment, what are the other two?
link |
And what I'm going to tell you next
link |
is largely the pioneering work of Helen Fisher,
link |
who is really an anthropologist
link |
who's become a bit of a neuroscientist
link |
and has collaborated with neuroscientists
link |
to establish brain areas and neural circuits
link |
that are associated with different aspects
link |
of attachment, love, and desire.
link |
I think the first really high quality study
link |
of neural circuits associated with these themes
link |
was a paper published in 2005
link |
in a very fine anatomical journal,
link |
perhaps the best neuroanatomical journal,
link |
which is the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
link |
The Journal of Comparative Neurology
link |
has been around for more than a hundred years
link |
and is considered the archival location
link |
for placing really high quality anatomy.
link |
They have tremendously high standards.
link |
And the study that I'm referring to
link |
is entitled romantic love and FMRI,
link |
meaning functional magnetic resonance imaging study
link |
of a neural mechanism for mate choice.
link |
And Dr. Fisher is a author on this paper,
link |
as is Arthur Aaron and Lucy Brown.
link |
So all very fine researchers.
link |
And this study, as well as several other studies
link |
using magnetic resonance imaging,
link |
things like EEG, neuroanatomical tracing, et cetera,
link |
have identified a large number of brain areas
link |
that are associated with different aspects
link |
of desire, love, and attachment.
link |
And I'll just throw out a few names of those brain areas
link |
and what they control.
link |
And then I'll tell you how those anchor
link |
to the other two categories of neural circuits
link |
essential for desire, love, and attachment.
link |
So not surprisingly, the dopamine system in the brain
link |
is associated with desire, love, and attachment,
link |
and mainly with desire, although to some extent love.
link |
Dopamine is a neurochemical sometimes associated
link |
with reward, but as some of you have heard me say before,
link |
it is mainly a molecule of motivation, craving, and pursuit.
link |
And that motivation, craving, and pursuit
link |
that relates to dopamine is not unique
link |
to attachment or love or sex or mating, et cetera.
link |
It is a universal generic currency in the brain
link |
for pursuing something.
link |
Food when you're hungry, a mate when you want one,
link |
two mate when you want two,
link |
warmth when you're cold, et cetera, et cetera, okay?
link |
So it's not for one specific purpose,
link |
but the brain areas associated with dopamine involve,
link |
for instance, the ventral tegmental area,
link |
the substantia nigra, areas of that sort, the basal ganglia.
link |
You don't need to know these names,
link |
just understand that these are networks of neurons
link |
that tend to put the person, you,
link |
into a state of forward action and pursuit
link |
and craving and motivation.
link |
They are not about being quiescent, relaxed, et cetera.
link |
The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation
link |
are most associated with love and attachment,
link |
not surprisingly, and they're the neurochemical serotonin
link |
and to some extent oxytocin
link |
are the predominant neurochemicals involved.
link |
And those are released from brain areas
link |
such as the raphe nucleus in the back of the brain.
link |
You may have heard that the majority of serotonin
link |
in your body is made in your gut, and indeed that's true,
link |
but I hate to break it to you,
link |
the serotonin in your gut is not responsible
link |
for your feelings of love and attachment,
link |
at least not to a high degree.
link |
That's mainly going to be the reflection of neurons
link |
in your brain that make serotonin.
link |
And there are other areas of the brain
link |
that make serotonin as well and oxytocin as well,
link |
but they tend to be associated
link |
with the kind of warmth and calm
link |
and the soothing that we feel
link |
in the presence of another.
link |
And again, these are not strictly divided circuits.
link |
We can have dopamine and serotonin present
link |
in our brain and body at the same time
link |
to equal or different degrees.
link |
And we will return in a little bit to what happens
link |
when levels of dopamine are very high
link |
and levels of serotonin are low and vice versa and so on,
link |
including in states of neurochemically modified states
link |
as it were in when we talk about things like MDMA,
link |
so-called ecstasy.
link |
But in the meantime, I want to just discuss
link |
the two neural circuits that use dopamine,
link |
that use serotonin and oxytocin,
link |
and that collaborate with the autonomic nervous system
link |
to drive what we call desire, love, and attachment.
link |
And the three circuits are autonomic nervous system,
link |
we talked about that one.
link |
Then there's the nervous system components
link |
or the neural circuits for empathy,
link |
for being able to see and respond to
link |
and indeed match the emotional tone
link |
or the autonomic tone of another.
link |
And then there's the third category,
link |
and this might surprise some of you,
link |
it certainly surprised me,
link |
but the data point to the fact
link |
that the third neural circuit
link |
that's very important for establishing bonds
link |
is one associated with positive delusions.
link |
So given that the neural circuits for empathy
link |
are absolutely crucial for falling in love
link |
and maintaining stable attachments,
link |
I'd like to talk about those neural circuits
link |
and what they are.
link |
Now, often when we hear empathy,
link |
we think, oh, empathy is really about listening to
link |
and really understanding what somebody else is feeling,
link |
maybe even feeling what they're feeling.
link |
And indeed that's the case,
link |
but what do we mean by that, right?
link |
What is it to feel what another feels?
link |
Well, what it means is that their seesaw
link |
is driving your seesaw or your seesaw
link |
is somehow driving their seesaw,
link |
that there's a match in terms of the tilt of those seesaws.
link |
Now, it doesn't have to be an exact match, right?
link |
If someone that you really care about is very, very stressed,
link |
you could also become very stressed.
link |
That's a form of empathic matching,
link |
and there are indeed neural circuits for that.
link |
I'll describe what those neural circuits are in a moment,
link |
but sometimes the best role for us to take
link |
is actually one in which we are calm
link |
when the person that we care about
link |
or that we are romantically involved with
link |
is very, very anxious.
link |
And in a few minutes,
link |
I'll talk about how matching of emotional tone
link |
can be good or bad for the stability of a relationship.
link |
And complementarity of autonomic matching
link |
can be good or bad.
link |
sometimes it's beneficial for a relationship
link |
to go into the same state as the other.
link |
And sometimes it's more beneficial for us
link |
to not go into the same state as the other.
link |
But the important feature here
link |
is that when we talk about emotional matching or empathy
link |
or going into the same state
link |
or not going into the same state,
link |
what we're really talking about
link |
is whether or not the autonomic seesaw of one individual
link |
is driving the autonomic seesaw of the other individual.
link |
And this is a vital principle
link |
for how we fall in love and form attachments.
link |
And it's actually part of the desire and mating process
link |
I would go so far as to say
link |
that one of the prerequisites
link |
to the propagation and expansion of our species
link |
is this notion of autonomic regulation
link |
and to some extent matching of autonomic nervous systems.
link |
Let me explain what I mean.
link |
the only way that new humans can be created
link |
is by way of sperm meeting egg,
link |
either in body or in dish,
link |
but sperm meets egg.
link |
And then typically nine months later,
link |
we have a human baby.
link |
The process of bringing sperm to egg,
link |
mating behavior, sex behavior in humans
link |
is one of autonomic regulation.
link |
And what I mean by that is
link |
the process of finding a mate.
link |
there's actually someone to mate with typically,
link |
while scenarios vary,
link |
typically is one of elevated autonomic arousal,
link |
meaning increased activation
link |
of the so-called sympathetic nervous system.
link |
This is related to dopamine release
link |
and it's related to epinephrine release.
link |
There has to be a pursuit
link |
or at least there has to be a mobilization
link |
to arrive in the same location whereby one can mate.
link |
That almost always is the case.
link |
However, the sexual arousal itself
link |
is in both males and females
link |
is actually driven primarily
link |
by the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system.
link |
So while pursuit is one of alertness
link |
and sympathetic drive, as we say,
link |
again, sympathy is not really what's at play here,
link |
that the word simpa means together
link |
and the activation of the autonomic nervous system
link |
toward more alert state
link |
is because of a sympathetic nervous system,
link |
meaning the co-activation together
link |
of many neurons in the brain and spinal cord.
link |
But then the actual physiological arousal state
link |
that we call sexual arousal
link |
is predominantly parasympathetically driven, okay?
link |
To be quite direct about this,
link |
if the sympathetic nervous system activation is too high,
link |
the sexual arousal response cannot happen
link |
in either males or in females, it's inhibited.
link |
However, the orgasm and ejaculation response,
link |
which if you think about it is required
link |
for sperm to meet egg is sympathetic driven.
link |
And then after orgasm and ejaculation,
link |
the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back in
link |
and there's a calming and relaxation.
link |
So the arc of mating involves sympathetic arousal, okay?
link |
Not sympathy, but alertness and arousal for pursuit.
link |
Then a tilt of the seesaw,
link |
at least to some degree for arousal of the sort
link |
that we typically hear of, of sexual arousal.
link |
Then at the point of orgasm and ejaculation
link |
is back to a sympathetic response.
link |
And how can I say that?
link |
How do I know that?
link |
The sympathetic nervous system,
link |
meaning neurons within the sympathetic arm
link |
of the autonomic nervous system
link |
are what drive ejaculation and orgasm.
link |
And then afterward, there's a return
link |
to increased parasympathetic activation.
link |
And we don't know for sure why that happens,
link |
but it's thought that in species that pair bond,
link |
humans generally pair bond, not always,
link |
the return to more parasympathetic activation
link |
after orgasm and ejaculation is thought to increase
link |
the exchange of pheromonal odors, excuse me,
link |
and to increase pillow talk and pair bonding
link |
of different kinds, okay?
link |
So that's the seesaw going back and forth
link |
is actually built into the process
link |
by which our entire species propagates.
link |
So in some ways, every human is required
link |
to navigate that process
link |
if they want their offspring to persist.
link |
And of course, nowadays there are technologies
link |
like in vitro fertilization and intrauterine insemination.
link |
There are a variety of ways
link |
that technology has allowed people
link |
to circumvent the actual physical mating process
link |
in the way that I described.
link |
But by and large, that's the way it's done,
link |
and certainly that's the way it was done historically
link |
for if not tens of thousands
link |
or hundreds of thousands of years.
link |
That process is also what happens
link |
in all mammalian species that mate, okay?
link |
So I'm overlooking an entire literature of animal studies.
link |
The classic studies of this were done by two individuals.
link |
I'll just briefly mention them
link |
in case you want to look at the literature.
link |
There's a guy at the Rockefeller University
link |
named Donald Pfaff, P-F-A-F-F,
link |
who has done beautiful studies
link |
identifying the neural circuitry
link |
of what's called the lordosis response.
link |
Unlike in humans, the mating behavior of animals
link |
is rather stereotyped in terms of the positions
link |
that they occupy, and the lordosis response
link |
is a kind of a U-shaping or a bending up
link |
of the hindquarters of typically of rodents,
link |
but of other animals as well.
link |
The male mounting is almost always from behind
link |
except in some species of primates,
link |
and that lordosis response is only going to occur
link |
during particular phases of the estrus cycle.
link |
The estrus cycle is sort of the analog
link |
to the menstrual cycle, but it's not 28 days,
link |
it's four days or some other duration
link |
in other animals, depending on the animal.
link |
The lordosis response is strongly regulated by odors,
link |
by contact, and is estrogen and testosterone controlled,
link |
and then the male portion of the mating sequence in animals,
link |
the mounting and thrusting and ejaculation as they're called
link |
or mounting, thrusting, intromission and ejaculation,
link |
those are the four scientific categories
link |
that have been described, that's presence in rodents
link |
and also in dogs, where it was primarily studied
link |
by Frank Beach, who was at University of California Berkeley
link |
for a long time, and the entire literature
link |
around the neural circuitry for sexual mating behavior
link |
in animals largely stemmed from the work of Donald Pfaff
link |
and Frank Beach and their scientific offspring,
link |
not their actual offspring.
link |
You can look at that literature if you like.
link |
There have been human neuroimaging studies of the process
link |
that I described a few minutes ago, believe it or not,
link |
of people in brain scanners,
link |
not necessarily mating with other people,
link |
but going through that arc of arousal,
link |
sympathetic activation during orgasm or ejaculation,
link |
and then the post-ejaculatory or orgasmic phase
link |
in both men and women, and the brain areas associated
link |
with those have all been mapped out now.
link |
The spinal cord areas that control things like erection,
link |
vaginal lubrication, ejaculation, and orgasm,
link |
those have also been mapped out,
link |
and this has all been explored from the perspective
link |
of both basic science, just to get an understanding
link |
of how our species has sexual interactions and reproduces,
link |
but also from the perspective of, for instance,
link |
trying to repair sexual function after spinal cord injury,
link |
which is a prominent concern for a lot of people,
link |
depending on where they have their injury,
link |
but in the number of people that have spinal cord injuries.
link |
So this is both vital biological and clinical data.
link |
The neural circuits for everything that I just described
link |
reside in the autonomic nervous system
link |
and are coordinated with the neural circuits
link |
that are associated with empathy.
link |
The neural circuits for empathy, again, there are many,
link |
but mainly two structures that you should know about,
link |
the prefrontal cortex,
link |
which is how we perceive things outside of us
link |
and make decisions on the basis of those perceptions,
link |
how we organize those decisions,
link |
and an area of the brain called the insula, I-N-S-U-L-A.
link |
The insula is a really interesting brain area
link |
that allows us to interocept to pay attention
link |
to what's going on inside our body
link |
and to split some of our attention to exterocept.
link |
And the mating dance,
link |
whether or not it's the dinner and date portion
link |
of the mating dance or the actual physical dance
link |
part of the main dance or actual mating
link |
and sexual behavior, kissing or otherwise,
link |
that is a coordinated activity of two bodies.
link |
Typically it's two.
link |
I realize sometimes it's more, sometimes it's only one,
link |
but typically it's two bodies,
link |
at least in the framework we're using here.
link |
That coordinated dance is one in which
link |
the autonomic nervous system of one individual
link |
in general is coordinating with the autonomic nervous system
link |
of the other individual.
link |
And the insula is essentially splitting one's attention
link |
between how we feel ourselves, how our body feels,
link |
what we're thinking with the thinking
link |
and the bodily sensations of the other.
link |
And that can be communicated obviously through words.
link |
I can be communicated through sounds.
link |
It can be communicated through touch
link |
and it can be communicated through a number
link |
of kind of more subtle cues like pupil size
link |
or whether or not,
link |
certainly in cases where we recognize the person
link |
and we kind of know their responses,
link |
their autonomic responses under different conditions,
link |
Is the person comfortable?
link |
Are they uncomfortable?
link |
Are they more focused on me or on themselves?
link |
This is the coordinated silent dance
link |
that if we look at in neurobiological terms,
link |
we can really see is all about the autonomic nervous system,
link |
whether or not it's time to tip the seesaw
link |
to one side or the other,
link |
depending on whether or not the other person's seesaw
link |
is tilted higher or lower than the other.
link |
Okay, so we have the autonomic nervous system
link |
and then we have this thing that we're calling empathy,
link |
which is really about autonomic matching.
link |
And again, the insula and the prefrontal cortex
link |
are neural circuits that are crucial for autonomic matching
link |
because they allow us to say what's out there
link |
and do I want to match to it or not, okay?
link |
And then the third category of neural circuit
link |
that Helen Fisher and others have found to be important
link |
for desire, love and attachment
link |
is the neural circuit associated with self-delusion.
link |
What do we mean by that?
link |
Well, first of all,
link |
self-delusion implies a kind of cynicism
link |
about love and attachment.
link |
And I think it was George Bernard Shaw that said,
link |
love is really about overestimating the differences
link |
between individuals.
link |
Actually, when I hear that and as I say it,
link |
I really don't like that quote.
link |
I have no bone to pick with George Bernard Shaw,
link |
but what it suggests, and I think what he meant was that,
link |
in love and attachment,
link |
we tend to put so much value in the other
link |
that we forget that many of the processes
link |
that are going on in our brain and body
link |
actually could be evoked by many other people too.
link |
But I think it somewhat overlooks
link |
the enormous power of attachment
link |
and the ways in which somebody's smell,
link |
somebody's voice, somebody's everything,
link |
or somebody's particular thing or things
link |
can really become so vital for our autonomic nervous system
link |
to feel soothed and to feel elated, et cetera.
link |
So I think that while the quote is accurate
link |
I think it does overlook the neural circuits for attachment
link |
and just how deeply wired those can become for us.
link |
So I will balance that quote
link |
with an enormous number of other quotes
link |
that I won't mention, but that you can find out there
link |
that really point to how incredible the person is
link |
that one tends to be attached to,
link |
that there's really only one or several people
link |
that could ever exist
link |
that could evoke those feelings from us.
link |
And of course you can read your Neruda poetry
link |
and you can find these things all over the place
link |
in music and poetry and writing.
link |
So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits
link |
being generic and could be activated by anybody,
link |
I think you'll find an ample number of opposing quotes
link |
that these neural circuits can only be activated
link |
by that special someone or that particular person,
link |
or maybe in just a small set of those people.
link |
So what of delusion?
link |
Well, the work of Helen Fisher and others
link |
has really pointed to the fact that desire, love,
link |
and attachment are three separate phases
link |
of what we call romantic relationships
link |
that typically, not always,
link |
but typically desire tends to come first
link |
or falls in the early phase,
link |
that the process of romantic slash sexual interactions,
link |
it doesn't necessarily have to be sex itself,
link |
but certainly something that involves intimacy of some kind
link |
and generally touch of some kind
link |
eventually transitions into what we call love,
link |
which eventually transitions into what we call attachment.
link |
And I should just mention touch
link |
because touch is a fundamental aspect of this whole process.
link |
There's an article, a research article I should say,
link |
the title of it is relationship specific encoding
link |
of social touch in somatosensory and insular cortices,
link |
cortices being cortex, cortex is plural, cortices.
link |
And again, there's our friend, the insula.
link |
So this is a study that explored what brain areas
link |
and what body areas are activated by specific forms
link |
of attachment and social touch.
link |
And what they found not surprisingly
link |
is that the areas of the brain
link |
they're associated with touch, the somatosensory areas,
link |
but more interestingly, the insula cortex
link |
are strongly activated by touch.
link |
So touch and the amount of touching and proximity
link |
and skin contact not surprisingly activates brain areas
link |
associated with somatosensory touch,
link |
but also the insular cortex,
link |
which again is this brain area that links the internal,
link |
our feelings about what's going on inside us
link |
and at the surface of our skin with events external.
link |
And they found activation of a number of brain areas,
link |
the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and so on and so on.
link |
That's not as essential as just understanding
link |
that the insula is the place in which we start
link |
to take our experience of our internal landscape,
link |
attach that to our perceptions of the external landscape,
link |
and then assign that a value
link |
or assign that some sort of interpretation.
link |
And positive delusion is predictive
link |
of long-term attachment.
link |
What do we mean by positive delusion?
link |
Positive delusion is the contradiction
link |
of that George Bernard Shaw quote.
link |
It's the belief that only this person
link |
can make me feel this way.
link |
This other person holds the capacity
link |
to make me feel this way physically or emotionally or both.
link |
And so as we move from desire to love to attachment,
link |
our brain circuitry is literally getting tuned up
link |
such that that individual that we happen to be attached to,
link |
again, here thinking about monogamous relationships,
link |
but I guess for non-monogamous relationship be individuals,
link |
is and are the way in which our autonomic nervous system
link |
They actually get access to our control panel.
link |
So it's our autonomic nervous system, empathy,
link |
and this positive delusion.
link |
Now, positive delusion is critical.
link |
If you look at the stability of relationships over time,
link |
something that's been extensively studied
link |
mainly by psychologists, but now also by neurobiologists,
link |
what you find is that there are some key features
link |
of interactions between individuals
link |
that predict that a relationship will last.
link |
And those are many, but mainly fall
link |
under this category of positive delusions.
link |
I'll return to those and what those exactly look like,
link |
but there are also just a handful of things
link |
that predict that a relationship will fail over time.
link |
This is largely the work of the Gottman's.
link |
It's actually a husband and wife team
link |
up at the University of Washington in Seattle.
link |
The Gottman's have run a laboratory
link |
in the Department of Psychology for a long time.
link |
They've also done a lot of public-facing work
link |
around relationships.
link |
And they've talked about the various aspects
link |
of relationships and interactions between people
link |
that predict either staying together or breaking up,
link |
so much so that they've established a method
link |
by which they can look at video interactions
link |
between couples and with very high degree of certainty
link |
predict whether or not those couples will stay together
link |
or break up over time.
link |
And they've identified what they call
link |
the four horsemen of relationships.
link |
These are things that essentially almost always predict
link |
that a couple will break up.
link |
And I think the current number on this
link |
is that Gottman can predict divorce with 94% accuracy,
link |
which if you think about is pretty remarkable.
link |
So even though these are purely psychological studies,
link |
I'm not aware of any analysis of underlying physiology.
link |
There are some things that they can observe
link |
between couples that can lead them to predict
link |
whether or not a couple will stay together
link |
or break up with 94% accuracy.
link |
So what are those things?
link |
Those four behaviors, what they call
link |
the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships,
link |
are one, criticism, two, defensiveness,
link |
three, stonewalling, and four, contempt,
link |
with contempt being the most powerful predictor
link |
Criticism, of course, does not mean
link |
that there's no place for criticism in stable relationships.
link |
Of course, there is.
link |
It has to do with how frequent
link |
and how intensely that criticism is voiced.
link |
Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness.
link |
We know as the sort of lack of ability
link |
to hear another or to adopt their stance.
link |
So lack of empathy, I think,
link |
is one way to interpret defensiveness.
link |
Stonewalling, which is actually another form
link |
of lack of empathy.
link |
It's a turning off of this neural circuit
link |
that's so critical for desire, love, and attachment.
link |
The stonewalling essentially means the emotional response
link |
or the request of another is completely cut off.
link |
So I don't think there's been brain imaging of this,
link |
but I think we can reasonably imagine
link |
that it involves untethering your insular response
link |
from the other and what they're dealing with
link |
and focusing your insular response, no pun intended,
link |
on your own internal state or perhaps the state
link |
of someone else entirely.
link |
We'll talk about infidelity in a moment.
link |
And then contempt.
link |
And contempt has actually been referred to
link |
as the sulfuric acid of relationship.
link |
I didn't say that, but Gottman and colleagues have,
link |
that it is such a powerful predictor
link |
of divorce and breakups in the future.
link |
And contempt, of course, by definition,
link |
is the feeling that a person or thing
link |
is beneath consideration, worthlessness,
link |
or deserving scorn.
link |
And apparently they can identify this
link |
in the videos of couples having discussions
link |
and interacting by very elaborate eye rolls,
link |
by expressions of anger in one individual
link |
when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm
link |
or excitement about something.
link |
It's the, oh yeah, you would say that,
link |
or deep-seated resentment toward the other,
link |
so much so that it's apparent that one
link |
kind of actively dislikes the other partner.
link |
So contempt, disregard for something
link |
that should be taken into account
link |
is the other way to think about it.
link |
Runs counter to all of the neural circuits,
link |
all three of the neural circuits
link |
that we talked about before.
link |
It certainly is, it is the antithesis of empathy.
link |
It is anything but a positive delusion.
link |
It's really looking at the other individual,
link |
either accurately or inaccurately,
link |
as somebody that you kind of despise.
link |
And then it is an absolute inversion
link |
of the autonomic seesaw matching
link |
that I was talking about before.
link |
It's a dissociating of your seesaw from their seesaw.
link |
They're very excited about something,
link |
you're unexcited by it.
link |
In fact, it's an inversion of their seesaw
link |
where they're excited, you're down.
link |
They're down, you're up, okay?
link |
So it's basically an inversion of all of the neural circuits
link |
that Helen Fisher and others have identified
link |
as critical for desire, love, and attachment.
link |
And therefore it's not surprising that it is
link |
so strongly predictive of breakups
link |
and in the case of married couples of divorce.
link |
For those of you that are interested in the work
link |
of the Gottman's and similar work,
link |
they've written several popular books.
link |
They're fairly easy to find.
link |
We can link to one of those in the caption.
link |
But they've also developed some quite interesting
link |
online resources in their so-called love lab.
link |
I guess it's fortunate that they didn't call it
link |
the hate lab or the breakup lab
link |
because they focused a lot on what predicts breakups.
link |
But they've also written extensively
link |
and researched extensively in peer-reviewed studies
link |
what makes people find appropriate partners for them
link |
and to maintain those partnerships over time.
link |
So you can go, you can search for Love Lab,
link |
University of Washington, Gottman,
link |
or any number of their various books.
link |
I think you'll find some useful resources there.
link |
So I want to shift back to the work of Helen Fisher.
link |
She's made some very interesting statements
link |
and some very interesting observations
link |
that at least to my mind,
link |
map very well onto the knowledge of neural circuitry
link |
both in humans and in non-human primates
link |
and in other species.
link |
I realized that she's not the only name in the game,
link |
but she's made some observations
link |
that I think are very, as we say parsimonious,
link |
meaning they allow us to organize a lot of this stuff
link |
into some distinct frameworks.
link |
She's also done some really beautiful studies
link |
that involve data from millions
link |
or even tens of millions of individuals on dating sites.
link |
So I'm going to share those with you in a moment.
link |
But before I do that, I just want to paraphrase Dr. Fisher
link |
who said that sex drive or desire,
link |
the pursuit of someone to mate with,
link |
meaning to mate the verb, not necessarily to find a mate,
link |
may be, she didn't say definitively,
link |
but maybe a way to forage for potential love partners.
link |
That the arc of this whole business
link |
is really the order that we're describing it,
link |
that it's desire, then love, and then attachment.
link |
And that oftentimes people can get confused.
link |
You may know some of these people,
link |
you may be one of these individuals
link |
who might confuse desire for attachment
link |
or might confuse love for attachment,
link |
but that there's a sequence of recruitment
link |
of these neural circuits that's established first
link |
from the pursuit of someone to mate with.
link |
And she's placed this in the context
link |
of kind of more modern dating themes
link |
where depending on culture, people might explore several,
link |
maybe many, many individuals before quote unquote,
link |
settling down with somebody,
link |
at least for some period of time.
link |
I think that's an interesting framework
link |
because it circumvents a lot
link |
of the frankly unanswerable questions
link |
about whether or not humans were meant to be monogamous
link |
or whether or not they weren't.
link |
Those are conversations that hold cultural context,
link |
that hold all sorts of contexts
link |
that really can't be addressed in a laboratory setting.
link |
But this idea that sex drive is a way to forage
link |
for potential love partners
link |
and that love is a kind of a litmus test
link |
for whether or not longer term
link |
or deeper attachments can and will form
link |
is one that at least makes sense to me.
link |
Later in the episode,
link |
we'll talk about this notion of sex drive and desire.
link |
I'll actually talk about some tools
link |
that have very strong data really to support them
link |
in terms of things that people can do
link |
or take to increase libido, both men and women,
link |
because there's actually quite good data on that now.
link |
But in the meantime,
link |
I want to talk about some of the work
link |
that Dr. Fisher has done in terms of categorizing people
link |
into, again, we have four groups.
link |
These are distinct from the A, B, C, and D
link |
attachment styles described earlier.
link |
Although as I described them,
link |
you might be able to map them somewhat onto those.
link |
And these four groups are groups
link |
that were defined through her studies
link |
of people that were or are,
link |
I don't know if they were
link |
or if they are still on match.com,
link |
but a very extensive data set.
link |
So again, millions, if not tens of millions of individuals,
link |
the number I heard her quote,
link |
and forgive me if this is not accurate,
link |
is that in upwards of 40 million individuals,
link |
in terms of whether or not their neurochemical
link |
and hormone systems are tuned toward
link |
particular types of behaviors.
link |
What do I mean by that?
link |
Well, both men and women, males and females,
link |
have both testosterone and estrogen.
link |
Typically, again, these are averages,
link |
but typically men have more testosterone
link |
than they do estrogen,
link |
and they have more testosterone than do women
link |
and less estrogen than do women.
link |
Typically women have more estrogen
link |
than they do testosterone, again, averages,
link |
and they have less testosterone than men,
link |
more estrogen than men, and so on and so forth.
link |
But both hormone systems are active
link |
in both sets of individuals.
link |
And of course, all humans, as far as we know,
link |
manufacture both dopamine and serotonin.
link |
Dopamine, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
has a number of effects in the brain and body,
link |
but one of the primary effects is that it places us
link |
into states of motivation and pursuit for various things.
link |
There is a somewhat close relationship
link |
between the dopamine system and the testosterone system
link |
in the hypothalamus,
link |
this brain area above the roof of your mouth,
link |
and the pituitary gland,
link |
which is responsible for making hormones
link |
that make the ovaries and or testes
link |
secrete testosterone or estrogen.
link |
So there's a lot of signaling that occurs
link |
such that dopamine and testosterone tend to operate
link |
as kind of close cousins in a system of pursuit.
link |
And conversely, the serotonin system tends to, on average,
link |
collaborate with the estrogen system
link |
to impart certain physiological functions and behaviors.
link |
So these aren't hard and fast, or I guess better stated,
link |
these aren't strict black and white categorizations,
link |
but I think those general themes hold
link |
when you look at the animal and human data.
link |
So Dr. Fisher has taken some liberties,
link |
but I think they are what I would call
link |
logically and scientifically
link |
and neurobiologically grounded liberties
link |
in classifying individuals who are on these dating sites
link |
according to the types of things they report
link |
about themselves and the type of people
link |
they tend to match with on these dating sites
link |
and created these four categories.
link |
The four categories are,
link |
she calls one the dopamine category.
link |
So these are people who would have high dopamine.
link |
And again, that's just a name.
link |
It doesn't mean they have low anything else,
link |
but they are high on the dopamine scale.
link |
People who rate high on the dopamine scale
link |
tend to be what the scientists and psychologists
link |
call high sensation seeking, novel seeking.
link |
They like new things.
link |
They like spontaneity.
link |
They tend to be very adventurous.
link |
And I think that's largely true.
link |
If you look at conditions
link |
where dopamine is super physiological,
link |
it's elevated beyond abnormal levels, things like mania,
link |
or when people take certain drugs of abuse
link |
like cocaine or amphetamine
link |
that really raise dopamine levels up very, very high
link |
for some period of time,
link |
they do tend to increase energy motivation
link |
and novelty seeking.
link |
And of course, drugs like amphetamine and cocaine
link |
have all sorts of deleterious effects
link |
that I don't need to go into here,
link |
but it's worth pointing out.
link |
But they don't tend to make people calm and relaxed
link |
and seek soothing interactions.
link |
Conversely, the group that Dr. Fisher
link |
calls the serotonin group
link |
tend to be more grounded in soothing activities,
link |
quiescent type activities.
link |
They actually tend to be on average,
link |
they tend to like rules and follow rules.
link |
They tend to be home bodies, this sort of thing.
link |
They're really, you can imagine them
link |
the sort of stable types, but they really like stability.
link |
They're not really into spontaneity as much,
link |
And then she created two other categories,
link |
the testosterone category of high testosterone.
link |
This again could be males or females.
link |
And then the estrogen category again
link |
could be males or females.
link |
And she gave these different names
link |
that I won't go into here.
link |
You can look up her work online,
link |
but she, you know, names like the director
link |
and the follower and things like that.
link |
But I don't really want to use those
link |
as much as I want to stick to the biological terms.
link |
So we have dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen.
link |
Now that might seem like an unfair
link |
kind of overgeneralization,
link |
but what's interesting is not necessarily
link |
the name or the neurochemical system, right?
link |
Those could have just been called category one, two, three,
link |
and four for all that matters here.
link |
What is interesting is seeing how those different groups
link |
of individuals that she absolutely can categorize
link |
based on their self-reported preferences about behaviors
link |
and certain kinds of interactions,
link |
how those groups tend to pair up with people
link |
in the same or opposite categories.
link |
So what her studies reveal is that people
link |
that fall into the high sensation seeking,
link |
novelty seeking, spontaneity category,
link |
the one that she calls the high dopamine category,
link |
tend to pair up with, at least in the short term,
link |
tend to pair up with people who are also
link |
in that dopaminergic category.
link |
So these would be people that would spontaneously
link |
take a trip or explore something new or a new restaurant.
link |
They tend to be creative and explorative types.
link |
So that group on average tends to date and mate
link |
and potentially form long-term relationships
link |
within category, again, averages.
link |
Individuals that she placed into the serotonin group
link |
or what she hypothesized would be a high serotonin group,
link |
again, they didn't measure serotonin,
link |
but people that tend to place value on stability,
link |
on rules, on certain forms
link |
of kind of traditional organization at home
link |
and in relationships,
link |
those people also tended to pair up with select, date,
link |
we presume mate with, and form stable relationships
link |
with people in the same category.
link |
Now, individuals in the other two categories,
link |
the high testosterone group,
link |
and again, testosterone wasn't measured,
link |
but she called it the high testosterone group,
link |
but these are people that tend to be very directive.
link |
They tend to know what they want
link |
and are comfortable telling other people what they want
link |
and from them, these are individuals that in her studies
link |
and in other studies tend to be a little bit challenging,
link |
meaning they not necessarily challenging to be around,
link |
but they tend to challenge other people,
link |
kind of push them in order to expand their boundaries,
link |
either for sake of the relationship or just in general.
link |
And the people they tend to push
link |
are the people that they pair up with,
link |
which are the people in the estrogen category,
link |
what she called high estrogen.
link |
Again, they didn't measure estrogen,
link |
but the people in the estrogen category
link |
were the ones that described themselves
link |
and their choices in life
link |
and their preferences as being nurturing.
link |
They actually seem to like it
link |
when someone else is making the major decisions,
link |
not every decision.
link |
They certainly like to be heard, of course,
link |
in terms of their preferences, but that those two types,
link |
the, what she called the testosterone
link |
and the estrogen type tend to pair up.
link |
So why are these categorizations and these averages
link |
interesting to me,
link |
at least interesting enough to convey to you?
link |
The reason they're interesting to me is,
link |
again, not because of their names,
link |
these molecules were not measured in these individuals,
link |
but that they once again bring us
link |
to the themes that we addressed before,
link |
which are the autonomic nervous system
link |
and whether or not it tends to be shifted
link |
more towards alertness in action
link |
or more towards kind of a stable equilibrium
link |
or more towards kind of calm
link |
and whether or not individuals are selecting
link |
for people who have autonomic nervous systems
link |
that are more or less like theirs
link |
before they even meet, right?
link |
So again, going back to this seesaw analogy,
link |
it's almost like people who have the kind of flat seesaw,
link |
alert but calm, but not extremely alert,
link |
not extremely overly calm in situations,
link |
but kind of in the middle seem to be seeking out people
link |
that are also at that kind of autonomic equilibrium.
link |
People in the, what she called the dopamine category,
link |
which really can just be described
link |
as high sensation seeking, novelty seeking,
link |
they seem to want to pair with one another.
link |
So there's a selection for similar
link |
in two of the groups, autonomic tone.
link |
I find that very interesting because in that decision
link |
or that preference for similar autonomic tone,
link |
it essentially eliminates a lot of the requirement
link |
for figuring out how to match
link |
one's autonomic nervous system to another.
link |
They simply find someone with a similar tendency, okay?
link |
Whereas in the other two groups
link |
that she called testosterone and estrogen,
link |
the director type and the nurturing
link |
kind of somewhat follower type,
link |
there's an establishment of balance,
link |
but not between two individuals as a match,
link |
but rather on the whole in the relationship.
link |
One person is kind of driving the novelty seeking
link |
in the course of decisions and actions,
link |
and the other person is essentially agreeing to those.
link |
Now, assuming that those decisions are good for both people.
link |
And I emphasize good for both people
link |
because one of the themes that Dr. Fisher underscores
link |
and I'd like to underscore here as well
link |
is that it need not be the case that people pair up
link |
exactly according to these categorizations
link |
that I've described.
link |
Dopamine with dopamine, serotonin with serotonin,
link |
testosterone with estrogen, and so on.
link |
What is important is that there be a recognition
link |
and a respect for the other types
link |
or a recognition and a respect for the fact
link |
that both are of the same type.
link |
You could actually imagine, for instance,
link |
that two people of this high sensation seeking,
link |
novelty seeking could have a terrifically
link |
exciting relationship,
link |
but that it actually might be a relationship
link |
in which the financial stability isn't quite there
link |
or in which the basic stability isn't there.
link |
You could imagine, for instance,
link |
a situation in which a relationship between two people
link |
of what she called the high serotonin preference
link |
would have a relationship that was actually kind of dull
link |
in which both of them found themselves kind of bored
link |
at some point or in which there wasn't enough
link |
of the dynamic tension that sometimes is required
link |
in order to keep this cycle of desire,
link |
love, and attachment going,
link |
something that we will talk about in a moment.
link |
So the point here is not that one should necessarily pair up
link |
according to these arrangements that I described.
link |
The point is that on average, that's what tends to happen
link |
and that through a recognition that these categorizations
link |
exist, similar to the recognition that the type A, B, C,
link |
and D infant and toddler type attachments exist,
link |
that we can gain better self-awareness of who we are
link |
and how we tend to show up in romantic attachments
link |
and thereby navigate healthier mate seeking,
link |
healthier breakups, if the case dictates it,
link |
and in some cases, healthy long-term relationships
link |
by understanding that the other person
link |
can either be similar or complimentary to us.
link |
One is neither better than the other.
link |
It's simply the case that in all romantic attachments
link |
from the initial inception of that romantic attachment,
link |
desire, love, and attachment,
link |
there is an autonomic coordination.
link |
And of course there's coordination
link |
of all sorts of other things like food, sex, and sleep,
link |
and finances, and where people are going to live,
link |
and many other features.
link |
But that at the core of all that is a seeking
link |
of either autonomic likeness or autonomic differences.
link |
And I think that recognition can be extremely valuable
link |
in thinking about tools to enter and maintain relationships.
link |
If one thinks about their autonomic nervous system,
link |
not simply as something that is driven
link |
by external people and events,
link |
but that we can actually gain some control over
link |
through techniques of the sort that I talked about earlier
link |
and on previous podcasts, but also generally,
link |
if we are able to adjust our autonomic nervous system
link |
in order to at least appreciate or get some empathy
link |
into what someone else is experiencing,
link |
then we gain actual cognitive empathy.
link |
And this episode isn't about empathy per se,
link |
but the theme keeps coming up again and again.
link |
And I think it's worth mentioning
link |
that when you talk to psychologists,
link |
whether or not they're psychoanalysts
link |
or from another source of training,
link |
what you find is that they don't talk about empathy
link |
as a general term, they will talk about emotional empathy.
link |
They'll talk about cognitive empathy.
link |
And what I'm talking about here today
link |
is that you had a third category
link |
that is very strongly determinant of relationship dynamics,
link |
and that's autonomic empathy.
link |
I'm a biologist, I'm not a psychologist,
link |
so I love mechanism.
link |
And fortunately, there are studies
link |
that have been done recently using modern techniques
link |
to look at neural mechanisms of romantic attachment.
link |
I mentioned earlier some of the brain imaging studies
link |
that have been done on child and mother,
link |
literally imaging the activity of neurons in the brain
link |
as child is nursing or as a mother is soothing baby.
link |
And as you learned earlier, baby is soothing mother as well.
link |
Those are remarkable studies.
link |
You may have seen some of these pictures online.
link |
You can see the kind of silhouette of the infant and mother
link |
and their brains and even some of the brain
link |
activation patterns, really, really beautiful studies.
link |
Similar studies have been done in romantic couples
link |
with those couples either touching one another,
link |
touching and kissing, or in kind of clever,
link |
I think, control experiments of the person
link |
just touching a pillow or something,
link |
or kissing a pillow in order to try and create
link |
the most reasonable control
link |
for what are actually pretty complicated
link |
interpersonal dynamics to do in a brain imaging scanner.
link |
But some of the other studies
link |
that have been done recently involved so-called EEG.
link |
So these are electrical recordings
link |
that are done noninvasively,
link |
putting a bunch of electrodes on the outside of the scalp.
link |
EEG is useful in that you can do it noninvasively.
link |
You can do it while people are moving and doing things,
link |
kissing, touching, et cetera.
link |
It doesn't allow one to image or to evaluate
link |
neural activity very deeply in the brain.
link |
So you can miss out on a lot of things.
link |
It's sort of like looking at the wave structure on the ocean
link |
without actually looking into the depths of the ocean.
link |
So you can miss certain things, but if you see things,
link |
generally you trust they are there,
link |
but you can't see what you don't see.
link |
Nonetheless, there's some studies
link |
that I'll just point you to,
link |
and that form the segue
link |
for what I'm going to discuss in a moment,
link |
which is a study published in Scientific Reports in 2021,
link |
entitled Investigating Real-Life Emotions
link |
in Romantic Couples, a Mobile EEG Study.
link |
So this is, as the title suggests,
link |
I think people wear these EEG caps of electrodes,
link |
get engaged in very passionate emotional kisses,
link |
emotional speech toward one another,
link |
standing at different distances.
link |
So a lot of cool stuff that you can do
link |
that you really couldn't do in a brain scanner,
link |
because in a brain scanner,
link |
people have to be there usually in a bite bar.
link |
They're actually draw hooks like this.
link |
I've been in one of these things.
link |
There's not a lot of moving around to be had,
link |
at least not using the current technology.
link |
In any case, what they found was
link |
there is a shift in brain waves, brain states,
link |
things like alpha waves,
link |
which is a particular frequency of brain waves
link |
in the neocortex, the kind of outer shell of the brain
link |
just beneath the skull.
link |
And in people that are kissing
link |
or in people that are engaged in romantic speech,
link |
or I didn't actually hear what they said to one another,
link |
but what the couple seems exciting,
link |
romantic, and arousing to them,
link |
they see more alpha wave activity
link |
compared to the control conditions.
link |
And there was some, what we call lateralization,
link |
where the left hemisphere was more active than the right
link |
And these studies are important
link |
because we know that the autonomic nervous systems
link |
of individuals tend to start to collaborate
link |
and actually synchronize at the level of heartbeats,
link |
at the level of breathing
link |
during romantic interactions of different kinds.
link |
But these studies are some of the first of their kind
link |
to start looking at neural synchronization
link |
between individuals.
link |
Now, the simple version of looking at this
link |
and the way I would have thought this would all go was,
link |
okay, two people start kissing,
link |
they start talking about what they find
link |
particularly romantic and arousing for them,
link |
and their brainwaves will just match to one another.
link |
And that's really the basis of romantic attachment
link |
and romantic engagement in that sort of thing.
link |
But it turns out that the opposite is true.
link |
So a really nice study published in a really fine journal,
link |
Cerebral Cortex is a journal
link |
that I've known about for many years.
link |
They published Strong Anatomy, Physiology, and Neuroimaging.
link |
There's a study that was published,
link |
first author Kajimura in, and this paper really points,
link |
again, this is 2021.
link |
And the title of this paper is,
link |
brain knows who is on the same wavelength.
link |
Resting state connectivity can predict compatibility
link |
of female-male relationship.
link |
Now, what this study did was a little bit different.
link |
They looked at the resting
link |
or default mode activity of the brain.
link |
So rather than evoked activity, as it's called,
link |
where people are kissing or are engaged
link |
in some sort of activity, this was a neuroimaging study,
link |
not EEG, but FMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging,
link |
which is similar to EEG in principle,
link |
but allows you to look deep into the brain.
link |
And it has a very good resolution in time and space.
link |
So fast events can be monitored,
link |
and the precise location of those events can be monitored
link |
somewhat better than EEG.
link |
There are exceptions to this.
link |
So for you EEGers out there, EEG,
link |
don't come after me with electrodes.
link |
Just understand that FMRI gives you a fuller picture
link |
of what's going on.
link |
And what Kajimura at all found was that contrary
link |
to what your reflexive prediction might be,
link |
people tend to select people that have resting brain states
link |
that are different than theirs,
link |
or sometimes they found that are actually opposite
link |
to their own resting brain state.
link |
And you might say, well, that doesn't make any sense.
link |
I thought this is all about autonomic coordination.
link |
But actually, if we go back to Helen Fisher's
link |
categorizations of the dopamine types,
link |
the sensation-seeking types, that is serotonin,
link |
the kind of stable rule-following types,
link |
testosterone and estrogen types,
link |
remember that the two categories that she called
link |
testosterone and estrogen type,
link |
the director and the follower, the nurturer,
link |
I guess it would be the more accurate way,
link |
the director and the nurturer,
link |
those tend to pair up across categories,
link |
not within category.
link |
And so I think what's really needed for this field,
link |
which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet,
link |
is to really start to map the neuroanatomical
link |
and neurophysiological findings of,
link |
in this case, that resting brain state
link |
is in one form in one individual,
link |
and they tend to seek out people whose resting brain state
link |
is different than theirs, not similar,
link |
that needs to be mapped onto the more subjective
link |
psychological categorizations that Helen Fisher
link |
and indeed the Gottman's and others have created.
link |
That's sort of the state of the field now.
link |
And I mentioned this, not to confuse you,
link |
but to the contrary, to illustrate that it's not just
link |
about finding someone just like you.
link |
And it's not just about finding someone
link |
who's opposite to you.
link |
This is actually the reason that I decided to become
link |
a biologist at some point in my life,
link |
which is that we can find verbal sayings and stories
link |
and examples to support just about anything.
link |
It's, this is not a knock on the field of psychology,
link |
as you can probably tell from today's episode,
link |
I have great respect for and reverence
link |
for the field of psychology,
link |
especially its collaboration with neuroscience
link |
But in the popular culture, we can find examples
link |
and sayings that support essentially anything
link |
as it relates to a relationship.
link |
For instance, I've heard, and you've probably heard,
link |
absence makes the heart grow fonder.
link |
And indeed I've experienced that and I believe it's true,
link |
but I also have experienced and I believe to be true
link |
that out of sight, out of mind also exists
link |
and that there will be a biological mechanism for that.
link |
The point here is that matching of same to same
link |
or same to different can both be effective
link |
in creating the desire, love attachment process.
link |
It's a matter of who is looking for same
link |
and who is looking for different.
link |
And there, I think Dr. Fisher and the work
link |
of these neurophysiologists and brain imagers
link |
really does point in a direction whereby
link |
there is not one form of attachment
link |
that is going to be wholly above all else
link |
and will predict good outcomes.
link |
There is not going to be a case in which opposites attract
link |
and that's always the best rule to follow.
link |
Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't.
link |
There is also not the case that people tend to pair up
link |
Sometimes it will be the case, sometimes it won't.
link |
Now, there are certain statistics
link |
that support that statement.
link |
For instance, people on average,
link |
people pair up with individuals
link |
of similar educational background, income and attractiveness.
link |
That is true on average, but it's not always the case.
link |
And again, a knowledge of and a respect
link |
for the different categorizations of attachment,
link |
the different categorizations of mate seeking
link |
described by Fisher and others,
link |
and the recognition that matching
link |
of autonomic nervous systems, but also mismatching
link |
of resting state brain networks are all at play
link |
in driving what we are calling desire, love and attachment.
link |
So in keeping with the exploration of the fact
link |
that there's a saying or a book or a song or an example
link |
of pretty much any relationship dynamic,
link |
I want to now talk about an article that came out
link |
a little over 10 years ago that talked about
link |
the universality of love and the ability to fall in love.
link |
So this would be very much in line
link |
with the George Bernard Shaw quote that I mentioned earlier,
link |
that love is really overestimating
link |
the differences between individuals.
link |
And again, I should say that is not something
link |
that I personally believe,
link |
although maybe I'm just deluding myself.
link |
I like to think that the people that we fall in love with
link |
are really special for us,
link |
that they could not easily be replaced with anybody else.
link |
That's simply my stance.
link |
I'm not basing that on any hardcore
link |
neuro-biological mechanism,
link |
an article was published in the New York Times in 2015
link |
that related to some psychological studies that were done
link |
as well as some clinical work,
link |
as well as some what I would call pop psychology
link |
or things that fall outside the domains of academic science.
link |
And the whole basis of this article
link |
was 36 questions that lead to love.
link |
And it involved a listing out indeed of 36 questions,
link |
a set divided into set one, set two, and set three
link |
that progress from somewhat ordinary questions
link |
about life experience and self-report to more,
link |
let's call them deep questions about people's values
link |
and things that are emotionally close to them.
link |
And I'll just give an example of a few of these.
link |
You can find this easily online
link |
by just putting into your search engine,
link |
36 questions that lead to love.
link |
Some of the questions in set number one were, for instance,
link |
what would constitute a perfect day for you?
link |
For what in your life do you feel most grateful,
link |
kind of standard questionnaire stuff.
link |
In set two, what is your most treasured memory?
link |
What is your most terrible memory?
link |
So these are, as you can tell,
link |
are drilling a little bit deeper
link |
into one's personal experience and emotional system.
link |
And then set three, questions 25 through 36,
link |
are things, what is a very embarrassing moment in your life?
link |
When did you last cry in front of another person
link |
What is something that's too serious to be joked about?
link |
So it's going deeper into one's emotional system.
link |
And even questions like of all the people in your family,
link |
whose death would you find most disturbing and why?
link |
So pretty heavy stuff there at the end.
link |
Now, the reason this article got so much traction
link |
and the reason I'm bringing it up today
link |
is that there was a statement
link |
that was made in and around this article,
link |
that if two people went on a date
link |
or simply sat down and asked each other these questions
link |
and each answered these questions
link |
and the other was paying attention carefully
link |
and at some level, emotionally responding or not responding,
link |
but certainly paying attention
link |
to the answers of the other person,
link |
that by the end of that exchange
link |
where one person asks 36 questions
link |
and the other person answers all 36,
link |
and then the other person asks all 36
link |
and the other person answers all 36,
link |
that they would fall in love, right?
link |
Which seems like kind of a ridiculous thing.
link |
And yet it is the case
link |
that people who go through this exercise
link |
report feeling as if they know the other person quite well
link |
and feeling certain levels of attachment
link |
or even love and desire for the other person
link |
that they would not have predicted, excuse me,
link |
would not have predicted
link |
had they not gone through that process.
link |
So what's going on in this exchange of questions
link |
and answers of a progressively more emotional
link |
Well, what I predict is going on
link |
is that inside of that exchange,
link |
people are creating a sort of delusional story
link |
about the nature of the exchange
link |
being a reflection of some deeper attachment.
link |
And so even though people are just exchanging words,
link |
they're not physically touching,
link |
they are not, at least not at the point
link |
where they're running these kinds of questionnaire studies,
link |
they may touch afterwards for all I know
link |
and probably did in some cases,
link |
but they're not exchanging life experience
link |
in an immediate way.
link |
They're not actually going off into the world
link |
and doing things together yet.
link |
They are simply exchanging narrative.
link |
But we know based on recent studies,
link |
and I've covered this before on this podcast,
link |
but I'll mention again,
link |
there was a study published in Cell Reports,
link |
a cell press journal, excellent journal,
link |
showing that when individuals listen to the same narrative,
link |
their heart rates tend to synchronize
link |
or at least follow a very similar pattern
link |
even if they're not in the same room
link |
listening to a given narrative.
link |
Whereas in this case, people are facing one another
link |
listening to the narratives of each other,
link |
certainly they are having autonomic responses,
link |
and it stands to reason
link |
that their autonomic nervous systems are synchronizing
link |
much in the same way that the Cell Reports study found
link |
that people will synchronize their autonomic nervous systems
link |
to a shared heard story from another.
link |
In other words, whether or not we hear a story,
link |
watch a movie, listen to a song,
link |
or exchange our own individual stories,
link |
our autonomic nervous systems have the potential
link |
to map onto one another.
link |
So I'm not all that surprised
link |
that people find that they fall in love, in quotes,
link |
after answering these questions to one another,
link |
because essentially the way these questions are laid out
link |
is they establish a narrative,
link |
they establish a very personal narrative,
link |
and the other person is listening very closely,
link |
and we don't have physiological or brain imaging studies
link |
to support what I'm about to say,
link |
but the reasonable interpretation
link |
is that that's causing some sort of autonomic synchronization.
link |
So if you want to try this on a date,
link |
or even it's actually been hypothesized
link |
that this could be useful for existing couples,
link |
even if they already know the answers
link |
to some of these questions,
link |
and that doesn't surprise me either.
link |
I think that autonomic coordination is present
link |
during mating behavior,
link |
it's present during shared experience of the outside world,
link |
movies, concerts, watching one's children
link |
with somebody else, et cetera,
link |
and it's established by sharing one's own narrative
link |
of their own personal experience.
link |
So I don't want to seem overly reductionist,
link |
I'll never propose that all of our sensation, perception,
link |
action, and experience in life boils down
link |
to us just being bags of chemicals
link |
and the action of those chemicals
link |
or any aspect of our nervous system,
link |
and yet in looking across the psychological literature
link |
of development of attachment,
link |
in the psychological literature
link |
of adult and romantic attachment,
link |
and what makes and breaks those attachments,
link |
it's very clear to me,
link |
and I think courses through the literature
link |
at multiple levels,
link |
that autonomic coordination is absolutely key
link |
for the establishment of desire, love, and attachment.
link |
In fact, I talked earlier about how our actual conception
link |
is born out of autonomic coordination
link |
of one sort or another.
link |
So again, it doesn't necessarily mean
link |
that autonomic nervous systems always be synchronized.
link |
In the case of the two categorizations
link |
that Fisher proposed of the director slash testosterone type
link |
and the nurturing follower slash estrogen type,
link |
it was actually the coordination,
link |
but in opposite directions of individuals
link |
that fall into each of those categories
link |
that led to more stable attachments
link |
or the seeking out of those attachments, I should say.
link |
But nonetheless, it's, at least to my mind,
link |
very clear that autonomic coordination
link |
is a hallmark feature of desire,
link |
a hallmark feature of what we call love,
link |
and a hallmark feature of what we call attachment.
link |
And that the breaking of attachments
link |
or the failures of desire, the failures of love,
link |
and the failures of attachment over time
link |
in line with the work of Gottman and others,
link |
and even just simply what's required for mating behavior
link |
is also reflected in the autonomic nervous system.
link |
But in that case, a failure
link |
to coordinate the autonomic nervous systems
link |
in some sort of concerted way.
link |
Any discussion about desire, love,
link |
and attachment would be incomplete
link |
if we didn't talk about the dreaded infidelity and cheating.
link |
Much has been made of infidelity and cheating
link |
and whether or not people who are higher on dopamine
link |
and sensation seeking tend to cheat more or less.
link |
Frankly, I don't think there's any solid evidence for that.
link |
I think there are a lot of examples
link |
that we can draw from in our own lives
link |
and in the lives of others
link |
that would generally support one or the other model,
link |
but I'm not aware of any decent physiological studies
link |
or psychological studies that really point to that.
link |
For instance, I would never say
link |
that the serotonergic phenotype as described by Fisher
link |
is less prone to cheat,
link |
or that the people who have an insecure attachment
link |
are more likely to cheat, for instance.
link |
I don't think those correlations have been drawn
link |
in any kind of meaningful way yet,
link |
so I would be cautious about assigning them
link |
without that evidence.
link |
However, there are some interesting studies involving,
link |
again, neuroimaging and some subjective measures in humans,
link |
meaning asking them questions
link |
that they're good ways to tease out lies from truths
link |
in these sorts of studies,
link |
and whether or not people tend to find their partner
link |
or others more or less attractive
link |
depending on how people feel about themselves.
link |
And I think this is a very interesting aspect
link |
to desire, love, and attachment for the following reason.
link |
You hear a lot out there
link |
that in order to form a really strong relationship,
link |
you have to have a good relationship with yourself,
link |
or you have to love yourself,
link |
or you often hear, for instance,
link |
that it's exactly when you're not looking for a relationship
link |
that you're going to find one.
link |
You hear this stuff, right?
link |
But none of that is really grounded in any studies.
link |
Again, that's like out of sight, out of mind,
link |
or absence makes the heart grow fonder.
link |
There are many life examples to support those statements,
link |
and there are many life examples
link |
to support statements to the opposite.
link |
There's a particular study that I found,
link |
this was published in Frontiers in Psychology,
link |
but it's a experimental study that involves neuroimaging.
link |
The title of this study is manipulation of self-expansion
link |
alters responses to attractive alternative partners.
link |
And I love the design of this study.
link |
What they did in this study is they took couples
link |
and they evaluated members of that relationship
link |
for what's called self-expansion.
link |
Now, self-expansion is a metric
link |
that involves one's perception of self
link |
as seen through the relationship to the other.
link |
And this is something that was developed by the authors
link |
are Aaron and Aaron, so they have the same last name.
link |
So I'm assuming this was either a sibling team
link |
or a somehow related team or a romantic couple team,
link |
A-R-O-N and A-R-O-N.
link |
Aaron and Aaron in 1986 proposed this self-expansion model
link |
of close relationships.
link |
And they proposed that people are motivated
link |
to enter relationships, I'm reading here,
link |
in order to enhance the self and increase self-efficacy.
link |
In other words, that one of the reasons
link |
why many people enter relationships
link |
is that it makes us feel good about ourselves
link |
And I would see that as a healthy interdependence,
link |
not necessarily co-dependence.
link |
This is especially strong at the beginning of a relationship,
link |
it turns out, when people are forming pair bonds.
link |
And it's the case that pleasure, arousal, and excitement,
link |
again, all hallmark features
link |
of autonomic nervous system function,
link |
pleasure, arousal, and excitement,
link |
give rise to self-expansion, meaning to self-efficacy.
link |
So what this self-expansion model is really about
link |
is how great other people that we are close to
link |
and romantically attached to can potentially make us feel
link |
in terms of what they say, in terms of what they do,
link |
in terms of the way in which we believe they feel about us.
link |
So it doesn't necessarily have to involve
link |
explicit statements of them telling us how great we are
link |
or them doing great gestures for us,
link |
but how we actually feel they feel about us,
link |
turns out to be a very strong parameter
link |
in terms of how we feel about ourselves
link |
and the relationship overall.
link |
Now, some of you out there are probably thinking,
link |
oh yeah, isn't there this thing, the love languages, right?
link |
I don't have any neuroscience to support that.
link |
I think the love languages,
link |
I'm not super familiar with this, I didn't list it out,
link |
but that some people are,
link |
their autonomic nervous system, if you will,
link |
tends to be very responsive to gifts or to quality time
link |
or to physical touch or acts of kindness.
link |
I think I've got a few of these, right?
link |
I probably have a few wrong.
link |
Anyway, they're easy to find online.
link |
And people do tend to have a kind of a bias
link |
toward two or three of these things
link |
that are especially meaningful for them.
link |
And when I hear meaningful,
link |
I hear they tend to push the autonomic nervous system
link |
and neurochemical systems of the brain and body
link |
in a direction that makes us feel good
link |
as opposed to lousy or neutral.
link |
In any event, this study looked at
link |
whether or not people have high levels of self-expansion
link |
through the actions or statements of their significant other
link |
and how that influences their perception of people
link |
outside the relationship,
link |
meaning how attractive they perceive people
link |
outside the relationship to be,
link |
turns out to be strongly influenced by A,
link |
whether or not their self-expansion
link |
is very strongly driven by the other person
link |
that they are involved with,
link |
that they're in the romantic relationship with,
link |
and whether or not that's being expressed to them.
link |
So here's how the study went.
link |
First of all, they rated or categorized individuals
link |
on the basis of the self-expansion metric.
link |
Some people have more of a potential
link |
to experience self-expansion through others, right?
link |
Some of us feel great about ourselves
link |
and we're kind of topped off at that.
link |
Others don't feel so great about themselves,
link |
but they can feel much better in response to praise,
link |
in particular praise or self-expansion type behaviors
link |
or statements from people that we really care about.
link |
And still other people are a mixture of the two,
link |
the kind of moderate levels of both.
link |
So they rated them on this scale.
link |
And then they had people experience
link |
self-expansion narratives.
link |
They heard their significant other
link |
say really terrific things about them
link |
and about the relationship in particular,
link |
that the relationship that they have was exciting,
link |
novel, and challenging.
link |
So that was one form of self-expansion.
link |
And they went into some detail
link |
as to why that was the case
link |
in their particular relationship.
link |
Or they heard a narrative from their significant other
link |
about strong feelings of love between the two
link |
that had been experienced previously in the relationship.
link |
So in the one case, it sort of directed more towards them.
link |
And in the other case,
link |
it's more about the relationship itself.
link |
And then they did brain imaging
link |
of one person in the relationship,
link |
while that person assessed the attractiveness
link |
of people outside the relationship.
link |
And what they found was that people who were primed
link |
for this self-expansion had lower activation
link |
of brain areas associated
link |
with assessing other's attractiveness,
link |
then did the people who experienced a lot of self-expansion.
link |
Now, the takeaway from that,
link |
at least the way I read this study,
link |
is if you're with somebody who really benefits from
link |
or experiences a lot of self-expansion,
link |
unless you really want them to pay attention
link |
to the attractiveness of other people,
link |
it stands to reason that they would benefit
link |
from more self-expansion type gestures or statements.
link |
Not so much centered on the relationship.
link |
We have such a great relationship.
link |
There's so much love, it's so great, that too.
link |
But in the context of this study and these findings,
link |
that the person is really terrific,
link |
that the relationship that they've created together
link |
is really exciting, novel, and challenging,
link |
that there's a narrative around the relationship
link |
that really has a lot to do with the dynamics
link |
between the individuals,
link |
in particular, that the person who really likes
link |
self-expansion is vital to that dynamic, okay?
link |
So it's not looking down at the relationship
link |
as a set of equals.
link |
There is sort of this bias written into this,
link |
of that this person is really essential
link |
for the relationship.
link |
I'm not saying this is something that anyone has to do.
link |
I'm not saying this is right or wrong.
link |
This is just what the data say.
link |
But what's remarkable is that
link |
in the absence of those statements,
link |
people who have, or that rate high on this scale
link |
of self-expansion rate attractive alternative partners
link |
as more attractive.
link |
Now, that's interesting to me because it means
link |
that their actual perception of others is changing.
link |
It's not that their opportunity to see others is changing.
link |
This is not a matter of them somehow getting access
link |
or no access to attractive alternative partners.
link |
Again, attractive alternative partner
link |
is literally the language in the title of this paper.
link |
They're still seeing all these attractive people.
link |
It's just that if they're feeling filled up in air quotes,
link |
psychologically filled up, emotionally filled up,
link |
autonomically filled, enhanced in the language
link |
that we're using today by the self-expansion narrative,
link |
well then the same set of attractive faces
link |
appear less attractive to a given individual.
link |
Now, whether or not this predicts cheating or loyalty,
link |
I certainly can't say.
link |
That would be very hard to assess in neuroimaging.
link |
And there, of course, people rarely,
link |
if ever report accurately their cheating behavior.
link |
There are some studies in which confidentiality is assured
link |
to the point where people seem to be more trusting
link |
and willing to reveal cheating behavior.
link |
But if you look at the statistics on cheating behavior,
link |
it's very hard to track because people lie all the time
link |
about their cheating in and outside of the context
link |
of psychological and neuroimaging studies.
link |
But I find this study, again,
link |
the title Manipulation of Self-Expansion
link |
alters responses to attractive alternative partners
link |
to be absolutely fascinating because again,
link |
it points to the fact that the interactions
link |
with our significant others shapes our autonomic arousal,
link |
shapes our perception of self,
link |
and thereby shapes our perception
link |
of other potential partners in the outside world
link |
or shuts us down to the potential of other people
link |
in the outside world.
link |
So when I hear statements such as,
link |
it's important that you love yourself
link |
in order to really fall in love with somebody else,
link |
or it is when one is not looking for a relationship
link |
that they're most likely to fall in love
link |
and form a stable relationship,
link |
I can filter that through these findings
link |
to say that it's really the person
link |
who needs a lot of self-expansion stimulating statements
link |
or actions coming from other people
link |
that is most prone to seeing other potential partners
link |
out in the world as attractive.
link |
And in this sense, we can return
link |
to the autonomic nervous system as kind of a glass
link |
that it can be filled up through various contexts.
link |
It can be filled up through our own ability to regulate it.
link |
It can be filled up through other people's ability
link |
to enhance our sense of wellbeing.
link |
And in some sense, this points to an idea
link |
where it is true that the better
link |
that we can feel about ourselves
link |
in the absence of any self-expansion type input
link |
from somebody else really does place us
link |
on more stable ground such that when we do receive
link |
that praise or we do receive those acts of kindness
link |
or service or physical touch or whatever they are,
link |
that we are able to further enhance the way that we feel,
link |
but that we don't necessarily tether all of our feelings
link |
of self-worth or self-expansion to that one individual.
link |
So you might think that if person A can only receive
link |
the self-expansion from the statements,
link |
from the action of the person they're involved with,
link |
person B, that that will form a very stable bond.
link |
But what this study points to is the fact
link |
that that's a very unstable bond,
link |
that person A is actually very susceptible
link |
to the attractiveness of others
link |
because they're so desperately attached
link |
to this notion of self-expansion,
link |
even if they don't realize it.
link |
And so this really does point to the idea
link |
that while it is important
link |
to link our autonomic nervous systems
link |
to establish desire, love, and attachment,
link |
that we want to have a stable internal representation
link |
of ourselves, a stable autonomic nervous system
link |
to some degree or another,
link |
so that we can be in stable romantic partnership
link |
with another individual
link |
if that's what we're really trying to do.
link |
So until now, I've been weaving together studies
link |
from the field of experimental psychology
link |
and the fields of neuroscience,
link |
in particular, neuroimaging.
link |
But if you recall back to the very beginning of the episode
link |
when I was discussing how odors and how hormones
link |
and how even birth control can shape people's ratings
link |
of attractiveness of others,
link |
you'll realize that there's a deeper layer to all this,
link |
which is that our biology that resides below
link |
our conscious awareness, things like our hormones,
link |
things like pheromones even,
link |
are shaping the way that we choose, interpret, and act
link |
with other potential romantic partners
link |
or the romantic partners that we already have.
link |
Now, this cannot be overemphasized, right?
link |
No matter how much we would like to create
link |
a sort of top-down description,
link |
meaning from the cortex and our understanding of things
link |
onto what we find attractive, who we find attractive,
link |
what we enjoy, what we don't enjoy in the pursuit
link |
and romantic interactions with others,
link |
there always seems to be, and indeed there always is,
link |
a deeper layer in which our subconscious processing
link |
drives us to find a particular person
link |
to be particularly attractive,
link |
or in which we have chemistry with somebody,
link |
or in which we lack chemistry with somebody.
link |
And I would say that one of the more exciting, fascinating,
link |
and indeed mysterious aspects of desire, love,
link |
and attachment are those subconscious processes,
link |
those things that we call chemistry, right?
link |
I mean, people will report, for instance,
link |
that somebody's smell is just absolutely
link |
positively intoxicating for them,
link |
or that somebody's smell is absolutely repulsive to them,
link |
and they don't know why.
link |
That the taste of someone's breath,
link |
and I don't mean that in any kind of poetic sense,
link |
I literally mean the taste of somebody's breath,
link |
in some cases, can be very exciting to somebody.
link |
And believe it or not, we can taste each other's breath.
link |
I talked about this in the chemical sensing episode
link |
some months back, but we actually have receptors
link |
for taste and smell that engage in coordinated action,
link |
such that we can't really separate taste and smell
link |
at some level, and this is especially true
link |
when it comes to the formation of romantic relationships
link |
and what we call chemistry.
link |
Now, is chemistry absolutely required
link |
for forming stable attachments for love and for desire?
link |
No, of course they're not.
link |
But in general, these are primitive mechanisms
link |
that exist in all animals.
link |
They exist in special forms in humans,
link |
but that they drive us toward behaviors that will,
link |
as the theory goes, lead to love and attachment.
link |
Not always, as Dr. Fisher pointed out,
link |
that sex and sex drive is one way
link |
to explore potential love relationships
link |
and to explore potential attachments,
link |
which of course are major investments
link |
that extend well beyond one night or a week
link |
or a vacation or even a year.
link |
When we talk about stable attachments in general,
link |
that means long-term attachments in humans.
link |
Now, there is a biology to all of that chemistry stuff,
link |
and the studies of oral contraception
link |
and men finding women more attractive
link |
at certain phases of their menstrual cycle
link |
and women finding men more attractive
link |
at certain phases of the woman's menstrual cycle
link |
point to the incredible power
link |
of those deeper biological mechanisms.
link |
In the Huberman Lab podcast,
link |
I discussed both science and science-based tools,
link |
and so I'd be remiss if I didn't actually cover
link |
some of the tools that relate
link |
to those deeper biological mechanisms.
link |
Now, the hormones testosterone and estrogen
link |
are almost always the first biological chemicals
link |
and hormones that are mentioned and described and explored
link |
when thinking about desire
link |
and love and attachment too, for that matter,
link |
since love and attachment stem from desire.
link |
I did an entire episode about the biology
link |
of testosterone and estrogen
link |
and ways to optimize testosterone and estrogen.
link |
You can easily find that episode at HubermanLab.com.
link |
There you can find all sorts of information
link |
about how certain behaviors or absence of behaviors
link |
drive up or down testosterone and estrogen.
link |
I also dispel some myths about sexual behavior
link |
and things like masturbation
link |
and how they relate to testosterone and estrogen,
link |
as well as some myths about how those hormones change
link |
across the lifespan.
link |
I also talk about the role of exercise.
link |
I talk about supplementation,
link |
and I also talk a little bit
link |
about hormone replacement therapy,
link |
although that will be the topic for a future episode.
link |
So if you're interested in the biology
link |
of testosterone and estrogen,
link |
two hormones that absolutely influence things
link |
like libido and desire,
link |
please check out that episode
link |
as well as what I'm going to talk about in just a moment.
link |
The simple stereotyped version
link |
of the hormones testosterone and estrogen
link |
are that testosterone drives libido
link |
or increases it, AKA sex drive,
link |
and that estrogen somehow blunts it
link |
or is not involved in libido and sex drive.
link |
And that is simply not the case.
link |
As I described in that
link |
testosterone and estrogen optimization episode,
link |
and as I'll tell you now,
link |
yes, testosterone and some of its other forms
link |
like dihydrotestosterone are strongly related
link |
to libido and sex drive and the pursuit
link |
and ability to mate.
link |
However, the hormone estrogen is also strongly associated
link |
with libido and mating behavior.
link |
So much so that for people that either chemically
link |
or for some other reason have very low estrogen,
link |
libido can severely suffer.
link |
So it's a coordinated dance of estrogen and testosterone
link |
in both males and females that leads to libido
link |
So I absolutely wanted to make clear
link |
that it's not a simple relationship
link |
between testosterone and sex drive
link |
or estrogen and sex drive.
link |
Both are required at appropriate ratios.
link |
Now, with that said,
link |
there are things that can shift libido
link |
in both men and women in the direction
link |
of more desire or more desire to mate,
link |
either to seek mates or to mate with existing partners.
link |
And there's a quite solid literature
link |
around a few of those substances.
link |
Now, a common misconception is that because dopamine
link |
is involved in motivation and drive,
link |
that simply increasing dopamine
link |
through any number of different mechanisms or tools
link |
will increase libido and sex drive.
link |
And that's simply not the case either.
link |
It is true that some level of dopamine
link |
or increase in dopamine is required
link |
for increases in libido.
link |
However, because of dopamine's relationship
link |
to the autonomic nervous system,
link |
and because the autonomic nervous system
link |
is so intimately involved, no pun intended,
link |
in sexual activity in seeking and actual mating behavior
link |
as I described earlier,
link |
it's actually the case that if people
link |
drive their dopamine system too high,
link |
they will be in states of arousal that are high enough
link |
such that they seek and want sexual activity,
link |
but they can't actually engage the parasympathetic arm
link |
of the autonomic nervous system sufficient
link |
to become physically aroused.
link |
Now, there's a whole description of this
link |
that awaits us in a future episode,
link |
but I'll summarize now by saying
link |
for people that are taking substances
link |
just simply to increase dopamine,
link |
in order to increase libido,
link |
that can be a potentially hazardous route to follow
link |
because depending on whether or not that dopamine level
link |
is high enough that it puts them into a mode
link |
of seeking mates or mating,
link |
but they can't adjust their autonomic nervous system
link |
during actual mating behavior,
link |
what essentially is I'm saying is it can place people
link |
into a chronic pursuit,
link |
but an inability to perform sexually.
link |
And this is true for men and women, okay?
link |
So I would just caution people against just thinking,
link |
oh, a lack of libido is simply a lack of dopamine.
link |
That is not the case.
link |
It could be from lower levels of dopamine,
link |
but it could also be for other reasons.
link |
And so these systems, these signaling systems
link |
and these neurochemicals are very intricate
link |
and just simply ramping up dopamine
link |
has actually been found for instance,
link |
in amphetamine and cocaine users,
link |
there is a phenomenon in which they become hyper aroused,
link |
but can't perform sexually.
link |
This is also true for people who take elevated levels
link |
of other recreational drugs or who take antidepressants
link |
that increase the dopamine system too much, right?
link |
Dosage has to be worked out with your physician,
link |
with your psychiatrist, such that mood is enhanced
link |
and the various aspects of a healthy wellbeing,
link |
mind and body are enhanced,
link |
but not so much so that that what we call the arousal arc
link |
is locked with the seesaw in the sympathetic drive position
link |
such that sexual arousal can't occur, okay?
link |
So this is an important point to make
link |
because I think that a lot of people are under the impression
link |
that if they just drive up testosterone, increase dopamine,
link |
and generally get themselves
link |
into high states of autonomic arousal,
link |
that that's going to increase their libido,
link |
but that's simply not the way the system works.
link |
It's that seesaw and that seesawing back and forth
link |
that is the arc of arousal that we talked about earlier.
link |
Now, there are substances,
link |
legal over-the-counter substances
link |
that fall under the categorization of supplements
link |
that do indeed increase libido and arousal.
link |
And so I'm going to talk about some of those
link |
in the context of peer reviewed literature now.
link |
I want to be clear, however,
link |
that these are by no means required.
link |
Many people have healthy libidos
link |
or have libidos that are healthy for their life
link |
and what they need and want.
link |
And as always, in any discussion about supplementation,
link |
you absolutely have to check with your physician.
link |
I don't just say that to protect us.
link |
I say that to protect you.
link |
Your health and wellbeing is dependent on you
link |
doing certain things and not doing others,
link |
and everybody is different.
link |
Nonetheless, there are studies
link |
that point to specific substances
link |
that are sold over-the-counter
link |
that at least in the United States are legal
link |
and that have been shown to be statistically significant
link |
in increasing measures of libido.
link |
There are many such substances,
link |
but three that in particular
link |
have good peer reviewed research to support them
link |
are MACA, M-A-C-A, which is actually a root.
link |
Tongat Ali, also sometimes called longjack.
link |
I didn't name them, forgive me.
link |
And tribulus, or tribulus it's sometimes called.
link |
I'm going to talk about each of these in sequence,
link |
the studies on MACA are quite convincing
link |
that consumption of two to three grams per day of MACA,
link |
which generally is sold as a powder or a capsule,
link |
typically consumed early in the day
link |
because it can be somewhat of a stimulant,
link |
meaning it can increase alertness
link |
and you wouldn't want it to interfere with sleep
link |
by taking it too late in the day.
link |
But in studies that include both men and women
link |
of durations anywhere from eight to 12 weeks
link |
of athletes and non-athletes
link |
and different variations of MACA,
link |
turns out there's black MACA, red MACA, yellow MACA.
link |
There are a bunch of different forms of MACA,
link |
but that they can increase subjective reports
link |
of sexual desire independent of hormone systems.
link |
Meaning it does not seem,
link |
at least based on the existing literature,
link |
that MACA increases testosterone or changes estrogen,
link |
at least not on the timescales that these studies were done
link |
or with the measures that were performed in these studies.
link |
But that MACA, again, consumed in doses
link |
of anywhere from two to three grams per day
link |
has been shown to significantly increase libido.
link |
And in fact, those dosages of MACA have been shown
link |
to offset so-called SSRI induced sexual dysfunction.
link |
So there are various routes to sexual dysfunction.
link |
The SSRIs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
link |
They go by name brands like Prozac and Zoloft,
link |
and there are many others now,
link |
and generic forms and so forth.
link |
Those don't always, I should point out,
link |
lead to sexual dysfunction.
link |
There's a dose dependence.
link |
Some people do quite well on SSRIs
link |
and don't have any issues with sexual function.
link |
Other people suffer quite a lot from sexual dysfunction
link |
while taking SSRIs, highly variable.
link |
You need to work with a physician, a qualified psychiatrist.
link |
But nonetheless, everything I've been saying
link |
about MACA thus far has also been explored
link |
in the context of SSRI induced sexual dysfunction.
link |
The paper that I'm referring to here
link |
is a double-blind randomized pilot dose finding study
link |
It goes by the name LMIENI.
link |
These always have fancy names,
link |
and the Latin names in biology are always more complicated,
link |
but it's MACA root for the management of SSRI
link |
induced sexual dysfunction.
link |
First author is Doerding, D-O-R-D-I-N-G.
link |
This was a study done at Mass General,
link |
which is one of the satellite locations around Harvard.
link |
Harvard Med, it's associated with Harvard Med,
link |
that found significant improvements in libido
link |
when people were taking a pretty low dose.
link |
It was actually, in this case, just 1.5 grams per day,
link |
up to a high dose, three grams per day of MACA.
link |
And they were doing this
link |
in 20 remitted depressed outpatients.
link |
So these are people that had depression.
link |
Their depression was successfully treated with SSRIs,
link |
but they were suffering
link |
from some of these SSRI-related sexual effects,
link |
and MACA seemed to offset some of those effects
link |
significantly in this population.
link |
The other studies exploring the lack of effect
link |
on serum testosterone in adult healthy men
link |
was a 12-week study,
link |
again, consuming anywhere from 1.5 to 3 milligrams,
link |
meaning, excuse me, 1,500 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams
link |
So again, this is 1.5 up to three grams of MACA or placebo,
link |
and they rated sexual desire, depression,
link |
and other measures such as testosterone in the blood.
link |
Again, no change in testosterone or estrogen,
link |
estradiol levels in men treated with MACA
link |
and those treated with placebo.
link |
But nonetheless, there was a significant
link |
and positive effect on libido
link |
with this dosage of 1.5 to three grams per day of MACA.
link |
And there are several other studies that also show this,
link |
again, in people that are taking SSRIs
link |
and people that are not taking SSRIs
link |
in chronically over-trained athletes.
link |
This was also found to be the case.
link |
So it seems like across the board,
link |
MACA is a fairly useful supplement
link |
for those that are seeking to increase their libido.
link |
And there are fewer studies involving women,
link |
but there are a few such studies
link |
that also point to the same general positive effect
link |
on libido in women taking MACA at equivalent doses
link |
to those I just described.
link |
I think it's noteworthy that MACA supplementation
link |
does not seem to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels
link |
to any significant degree, but it does change libido.
link |
I think that points to the fact
link |
that there are multiple systems in the brain and body
link |
that influence libido, not just testosterone and estrogen.
link |
And indeed, we know that to be the case.
link |
Things like PEA, which is a substance found in chocolate
link |
and is a substance that some people supplement
link |
is known, for instance, to increase sexual desire,
link |
but also the perception of sexual experiences
link |
as more stimulating, for instance.
link |
So there are a lot of pathways in the brain,
link |
in particular in the hypothalamus,
link |
this ancient area of our brain that harbors neurons
link |
and hormone secreting cells, including neurons,
link |
that can shape our perceptions of our,
link |
even just our tactile experience of others
link |
and their attractiveness,
link |
and indeed can shift levels of desire
link |
independent of changing levels of circulating hormones.
link |
Another substance that has been shown to increase libido
link |
across a range of human populations is so-called Tonga Ali.
link |
I've talked a little bit about this before
link |
on the Huberman Lab podcast in reference to testosterone.
link |
And I've talked about it extensively
link |
as a guest on other podcasts.
link |
Tonga Ali goes by a number of different names.
link |
One of them is exceedingly difficult for me to pronounce.
link |
It's Yurikoma longifolia, also called longjack,
link |
but Tonga Ali is the typical name.
link |
There's a Malaysian version and an Indonesian version.
link |
My understanding is that the Indonesian variety
link |
of Tonga Ali is the one that is most potent
link |
for its effects on libido.
link |
Previously, I've talked about Tonga Ali
link |
taken in 400 milligram per day capsules
link |
as a means to increase the amount of free,
link |
meaning unbound testosterone.
link |
So testosterone has a both bound form and an unbound form.
link |
Very briefly, the bound form is bound to albumin in the blood
link |
or to so-called sex hormone binding globulin.
link |
When it's bound, it can't be biologically active
link |
It is important that some of it be bound
link |
in order to get a sort of time release
link |
and proper distribution of testosterone through the body,
link |
but is the unbound free testosterone
link |
that can really have its most potent effects.
link |
And there's some evidence that Tonga Ali
link |
can increase the amount of unbound,
link |
so-called free testosterone
link |
by lowering sex hormone binding globulin.
link |
Although it is almost certain
link |
that it has other routes of mechanism as well.
link |
Nonetheless, there are some reports
link |
of Tonga Ali increasing libido.
link |
One particular article, last author,
link |
or I should say last name of first author, excuse me,
link |
Ismail, I-S-M-A-L.
link |
This was published in an evidence-based complimentary
link |
and alternative medicine.
link |
It's from 2012, reports a significant increase
link |
in libido and sexual function.
link |
There are other such studies, not a lot of them,
link |
not as many robust controlled quality peer reviewed studies
link |
as there are from Maca.
link |
Nonetheless, a number of people, men and women,
link |
that I know do take Tonga Ali
link |
and it seems to work well for them.
link |
The question always comes up
link |
around discussion of supplements.
link |
Do you need to cycle these things?
link |
The only way to determine that
link |
is really to do your blood work, monitor liver enzymes,
link |
monitor hormone levels and so forth.
link |
So I simply can't say whether or not you need to
link |
or you don't need to cycle them.
link |
Typically Tonga Ali and Maca are not cycled
link |
in any regular kind of way that I'm aware of,
link |
but again, you really need to check with your doctor
link |
if you're going to initiate taking any of these things.
link |
And you certainly should do your best
link |
to monitor your blood work as well as subjective measures
link |
in evaluating whether or not they're working for you,
link |
say for you and so forth.
link |
The third and final substance slash supplement
link |
that I want to touch on as it relates to libido
link |
is called tribulus terrestis.
link |
So that's T-R-I-B-U-L-U-S, terrestis, T-E-R-R-E-S, T-R-I-S.
link |
This is a commonly sold over-the-counter supplement
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for increasing testosterone for fitness purposes and so on.
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Whether or not it actually does that
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to a meaningful degree isn't clear,
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but I'm aware of four peer-reviewed studies
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that were focused on both males and females
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ranging anywhere from 18 years old
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all the way up to 65 plus, they say 65 plus,
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I guess it could be 70, it could be 80, I don't know,
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but a fairly broad age range
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where people took anywhere from 750 milligrams per day
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divided into three equal doses.
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So 750 total per day divided into three equal doses
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of tribulus or placebo for 120 days.
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This particular study was focused on females
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and according to the female sexual function
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index questionnaire, no significant difference
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between any of the groups.
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However, free and bioavailable testosterone
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increased in the group taking tribulus terrestis.
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Total testosterone did not reach statistical significance.
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So this is sort of the inverse of what we see with maca
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where there do seem to be increases in testosterone
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which would predict that there would be increase in libido,
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in this case, this was post-menopausal women,
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there was no increase in libido,
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there was an increase in testosterone.
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I mention it only because there might be instances
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in which people want to increase their testosterone.
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It does seem that tribulus, at least in that population,
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is capable of doing that.
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Now, there's a separate study that was done,
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a double-blind study lasting anywhere
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from one to six months that had a clear
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and significant increase in libido.
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Now, this was taking six grams.
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So that's 6,000 milligrams of tribulus root for 60 days.
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And it did seem to increase various aspects
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of sexual function.
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And there was what appeared to be a substantial
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16.3% increase in testosterone.
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But in this particular study,
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because of the variability across individuals
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that did not actually arrive at statistical significance.
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Now, there were a number of other studies
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that explored the role of tribulus,
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in particular in females.
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And one of those studies was a study
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that was actually quite short.
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It was two to four weeks, it involved 67 subjects.
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These were subjects that had experienced a loss of libido
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and took tribulus divided into two equal doses,
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compared that to placebo.
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And they did see a significant improvement
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in these measures of sexual desire and function
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on this female sexual function index.
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So there is some evidence that tribulus can be effective
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in increasing testosterone in certain populations,
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in increasing sexual desire and function
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in certain populations, particular in females.
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I think more studies are certainly needed,
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but these three substances slash supplements,
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makka, tonga ali in particular,
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Indonesian tonga ali and tribulus
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can indeed create significant increases
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in sexual desire and in some cases
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by adjusting the testosterone and estrogen system,
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in some cases not by adjusting
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the testosterone and estrogen system.
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Again, pointing to the complexity of neurochemicals
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and features that adjust things like libido, aka desire.
link |
So we covered a lot of material today
link |
related to desire, love, and attachment.
link |
And yet I acknowledge that it is not exhaustive
link |
of the vast landscape that is the psychology and biology
link |
of desire, love, and attachment.
link |
Nonetheless, I hope that you found
link |
the information interesting and hopefully actionable
link |
in some cases toward the relationships
link |
of your past, of present,
link |
and potentially for the relationships of your future.
link |
If you're enjoying and or learning from this podcast,
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please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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That's a very straightforward, zero cost way to support us.
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And it really does help us.
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In addition, please subscribe to our podcast
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on Apple and Spotify.
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And on Apple, you have the opportunity
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to leave us up to a five-star review.
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In addition, please leave us comments,
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feedback, and suggestions for future guests
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in the comment section on YouTube.
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We do read all of those comments.
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Please also check out the sponsors mentioned
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at the beginning of today's episode.
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That is the best way to support the Huberman Lab Podcast.
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In addition, we have a Patreon.
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It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman.
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And there you can support the podcast
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at any level that you like.
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Please also follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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I teach neuroscience and neuroscience-related tools
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on both Instagram and Twitter.
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Some of that material overlaps
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with material covered on the podcast.
link |
Some of it is unique material
link |
only covered on Instagram and Twitter.
link |
During today's episode and on many previous episodes
link |
of the Huberman Lab Podcast, we discussed supplements.
link |
While supplements aren't necessary
link |
or appropriate for everybody,
link |
many people derive tremendous benefit from them
link |
for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus,
link |
or as discussed today, for enhancing libido and desire.
link |
If you want to see the supplements that I take,
link |
you can go to Thorne.
link |
That's T-H-O-R-N-E.com slash the letter U slash Huberman.
link |
And there you can get 20% off any of the supplements
link |
And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site
link |
through that portal, thorne.com slash the letter U
link |
slash Huberman, you can also get 20% off
link |
any of the other supplements that Thorne makes.
link |
We partnered with Thorne
link |
because Thorne has the absolute highest standards
link |
with respect to the quality of the ingredients
link |
in their supplements and the precision of the amounts
link |
of those supplements.
link |
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion
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about desire, love, and attachment.
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And last, but certainly not least,
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thank you for your interest in science.
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And I'll see you in the next one.