Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine.
Today. We are going to talk about the psychology and the biology of
Desire. Love and attachment today happens to be Valentine's Day 2022.
However, the themes we are going to discuss pertain to desire love and attachment on any
Day. And indeed the mechanisms. We are going to discuss almost certainly. We're at play thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago and no doubt will still be at play in our minds and in our bodies and in our psychologies, for the decades, centuries and thousands of years to come
indeed today. I want to focus on core mechanisms that lead individuals to seek out, other
individuals with whom to mate, with with whom to have children with or not with whom to enter short or long-term
relationships.
With and perhaps to end
those relationships or to seek relationships on the side. So called infidelity. I'm certainly not going to encourage or
discourage any of these behaviors. I'm simply going to cover the
peer-reviewed scientific data on all these aspects of Desire, love and attachment. I'm going to discuss how our childhood attachment Styles as they're called influence. Our adult attachment Styles. Yes. You heard that right?
How we
attached or did not attach to
primary?
First in our childhood has much to do with
how we attach or fail to
attach to romantic Partners as adults because
the same neural circuits
the neurons and their connections in the brain and body
that underlie attachment between infant and
caregiver between toddler and parent or other caregiver and during adolescence and in our teenage years are repurposed for adult romantic attachments. I know that might be a little Eerie to think about but indeed that
That is true. Now. The fortunate thing is that regardless of our childhood attachment Styles and
experiences, the neural circuits for desire
love and attachment are quite plastic. They are amenable to change in response to both what
we think and what we
feel as well as what we
do. However,
all three aspects that were discussing today, desire, love and attachment are also strongly biologically driven. We're going to talk about biological mechanisms such as
Hormones biological mechanisms such as neurochemicals things
like dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin
and neural circuits brain areas and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain that control. Whether or not we desire somebody or not, whether or not we lose or increase. Our desire for somebody over time whether or not we fall in love what love means. And whether or not the relationships, we form continued to include the
elements of desire and love over time or not in order.
Her
to illustrate. Just how powerfully our biology can shape our
perception of the attractiveness of other people. I want to
share with you the results of a couple of studies. Both studies, explore how people rate other people's attractiveness and in both studies. The major variable is that women are at different stages of their menstrual cycle. Now in the first study men are rating, the attractiveness of women according to the smell of those women.
Now, they're not smelling them directly. They're
smelling clothing that women wore for a couple of days.
Is at different phases
of their menstrual cycle. And
what they find is that men will rate the odors of women
as most attractive.
If those women wore those shirts
that clothing in the pre ovulatory phase of their cycle. Okay. So this is not to say that men do not find women attractive at other stages of their cycle.
It is to say that men find women's odors particularly attractive. If those odors were worn by women that are in the pre ovulatory,
phase of their
Menstrual cycle.
Okay. Now there was also a study that was done where women at different stages of their. Menstrual cycle are rating the odors of men and a similar. But mirror symmetric result was found such that women who are in the pre ovulatory phase of their menstrual cycle will rate men's odors as more
attractive than at other stages of their cycle.
So the simple way to put this is that there seems to be something special about the preovulatory phase of a woman's menstrual cycle.
That makes men rate them as more attractive
during that time and
women rate men
as more attractive during that particular time as well. So this is a bi-directional affect
the way that the second study was done where women are rating. Men was not just to smell the odors of
those men on T-shirts. They did that but
they correlated that with whether or not the shirts were worn by men that were particularly physically symmetrical that she had these men divided into groups. It was more of a Continuum rather.
Either rated according to body symmetry and face symmetry and women preferred more symmetrical men when they were doing the preference test during the pre ovulatory phase of their cycle. So again, the point is that that preovulatory phase of the cycle seems to create a
bi-directional mutual attractiveness.
Now, also extremely interesting is that this effect does really seem to have something to do with
ovulation, because in both
studies, they had women that were taking oral contraception or
Art and what they found. Was, if a woman is
taking oral contraception, it
prevented that peak in perceived
attractiveness by the men,
meaning men no longer perceived a woman to be more attractive at a particular phase of their cycle and also women taking oral contraception no longer prefer the odors of more symmetrical men during the pre ovulatory phase of their cycle. I want to make sure that it's especially clear that it is not the case that oral.
Option reduced the perception of a woman as
attractive that did not happen in these studies. It reduced
the further increase in a
male's perception of her as attractive
and if women took oral contraception, it prevented them from preferring more symmetrical, men, based on the odors of those men. Now, I realize there are a lot of variables here. We've got odors we've got symmetry. We've got menstrual cycle, preovulatory non preovulatory and we have whether or not people are taking contraception or not, but the
Basic finding is that depending on where women are in their menstrual cycle influences? Both men's perception of them as attractive and their perception of men as attractive and oral contraception eliminates that effect. So I share with you those data to illustrate that we often think that somebody is attractive or
not based on how they look their skin, their Hair,
Etc. But it also illustrates that their odor is a powerful cue for some people more than others, you know.
Some of us tend to be more
olfactory driven than others.
Although, if you watched the huberman Lab
podcast, episode that I did with Professor David Buss from the University of Texas, Austin, who's
a luminary in the field of evolutionary
psychology and has studied mate choice and mate, selection bias over decades. He's really one of the founders of that field. He emphasized findings that odor for many people is a maker or a deal-breaker
meaning. There are some people that even if somebody
has all the
Characteristics that they're looking for in terms of kindness and attractiveness and values and other features that would and should be a very high priority in
selecting a mate that if they, if someone does not like the way that person smells their innate body, odor, independent of colognes, and perfumes and soaps, Etc. Is that that's
often a complete and total deal-breaker. I'm sure there's some of you that can relate to that, and there's some of you perhaps for, which that is not the case. And you can't even imagine that being such a powerful variable and
Yet, the data suggest that indeed, it is a powerful variable for many people out there. Before. We begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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checkout. Let's talk about desire, love and attachment.
Of course, these are topics that grab tremendous
interest. So it's worth us defining our terms a little bit
before going, any further.
Of course, we can have many different kinds
of loves. There's romantic love. There's love of family.
The so called familial love, there's love of pets. We can even love
objects where we can feel. As if we love objects. We can love certain activities. We can have friends that we love and so on and so forth. The word love is used to Encompass a lot of different types of relationships
today. We are mainly going to be focused on romantic love
and the neural mechanisms of romantic
love. I want to acknowledge here at the outset that most of the studies of romantic love have focused on monogamous
heterosexual. Love and also,
Oh, it, when we talk about studies focused
on desire and attractiveness and attachment, that's also the case and that simply reflects the general bias of the literature
over the last 50 to 100 years. It does, of course, not rule out that
similar or different
mechanisms could be at play in non-monogamous relationships, in homosexual, relationships,
were in relationships of any kind or variation. It's also Worth US defining. Our terms around desire. It can
mean lust, it can mean the desire for long.
From partnership. So we need to Define our terms and throughout, I will do my best to very carefully. Define what I mean by
desire, what I mean by love and what I mean by attachment,
the formal study of
Love and Desire and
attachment goes back to
the early 1900s. One of the classic studies of on, this is entitled Love and Desire. It was published in 1912 and really focused on
two opposing themes.
Within romance. One is love, which in that paper was really meant to include attachment and dependents or interdependence between individuals. All right,
and the other end of the spectrum being
desire or the sexual desire for another and romance was meant to encapsulate. Both those things Love and Desire and for much of the 1980s. It was thought that Love and
Desire were on sort of opposing answering kind of a push.
Or, and it was the dynamic push and pull between
love and a desire that one could Define
romance. And that actually led to much of
what's out there in the psychological
literature. Today. We are going to explore some neurobiological
studies, some studies of the endocrine system, using the hormone system
that actually support that General model. And I'll point you toward a, what I think, is a very useful book in thinking about how
relationships can both form and last,
A long periods of time and how those relationships can include both
desire and interdependence. I'll also talk about some studies that have really focused on why relationships succeed and why they
fail. And how that relates to whether or not there is sufficient amounts of attachment and desire. So today, we're going to talk about the
science and indeed, you'll also get some tools, those tools should be useful
to you whether or not you happen to be in a relationship or not whether or not you're seeking your relationship or not. I'd like to
In
with an anecdote. And this is not an anecdote about my relationship history. It's a anecdote about my scientific
history. When I started graduate school, the chairman of the department. I was
in at the time, said to me, you know, most
phds last longer than most marriages and indeed, he
was right. And also most marriages in this country. And in divorce. I
think it's about 50% with a slight, skew
toward more ending in divorce than persist until
Death do them part, but nonetheless, it's
about half and most marriages end
before the eight-year period is up. Most phds.
Take anywhere from four to nine
years. So, there was a bit of a smearing of averages there. But the point he was trying to make really landed home for me. It did not scare me of out of relationships, nor did it scare me out of a PhD, obviously, what it did illustrate was that there's something about our attachment Machinery. That can
be very
Very compelling such that people take on
tremendous levels of commitment. I have to imagine the most people enter marriages assuming that they're going to stay in those marriages. I don't think most people enter marriages thinking, they're going to get divorced but
that if 50% of those commitments end in divorce, there must also be mechanisms
by which our attachments can break. And
today we're going to talk about both the forming of
attachments and the breaking of attachments, what can prevent those brakes and attachments and indeed what can lead to really
Attachments
there are
biological mechanisms to desire, love and attachment. That's
abundantly clear. Now. There's a robust and very large literature in animal models. And what I mean by that, our field studies and laboratory studies in primates of different
kinds such as macaque monkeys or bonobos people have looked at these sorts of things believe or not in ducks. In laboratory,
mice in different types of
birds,
Etc.
You look at that literature. You can essentially find biological examples in the animal kingdom for just about any behavior that you can easily
map to human behavior.
So, for instance, there's a species of animal called the Prairie vole in one portion of the United States. This Prairie vole species is monogamous. They only mate with one other Prairie, vole only
raise young with one other Prairie vole for their entire life and in another region of the United States that same species of animal.
The Prairie vole
will mate, with many individuals. They're non-monogamous. And the major difference at least as far as we know between the Prairie voles in one location to another location, is the levels of
a molecule called vasopressin in the brain and
body vasopressin is present in humans. It
has numerous biological roles. It's an responsible, for instance, for controlling the amount of urine that you
excrete, the amount of water that you retain and for sexual desire, as well as mate seeking.
Levels of vasopressin in Prairie voles are strongly determinant of whether or not
a prairie vole is going to be a monogamous or non-monogamous.
Why do I raise this? Well, I raise this because the literature on Prairie
voles is quite beautiful and has been discussed quite a lot in the popular press. You can look it up with an easy easily just web engine, search. You'll find lots of information about this. Lots of news articles about this
and lots of interpretations as to how vasopressin might be involved in similar, or different.
In isms, in humans. Now, I don't have a problem with mapping animal studies to humans. I think there's certainly a place for that. But if you just sort of lean back and look at the giant
mass of studies in animals, and their mating behavior and their mate selection Behavior, you can essentially find examples of anything, you can find
examples of polygamy. You can find
examples of cheating, you know, of infidelity, you can find
examples of all sorts of different behaviors that in your own mind, you can
map to human behavior.
But it's really hard to make the leap
from animal models to humans in any kind of direct way. And so
thankfully there's been tremendous work done in the last mainly 20 years or so. Looking at human mate. Selection human desire,
human love and human attachment.
So were mainly going to focus on those studies today and where appropriate we will map those findings back to the
findings and animals to see
if there are some Universal truths or some Universal principles
about how the neural circuits and bye.
Logical mechanisms work but by and large we're going to focus on human studies today. So unless I say, otherwise, the data that I'm referring to today are entirely from human beings. So let's talk about attachment and attachment Styles
and this will offer you the opportunity to answer some important questions for yourself
such as what is my meaning, your attachment style in relationship.
One of the most robust
findings in the field of psychology. Is this notion of attachment Styles,
and this was something that
Discovered through a beautiful set of studies that were done
by Mary Ainsworth, in the 1980s, in which she developed a laboratory condition called The Strange situation task.
Now, the strange situation task has been studied over and over again in different
cultures in different
locations throughout the world. And in preparing for this episode. I actually spoke to three different
psychologist. I spoke to a psychoanalyst. I spoke to a cognitive behavioral psychologist and I actually spoke to a psychiatrist, use me not a psychologist. But a psychiatrist with a
School degree and asked
is the strange situation task and the various attachment styles
that emerge from that
task. Are those still considered valid and indeed. All three of them said, If ever there was a literature in
Psychology that is absolutely tamped down and has a
firm basis in both data and real world
principles and real world examples. It's this notion of attachment Styles. So, what is the strange situation task the strange situation to?
It involves a parent. Typically a mother in the studies that were done, but a parent or other caregiver
bringing their child, their actual child
into a laboratory.
And there's a room with a stranger and the mother enters the room with the child and there's some toys in the room and typically the mother, and the stranger will talk. Obviously, the stranger is part of the experiment is
not just some random person off the street and the
child is allowed to move about the room. They can observe.
Give the mother interacting with the other person or not. They can play with toys or not. But then at some point, the mother leaves.
And then at some point later, designated by the experimenter, the mother comes back
and what is measured in these studies, is both how the child the
toddler reacts to the mother leaving
and how the child reacts to the mother
returning, at the end of the
experiment. And often times. This will have two or three.
Different phases where the mother will bring the child in then leave then come back in and leave their also studies in which the behavior of the child with the stranger is
also
examined. So there are a lot of variations of this, but the basic findings are that toddlers children fall into four different
categories of attachment style.
And that these attachment Styles can predict many features of a
Adolescent teen young adult, and even adult attachment Styles not in strange situations of the sort that I just described. But in romantic
attachments,
I should mention also that attachment style is plastic, meaning it can change
across the lifespan. So as I described the results, I describe the different attachment styles that are out there
and if any of those resonate with you or bring to mine certain people in your life, please do not assume that those attachment styles are
rigid and fixed for the entire life span. There are also terrific data that indicate
that through specific.
Processes both psychological and some biological adjustments that people can change their attachment style and that indeed people
who have different attachment Styles can change the attachment styles of others, but just to make very clear what the results of the study were. I want to review what the four different attachment styles are and typically people fall into one group or another? But not several. So the 4 patterns of
attachment that were revealed by these studies.
Again, were revealed by examining the behavior of the child and
Response to the mother, leaving the room and the mother returning, and the child's response to the stranger that is in the room with them.
The first style is the so-called
secure attachment
style in the nomenclature of this kind of study. These are the
so-called be babies as, in the letter B, Bulldog be not for Bulldogs, but just to designate this category.
The secure attachment style is one in which the child will engage with the stranger with the experimenter.
While the parent is present in the room, but that when the parent typically it's a mother but when the parent or other caregiver leaves the child does get
visibly upset, they might win. They might cry. They might even tantrum a bit.
However, when the caregiver meaning the mother or father other caregiver Returns the child
visibly expresses happiness that the caregiver has returned. Okay. So that's the Hallmark of the secure attachment style.
And again, this is all.
Pre verbal, this is happening
long before the child can express, how they feel with words.
And the interpretation of this is that the secure child feels confident that the caregiver is available and will be responsive to their needs
and their Communications. So that when the child whines and, whereas, you know,
distressed the parent doesn't come right back into the room, but at some point, they do, and they seem to have a sense of
trust that if the parent or caregiver leaves that, the parent will come back and that they're happy that they do.
These children are also very good at
exploring novel environments after the parent is gone. And while the parent is there, and
almost always when the parent is there. They will. Explore More broadly, literally in space. They'll venture out further
than they will. When the parent is gone.
They also tend to engage with the caregiver in a way that's not immediately and completely trusting, but that over time, seems to evolve from one in which they're kind of suspicious of this person to one in which they are at least somewhat.
Trusting. Okay. So those are the general Contours of the secure attachment style and fortunately. Nowadays. There are physiological, studies measuring things like heart
rate and breathing and other measures that correlate with
the subjective assessment of what these children are feeling.
Okay. So first category, secure attachment, the second category is a so-called anxious
avoidant or insecurely attached, which are the category a baby's,
the chop the children with anxious, avoid an insecure attachment patterns.
I generally tend to avoid or
ignore the caregiver. All right, meaning the
parent and show very little emotion when the parent leaves
or returns. So this is the reason they call them avoidant or anxious avoidant and kind of insecure. There isn't this happiness or joy that the parent is back. They don't seem to express that
they do not exhibit distress on separation and they generally tend to have some tendency to approach.
The, the caregiver when they return. But it, but there doesn't seem to be
a general expression of joy. And again, physiological, measures support that as well. Things like, changes in heart rate tend to be less dramatic in the anxious avoidant, insecure attachment style than in the secure attachment style. Okay. So that's the second one.
The third category is the so-called anxious. Ambivalent / resistant
insecure category. I didn't name these categories so you have to blame others and
In this one instance for everything else, blame me. But in this instance, you have to blame the psychologist that name this
category. The anxious ambivalent / resistant insecure category also called The Sea
Babies for the letter c. Just as a
categorization, the anxious ambivalent resistant insecure
toddlers, really
show distress, even
before separation from their mother or other caregiver.
And they tend to be very clingy and difficult to
comfort when the caregiver returns.
So their
distress even before the mother leaves the room and they tend to be very clingy and really hard to
calm down when the mother returns.
They tend to show either, what seems to be resentment in response to the parents absence. We don't really know what they're feeling or some sort of helpless passivity. And there's actually some
categorizations that the psychologists have come up with, with C1 subtypes and see, two subtypes. We don't have to get bogged down in that
but just know that there isn't one absolute
measure that says, oh well, this person.
Person is anxious ambivalent resistant insecure.
They could be somewhat passive,
or they could be seem somewhat angry at the caregiver. But the basic idea is
that before, and
after the separation, they are clingy and difficult to comfort. They just can't seem to calm themselves down and physiological measures of heart rate and hormone measurements. Such as cortisol also, support that statement
and the third category of attachment style is the so-called disorganized or disoriented
or D.
For the letter D. Baby's this is a categorization that was added later to this strange situation task. That is a real Hallmark of Developmental Psychology
studies. It was developed by Mary. Ainsworth graduate student.
Mary main who actually had the great Fortune of taking a course from and learning from when I was a graduate student at Berkeley many years ago
and this fourth categorization was controversial for a while, but now is generally
accepted the
key feature of the disorganized.
Rented category is that the toddler's tend to be tense? And they tend to Encompass a lot of kind
of odd. Physical postures. They tend to
hunch their shoulders.
They'll put their hands behind their
neck. They'll cock their head to the side. For those of you listening. I'm doing this on the video
version. It's not where you don't have to go see that. But it for those of you that are watching this on video. They tend to kind of
constrain their, their body size a bit and going to AUD postures that they normally wouldn't do anywhere else.
So this is why it's called the disorganized or
disoriented category. It seems like these children just don't really know how to react to a separation and they just start to
manifest behaviors and emotional tones.
That aren't observed in other situations.
Okay. So we've got our four categories. I'll try and use the shortest possible names for each category. We've got category 1 which is
securely attached. We've got category
to, which is insecurely attached. Also sometimes
called anxious avoidant,
then we've got
Cory three, which is the resistant insecure
category, which is anxious, ambivalent. And then
there's this fourth category. The disorganized
disoriented category where the so-called D babies. Now,
what's interesting about this from the
perspective of Desire, love and attachment. Is that the
categorizations of children into one
of these four different categories as toddlers
is strongly predictive of their attachment style in romantic.
Partnerships later in
life, which is to me, both amazing and
surprising and not surprising all at the same
time, amazing.
Because it means that first of all, we are relatively hard wired for attachment. I think that that's incredible and beautiful that we have designated neurons nerve cells and
hormonal systems that are there to ensure that we have some sort of
response to a caregiver being there or not being there or returning or
Or leaving
but also that the same neural. Circuitry. He's the same. Hormonal responses are, at least in some way repurposed for entirely different types of
attachments later in life.
So when we hear the psychologists talk about how, you know, we formed a
template early in life, based on experiences that were even pre verbal before we had language and those
templates are superimposed on our relationships or
we should say our later relationships are superimposed on those templates.
There really is a basis for that. We now have neuroimaging studies to support. For instance, the work
of Alain Shore from UCLA showing that
when a mother and child interact,
either through very soothing interactions, like, bottle feeding or breastfeeding, or
singing to one's baby, or putting them to sleep that the brain of the child, and the brain of the mother are entering a coordinated state of relaxation, and it's not One
Direction mother to child. The child is also calming the
Mother typically these studies were done with mothers again sometimes with fathers but typically with mothers
and in addition to that when the mother or other caregiver acts very excited and raises their voice or puts a lilt in their voice or widens their eyes that the child will do
the same. And again, there's a bi-directional interaction in that case of excitement and there's the release of neurochemicals like dopamine into the bloodstream. Whereas in the relaxation scenario and the soothing
scenario. There's we know the
The release of things like serotonin and oxytocin.
So the neural systems for attachment and the neural
systems, for what we call autonomic arousal, for being alert and calm
don't act in a vacuum. They are Tethered to other people in our environment. And of course, we know this, right? We sometimes hear the statement. No one can make you feel anything. I've always had a little
bit of a problem with that statement. I don't think I'm contradicting anyone in particular, but you hear that a lot. No one can make you feel.
Anything indeed, they can write a physical injury can make you feel something.
If somebody says something that you
very much like it can make you feel something. And if somebody says something that you very much dislike,
it will make you feel something. So, the idea that no one can make us feel anything isn't actually true. Our nervous system is
Tethered to the nervous systems of others. And that is
true from the
very earliest stages of our lives. And in this
case, we're talking about how our templates for attachment in romantic relationships, how we find them how we maintain.
Them and indeed how we break them and reform. Them is based on a template that was established through an entirely different set of priorities, which was how we feel safe and
secure in novel environments. Depending on whether or not our primary caregiver is there or not
neuroimaging supports that when I say neuroimaging, I mean brain scan support that measures of hormones in
the body and brain support that measures of neurochemical support. That there's
simply no way around this truth that we have a set of road maps in our mind that are reused for
An entirely different purposes later in
life that is vitally important to understand because
if one is successful in
forming romantic attachments maintaining them Etc
or not does in fact reflect the earlier
templates that you've
created but as I've mentioned before, the good news is that these templates can shift over time and one of the more powerful ways
to shift those templates over time is
purely by the knowledge that they exist. And the
In that those templates are malleable. They can change through the process of
neuroplasticity. Again, neuroplasticity is just a rewiring of nerve connections. That is very much present in childhood, but also very much present in
adulthood. So if you're somebody who you think
falls in the category, 1 2 3 or 4 or, you know, somebody or involved with somebody who falls in the category, 1 2, 3 and 4.
The mere knowledge of that can be very
useful but you might ask. What do I do with that knowledge? Well, fortunately both psychologists and biologists have started to leverage that knowledge toward establishing better, more secure Bonds in adult romantic relationships and there's a book that has really tapped into this. I think it's the first book that is really address this head-on and that book comes from to Columbia professors. And the title of the book is
attached.
The new science of adult attachment.
How it can help you find and keep love that. The authors of this book are a mere Levine and Rachel Heller again. Both of them are skilled academics and researchers who have really taken the literature that I described on the
strange situation to ask and mapped it to adult attachment Styles.
And also they've mapped out ways that they've observed in their clinical practice and that
is laboratory supported for,
for instance, people that have an anxious
ambivalent or what we would call an insecure attachment.
Dial or four people that fall into the disorganized or disoriented attachment style, how they can modify that attachment style
in or out
of relationships in order to establish. What I think everybody wants which is secure attachment. Why does everybody
want that? Well, secure attachment allows people to be both in
relationship or if they choose to be on their own
or to be in relationship, but
physically separated from somebody else or even emotionally, separated from somebody
else. And maintain what we call a stable autonomic.
Make equilibrium the ability
to remain calm clear-headed. You might not like what's happening,
but you're able to navigate that with some sense of clarity and not excessive discomfort. So, is there a
goal in all of this stuff? About love desire and attachment indeed. There is the the secure attachment style is the one that
leads to the most stable and predictable long-term relationships put differently.
Babies, toddlers adolescents, teens and young adults that have a secure. Attachment style are more likely to find in form long-term relationships than are people in the other categories,
but people in other categories can learn and eventually migrate into the
secure attachment style.
And I think that book attached. I have no affiliation to the
author's or the book itself. I should just mention that attach the new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find and
keep low. Really? It sounds very
Psychology ask but it is really grounded in the research psychology literature. And there's also some interesting biology there.
Another point to make about attachment Styles, is that it
is possible
and some of you may be familiar with circumstances, where by people who are securely attached
either, because they grew up in an environment where secure attachment was
cultivated or because they developed that on their own can
also migrate out of the securely attached.
Category into insecurely attached or into avoidant types of attachment Styles as teens or as young adults, or, as adults of any age, or any stage of Life,
by virtue of being with somebody who has a different
perhaps less adaptive attachment style.
Right? What this means is that if
you have or you develop a secure attachment style,
it's vitally important to
protect that attachment style because it is possible to become anxiously.
Even if you grew up in a stable attachment framework and again this can happen at any stage. So if you're interested in attachment Styles, and how they influence adult romantic attachments, and certainly, if you
are a parent, I would encourage you to check out the
book attached again, it's quite good and I think that it offers a number of actionable
tools to both form
and hold on to secure attachment Styles. So I mentioned that the neural circuits for child parent or child care giver attachment.
Are repurposed for romantic attachment later in life. But what are these neural circuits? What do they do? I mean it's so attractive if you will to think about a brain area that controls love or a brain area that controls desire or a brain area that controls attaching. But it simply doesn't work that way
as I've talked about before on this podcast and I will say again and again because it will persist to be true long after I'm gone is that no one brain
area can give rise to any thing is
Complexes desire. Lover attachment
instead, there are multiple brain
areas that through their coordinated
action. Create a sort of a
song that we call Desire, or a song that we call love or a song that we call attachment not a literal song. Although there are songs about desire love and attachment. Of course many songs some good, some not so good.
But rather different brain areas being active in different sequences and with different intensities can make us feel as
if we are in the
The mode that we call Desire in the mode of Love or in the mode of attachment, but beneath
all of that is this element
of autonomic arousal
and I want to focus on autonomic arousal just for a bit longer because it really is one of the
Three core Elements by which we form and maintain loving attachments and by which we break loving attachments
the autonomic nervous system
as the name suggests is automatic. In fact, that's what.
Comic means now, it's actually the case that we can control our autonomic nervous system to some degree or
another, but the autonomic nervous system, controls things like digestion are breathing
whether or not, we're conscious of that breathing or not. It controls things, like how alert we are, or how sleepy we are,
and the autonomic nervous system. As I just briefly described earlier, is really something that we come into the world
with it's hardwired. All the elements are there but
through interactions with our parents.
Aunt either soothing interactions or fun playful interactions or dare, I say scary interactions. Are autonomic nervous system gets tuned up. Meaning we each develop a tendency to either be more alert and anxious or more calm or kind of a
balance of alert and calm. Now, of course, this changes across each day and depending on tired, we are late in the day. If we've been awake for a while we tend to get sleepy early in the day. We're very rested. We tend to wake up and feel very alert. So the
way to think about the autonomic nervous,
Is it kind of a seesaw?
We go back and forth
between being very alert. We can be alert and calm or we can be very, very alert. We can be in a state of panic, we can be fast asleep. So we can be
extremely calm, or we can just
be kind of sleepy semi calm and but still also alert,
so think about it like a
seesaw and that seesaw has a
hinge and that hinge defines how tight or
loose. That seesaw is how readily it can tilt back and forth.
Our autonomic tone.
Is how
tight that hinges and there are biological mechanisms to explain this. But here I just want to stay with the analogy of the Seesaw for now.
The interactions between child
and caregiver early in
life, take the child and the caregiver from one end of the Seesaw to the
other, from being very Alert, in a state of play, for instance,
to being nursed and being very soothing until we go to
sleep. And of course, we each have a seesaw, the parent on the child has a seesaw and they're interacting. What do I mean by that?
Well, there are
beautiful studies, and beautiful
and not in the sense of a focused on a pleasant
topic. But
Because they were done so beautifully. Well,
that looked at, for instance, the response of mothers and their physiologies and the response of children and their physiologies during the bombing of cities during World War
Two. So an unpleasant
situation, but what was revealed during the course of these studies was that if the mothers were very stressed during an
onslaught of bombing of the city, the
children's physiologies tended to be stressed also and
Persisted in being stressed, long after that stressful
episode was done. They actually followed that these children. Well out for many decades afterwards.
Conversely, if the
parent and in this case, again, it was Mother's that that were explored in these studies
had turned this whole business of going into the bomb shelters into somewhat of a game. All right. Taking it seriously, but essentially telling the children, okay, it's time to go but not expressing much stress or
distress.
Children also didn't develop much stress, or distress, or trauma. Now, there were exceptions
to this, of course, but in general, that was the rule that the autonomic nervous systems of children. Tend to
mimic the autonomic nervous systems of the primary caregiver and the mechanisms by which this occurs has been
explored. And again, I just referred to the beautiful work of Alain Shore, at University of California, Los Angeles. I mean, again, his name is is sure, spelled
SCH o re I'm looking down, briefly at the floor here because I'll just reach for the
Book, he has a wonderful book called right brain, Psychotherapy. It's a
little bit technical. But if you're
interested in some of the studies,
this book, right? Being
Psychotherapy details,
how everything from nursing of children to play time, Behavior to strange situation type task behavior that we talked about
before which of course, occurs when children get dropped off at daycare or nursery school, or with babysitters
Etc. And indeed all
types of caregiver, child
interactions tune-up that autonomic
A system.
So that the child ends up with an autonomic nervous system that either tends to lean more towards alert and anxious, or can be very
alert, but calm, or can be very calm and hard to budge.
Again. It's the tightness of that hinge that
really underlies. These attachment styles that we were talking about earlier
and not on this episode of
the human lamp podcast, but on many other previous episodes such as the master stress episode or some of the optimize Health episodes. You can find these if you want.
Huberman lab.com.
A lot of the tools and techniques that are recommended. There have to do with readjusting
the autonomic nervous system in deliberate ways as an adult.
Again. I won't go into the the specific tools, but for instance, the the physiological sigh this tool
that I've talked about extensively of to inhales
through the nose as deeply as you can, on the first one sneaking in a little bit more are on the second one and then a long exhale through the mouth is a way of adjusting
that autonomic. See saw it.
Tends to make us more calm. It activates, what we call the parasympathetic arm
of the autonomic nervous
system, which is just fancy nerd. Speak for it's a quick way to calm yourself down.
Right things, like ice baths or cold, showers or cold immersion or hyperventilate. Deliberate, hyperventilation by contrast or ways in which, we can deliberately increase the level of our so-called sympathetic
arm of our autonomic nervous system. Make ourselves more alert.
Why would you want to do that? Well, you can do
that to be more alert.
To be more awake
if you like, or as a form of self induced stress, inoculation to be able
to tolerate higher levels of adrenaline, by making it a practice that you self
direct. The reason those tools are out. There is because many of us for whatever reason we don't have to blame anyone but because of our childhood templates because of things that happened in didn't
happen. In terms of our interactions with caregivers have autonomic
nervous systems that are tilted to one side or the other more than we would like or
In which the hinge
that I'm talking about in this analogy is too loose
or that is too tight. And we're sort of stuck in a mode of anxiousness or stuck in a mode
of lack of energy. That's what those tools are really
about. But at a deeper level, the autonomic nervous system is really the system that governs how we will react in
response to a romantic partner, being present or leaving. And I don't necessarily mean leaving the relationship.
Entirely, although it could mean
that right. We know people, I'm sure, you know, people that upon the end of a relationship that they wanted very much are absolutely crushed. And actually, in researching this episode there. I discovered, there's an extensive literature, finding that the feelings that one has. After a breakup are very much like a clinical
depression in many cases,
but there are individuals that can look at a breakup as a transient event that they don't interpret as going to mean so much.
For all aspects of their life for reshaping their view of themselves.
Why? Well, we have different levels of autonomic function and depending on where our seesaw is if you will, some of us become extremely distraught and can't recalibrate ourselves. Can't
adjust ourselves down from, you know, stress to calm or can't take ourselves from exhausted to more alert if we need to do that on our own. And so that's why tools to for doing that exists. But
attachment itself.
Is about where our autonomic nervous system resides. So if I were to offer a set of
Tools around, these topics of desired love and attachment, I
would say, first of all, you might want to
think about whether or not you fall into the secure insecure or other attachment Styles,
second. I think it is vitally important for all of us, but certainly for people that are in relationships or seeking relationships to be able to, at least have some recognition of where our autonomic nervous system
tends.
To reside both in terms of when we are with
somebody. And when they leave, when we are apart for long periods of time, can we calm ourselves? Can we self-soothe or are we very
much dependent on the presence of another in order to feel soothed?
Now, I absolutely want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong. In fact, there's everything right with feeling great
in the presence of somebody else. That is
actually a Hallmark of
strong and quality attachments. These
days, we hear the term
codependent a lot. This was a
I believe the term was first coined by Pia Melody and it actually does occupy an important role
in the
world of trauma. Trauma healing. So called trauma bonding
topics of another episode. I actually did an episode on fear and Trauma and we will do one all about trauma bonding with an expert at some point in the
future, but codependence and codependency. The term can sometimes be misinterpreted as any dependence on another isn't good. Interdependence healthy.
This, of course, is good. It is the Hallmark of healthy child,
parent relations, sibling, relations and romantic relations, but a key element of healthy interdependence is that? Yes, our autonomic nervous
system is adjusted by the presence of another, but
that also that we can adjust
our own autonomic nervous system even in the absence of that person
that if the person goes away temporarily or permanently that we can still
regulate our own autonomic nervous system both
from states of stress, to
States of
Calm, both from states of exhaustion to states of more alertness. And of course, we all need sleep to go from exhaustion to alertness. But what I'm
referring to here is the ability to regulate when distraught or
regulate when fatigued or feeling
depressed and that is an is all about
the autonomic nervous system. So as we talk about attachment Styles, we talk about
infant and toddler and adult attachment Styles. What we are really talking about is a complex set of neural circuitry.
And one of those neural circuitry is which is absolutely crucial. Is this autonomic nervous system.
So if the autonomic nervous system is one key component
of Desire, love and attachment. What are the other two? And what I'm going to tell you next is largely. The pioneering work of Helen Fisher,
who is really an anthropologist who's become a bit of a neuroscientist in this? Collaborated with neuroscientists to establish brain areas and neural circuits that are associated with different aspects of
moment, Love and
Desire. I think the first really high quality study of neural circuits associated with these themes,
was a paper published in 2005. In a very fine. Anatomical Journal, perhaps, the best
neuroanatomical Journal which is the Journal of comparative neurology.
The Journal of comparative neurology has been around for more than 100 years and is
considered the archival location for placing really high quality Anatomy. They have tremendously high standards and the study.
That I'm referring to is entitled romantic love and fmri,
meaning functional magnetic resonance. Imaging
study of a neural mechanism for
mate? Choice. And dr. Fisher is a author on this paper as
is Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown. So all very fine researchers and this study as well as several other studies using
magnetic resonance. Imaging, things like EG neuron, Tomica
tracing Etc have identified a large number of brain areas.
That are associated with different aspects of desired, love and attachment. And I'll just throw out a few names of those brain areas and what they control. And then I'll tell you how those anchor
to the other two categories of neural circuits essential for desired love and attachment. So
not surprisingly, the dopamine system
in the brain, is associated with desire, love and attachment and mainly with desire although to some extent love
dopamine is a neurotransmitter will sometimes associated with reward, but as some of you have heard me say before it is made.
The a molecule of motivation, craving and
pursuit and
that motivation, craving a Pursuit that
relates to dopamine is not unique to attachment, or love or sex or mating etcetera. It is a
universal generic
currency in the brain for pursuing something food. When you're hungry, a mate when you want, 12, May 20 want to
warmth when you're cold etcetera, Etc. Okay, so it's not for one specific purpose, but the brain areas associated with
dopamine involve.
For instance, the ventral tegmental area, the substantia nigra areas of that
sort. The basal ganglia. You don't need to know these names, just understand that. These are networks of neurons that tend to put the person you into a state
of forward action and pursuit and craving and motivation. They are not about being quiet and relaxed etcetera.
The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation are most associated with love and
attachment not surprisingly.
And there the neuro chemical serotonin and to some extent, oxytocin
are the predominant neurochemicals involved and those are released from brain areas such as the raphe nucleus in the back of the brain. You may have heard that the majority of Serotonin, your body is made in your gut. And indeed that's
true, but I hate to break it to you. The serotonin, your gut is not responsible for your feelings
of love and attachment. At least not to a high degree. That's mainly going to be the reflection of neurons in your brain that make
serotonin and there.
Other areas of the brain that makes serotonin
as well, and oxytocin
as well, but they tend to be associated with the kind of warmth and calm and the
soothing that we feel in the presence of another.
And again, these are not strictly divided circuits.
We can have dopamine and serotonin present in our brain and body at the same time to equal or very, or different
degrees. And we were turning a little bit to what happens when levels of
dopamine are very high and low levels of Serotonin or low and vice versa and so on, including in States of
Neuro chemically modified States as it were in when we talk about things like MDMA so-called
Ecstasy. But, in the meantime, I want to just discuss the to neural circuits that use dopamine that
you serotonin and oxytocin and that collaborate with the autonomic nervous system to drive, what we call Desire love and attachment
and the three circuits
are autonomic nervous system. We talked about that one.
Then there's the nervous system components or the neural circuits for empathy for being able to see and respond to
and indeed match the emotional tone or the autonomic tone of another and then there's the third category and this might surprise some of you. It certainly
surprised me but the data point to the fact that the third neural circuit that's very important for
establishing bonds is one associated with positive delusions. So
given that the neural circuits for empathy
are absolutely crucial.
All for falling in love and maintaining stable attachments. I'd like to talk about those neural circuits and what they are
now often when we hear empathy, we think oh, empathy is really about listening to,
and really understanding what somebody else is feeling, maybe even feeling what they're feeling
and indeed that's the case. But what do we
mean by that? Right? What is it to feel? What another feels. Well, what
it means is that
there seesaw is driving your seesaw.
Or your seesaw is somehow driving their seesaw that there's a match in terms of the tilt of those
seesaws. Now, it doesn't have to be an exact match. Right? If someone that you really care about is very, very
stressed. You could also become very stressed. That's a form of empathic matching. And there are indeed neural circuits for that. I'll describe what those neural circuits are in a
moment. But sometimes the best role for us to take is actually one in which
we are calm when the person that we care about or that we were romantically involved with
Is very, very anxious. And in a few minutes,
I'll talk about how matching of emotional tone can be good or bad
for the stability of a relationship and complementarity of autonomic matching can be good or bad.
In other words. Sometimes it's beneficial for a
relationship to go into the same state as the other.
And sometimes it's more beneficial for us to not go
into the same state as the other.
But the important feature here.
Here is that when we talk about
emotional matching or empathy or going into the same state or not going into the same state. What we really talking about is
whether or not the autonomic seesaw of one individual is
driving, the autonomic seesaw of the other individual.
And this is a vital principle for how we fall in
love and form attachments and it's actually part of the desire and mating process itself.
I would go so far as to say that one of the prerequisites to the
propagation and expansion of our
species is this notion of
autonomic regulation and to some extent matching of autonomic nervous systems. Let me explain what I mean. Last, I checked
the only way that new humans can be created is by way of sperm
meeting egg, either in body, or in dish,
but sperm meets egg, and then
Typically nine months later. We have a human, baby.
The process of bringing sperm to egg, right? Mating behavior sex behavior in humans is one of
autonomic regulation. And
what I mean by that is the process of finding
a mate. And in this case, I mean, actually someone to mate with
typically while scenarios very typically is one of elevated autonomic arousal. Meaning increased activation of the so-called
sympathetic.
This system. This is related to
dopamine release and it's
related to
epinephrine release. There has to be a pursuit or at least. There has to be a mobilization to arrive in the same
location where by one can mate, right? That, that almost always is the case.
However, the sexual arousal itself is in both males, and females is actually driven primarily by the
Pathetic arm of the autonomic nervous
system. So while Pursuit is
One of alertness and
sympathetic drive. As we say again, sympathy is not really what's at play here that the word
simply means together and the
activation of the autonomic nervous system toward more alert state is
because of a sympathetic nervous system in the co activation together of many
neurons in the brain and spinal cord,
but then the actual physiological
arousal state that we call sexual arousal is predominantly parasympathetic. Lee driven. Okay to be quite direct
about this.
If the sympathetic nervous system activation is too high, the sexual arousal, response cannot
happen in either males or in females. It's inhibited.
However, the orgasm and ejaculation response, which if you think about it is required for sperm to meet egg.
Is sympathetic driven. And then after
orgasm, and ejaculation the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back in, and there's a calming and relaxation. So, the
Arc of mating involves sympathetic arousal. Okay, not sympathy, but alertness, and arousal for Pursuit, then a tilt of the Seesaw, at least, to some degree for arousal of the sort that we typically hear of of sexual arousal then.
At the point of orgasm and ejaculation is back to a sympathetic response and why how can I say that? How do I know that the sympathetic nervous system meaning neurons within the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, are what?
Drive ejaculation and
orgasm and then afterward, there's a return to increased
parasympathetic activation and
we don't know for sure why that happens. But it's thought that in species that pair bond.
Humans, generally pair, but not always there. The return to more parasympathetic activation
after orgasm. And ejaculation, is thought to increase the exchange of
pheromonal orders. Odors scuse me and to increase pillow talk, and pair bonding of different kinds. Okay. So that's the, the, the Seesaw going back and forth is actually built into the
process by which our entire species propagates.
So, in some ways, every human is
Required to navigate that process if they want their offspring to persist.
And of course nowadays, there are Technologies like in vitro fertilization and ginger, you intrauterine insemination. There are a variety of
ways that technology is allow people to circumvent the actual physical mating process in the way that I described but
by and large, that's the
way it's done and certainly that's the way it was done. Historically for, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years that process is
also what
opens in
all mammalian species that mate. Okay. So I'm
overlooking an entire literature
of animal studies. That classic studies of this were done by two individuals. I'll just briefly mention them. In case you want to look at the literature. There's a guy at the Rockefeller University named. Donald 5pf
AFF, who has done beautiful studies
identifying, the neural circuitry. What's called the lordosis response.
Unlike in humans, the mating behavior of animals is rather.
In terms of the positions that
they occupy and the lordosis responses, a kind of a you shaping, or a bending up of the hindquarters of typically of rodents, but of other
animals as well. The male the male
mounting is almost always from behind except in some species of primates and that lordosis response is only going to occur during particular phases of
the estrous cycle. The Ester cycle is sort of the analog to the menstrual cycle, but it's not 28 days. It's four days or some other duration in a
other animals depending on the animal.
The lordosis response is strongly regulated by odors by contact and is estrogen and testosterone controlled. And then the male portion of of the mating sequence in animals, the mounting and thrusting, and ejaculation, as they're called, or mounting thrusting, intromission and
ejaculation. Those are the four scientific categories that have been described that's presence in rodents. And also in dogs where it was primarily studied by Frank Beach who was at
you
See, California Berkeley for a long time and the entire literature around the neural circuitry for sexual meaning behavior in animals.
Largely stemmed from the work of Donald Pfaff and Frank Beach and their scientific Offspring not their actual Offspring. You can look at that literature. If you like
there have been human neuroimaging studies of the process
that I described a few minutes ago Believe It or Not of
people in brain scanners not necessarily mating with
A other people, but going through that Arc of arousal,
sympathetic activation during orgasm, or ejaculation. And then the post ejaculatory or orgasmic phase in both men and women and the
Brain areas associated with those have all been mapped out. Now. The spinal cord areas that control things like
erection, vaginal lubrication ejaculation and orgasm. Those have also been mapped
out and this is all been explored from the
A vote of both basic science just to get an understanding of how our species has sexual interactions and reproduces.
But also from the perspective of, for instance, trying to repair, sexual function, after spinal
cord injury, which is, you know, a prominent concern for a lot of people depending on where they have their injury, but in, in the number of people that have spinal cord injuries,
so this is both vital
biological and clinical data
the neural circuits.
For everything that I just described reside in the autonomic nervous system and are coordinated with the neural circuits that are associated with empathy. The neural circuits for empathy again. There are many, but mainly to structures that you should know about the prefrontal cortex, which is how we perceive things
outside of us and make decisions on the basis of those perceptions. How we organize those decisions
and an area of the brain called, the insula i.n.s. Ula, the insula is a really interesting brain area that allows us to interact.
Aricept to pay attention to what's going on inside our body and to split some of our attention to external cept and the mating dance. Whether or not it's
the dinner and date portion of the mating dance, or the actual
physical Dance part of the main dance or actual
mating and, and sexual
behavior kissing. Or otherwise, that is a coordinated activity of two
bodies. Typically its do I realized sometimes it's more. Sometimes it's only
one, but typically, it's two bodies.
And at least in the framework we're using here that coordinated dance is one in which the autonomic nervous system of one individual in general, is coordinating with the autonomic nervous system of the other individual. And the insula is essentially splitting. One's attention between how we feel ourselves, how our body, feels what we're thinking with the thinking
and the body's bodily sensations of the other and that can be communicated. Obviously, through words.
Can be communicate through sounds. It can be communicated through
touch and it can be communicated through a number
of kind of more subtle cues like pupil size, or whether or not certainly in cases, where we recognize the person and we kind of know their responses, their autonomic responses under different conditions. We can assess it is the person comfortable, are they uncomfortable? Are they
are they more focused on me or on themselves? This is the coordinated silent dance. That if we look at a neurobiological terms, we can really see is all
About the autonomic nervous system whether or not it's time to tip the Seesaw to want it to one side or the other, depending on whether or not the other person seesaw is
tilted higher or lower than the other.
Okay. So we have the autonomic nervous system. And then we have this thing that we're calling empathy, which is really about
autonomic matching and again, the insula and the prefrontal
cortex are neural circuits that are crucial
for autonomic matching because they allow us to say what's out there and do I want to match to it or not.
Okay, and then the third category of neural circuit that Helen Fisher and others
have found to be important for desire love. And
attachment is the neural circuit associated with self-delusion. What do we mean by that? Well, first of all,
Self-delusion implies a kind of cynicism
about love and attachment and I
think it was George Bernard. Shaw that said love is really about
overestimating. The differences between individuals, actually when I hear
that and as I say it, I really don't like that quote. I have no bone to pick with George Bernard Shaw, but what it suggests
and I think what he meant was that, you know,
in love and attachment we tend to put so much value
in the other that we forget that many of the
Seas that are going on in our brain and body actually could be evoked by many other people too. But I
think it's somewhat overlooks.
The enormous power of attachment and the ways in which somebody smell somebody's voice, somebody's everything or
somebody's particular thing or things can really become so vital for our autonomic nervous
system to feel soothed and to feel elated etcetera.
So, I think that, while the quote is accurate, in the one sense,
I think it does overlook
the neural circuits for attachment and just How Deeply why are those can become for us? So I
will balance that quote with an
enormous number of other quotes that I won't mention. But that you can find out
there that really point to, you know, how incredible
the person is that one tends to be attached to that. There's really only one or, you know, or several people that could ever exist that could evoke those feelings from us, and, of course, you can read your, you know, naru.
Poetry in your that you can find these things all over the place in music and poetry and
writing. So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits, being generic
and could be activated by anybody. I think you'll find an ample number of
opposing quotes. That these neural circuits
can only be activated by that special someone or that particular person or maybe in just a small set of those
people. So what of delusion? Well, the work of Helen Fisher and others has really
Pointed to the fact that desire love and attachment are three separate
phases of what we call romantic relationships that typically, not always but typically desire tends to come first or falls in the early
phase that the process of
romantic, / sexual interactions. It doesn't necessarily have to be sex
itself, but certainly something that involves in some intimacy of some
kind, right? And generally Touch of some kind.
Eventually transitions into what we call love, which, eventually transitions into what we
call attachment. And I should just mention touch because touch is a fundamental aspect of this whole process. There's an article, a research article. I should say.
The title of it is relationship specific, encoding of social touch, and somatosensory and insular,
cortices cortices being cortex, cortex is plural, cortices. And again, there's our friend, the
insula. So this
A study that explored what brain areas and what body areas are activated by specific forms
of attachment and social touch.
And what they found not surprisingly, is that the, the, the areas of the brain are associated
with touch the somatosensory areas, but
more interestingly, the insular cortex are only
activated by touch.
So touch in the amount of touching and proximity and skin contact. Not
surprisingly activates brain areas associated with
Somatosensory touch, but also the insular cortex, which again, is this brain area, that
links, the internal our
feelings about what's going on inside Us in at the surface of our skin, with events
external. And they found activation of number of brain areas the amygdala orbitofrontal, cortex, and so on, and so on.
That's not as essential as just understanding that. The insula is the place in which we start to take our experience of our internal landscape,
attach that to our perceptions of the external landscape and then a sign that a
value or a sign that some sort of interpretation and positive delusion is predictive of long-term attachment. What do we mean by positive delusion? Positive delusion is the contradiction of that. George Bernard Shaw. Quote. It's
The belief that only this person can make me feel this way. This other person holds the
capacity to make me feel this way physically, or emotionally or both.
And so, as we move
from desire to love to attachment our brain, circuitry is a
literally getting tuned up such that that individual,
that we happen to be attached to again here thinking about monogamous relationships, but it, I guess for non-monogamous relationship be
Jules
is an are the way in
which our autonomic nervous system can be regulated. They actually
get access to our control panel. So it's our autonomic nervous system empathy and this
positive delusion.
Now, positive dilution is critical. If you look at the
stability of relationships over time something that's been extensively
studied mainly by psychologists, but now also by neurobiologists what you find is that there are some
Features of interactions between
individuals that predict that a relationship will last
and those are many, but mainly fall under this category of
positive delusions. I'll return to those in what those exactly look like.
But there are also just a
handful of things that predict that relationship will fail
over time. This is largely, the work of the gottman's is actually a husband and wife
team up at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The gottman's have
run a
laboratory in the department of psychology for a
long time. They've also done a lot of public
facing work around relationships,
and they've talked about the
various aspects of relationships and interactions between people that predict either staying together or breaking
up so much so that they've established a method by which they can look at video
interactions between couples and
with very high degree of certainty predict whether or not those
couples will stay together or break up over time and they've identified what they
All the Four Horsemen of relationships. These are things that essentially almost always predict that a couple will break up. And I think the current number on this is that gottman can predict divorce with 94% accuracy,
which if you think about is pretty remarkable, so, even though
these are purely psychological studies, I'm not
aware of any analysis of underlying
physiology. There are some things that they can observe between couples.
That can lead them to predict whether or not a couple of stay together or break up with
94% accuracy. So what are those things?
Those four behaviors? What they call the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
for relationships or one criticism to defensiveness three stonewalling and for contempt with contempt, being the most powerful predictor of breaking up criticism, of course.
Not mean that there's no place for
criticism in stable, relationships. Of course, there
is has to do with how frequent and how intensely that criticism is voiced. Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness. We know,
as the sort of lack of ability to hear another, or to adopt their stance. So lack of empathy, I think is a one way to interpret defensiveness
stonewalling, which is actually another form of
lack of empathy. It's a turning off of this.
Neural circuit. That's so critical for desire, love and
attachment. The stonewalling essentially means the
emotional response or the request of another is completely cut off. So it's, it's I don't think there's been brain Imaging of this, but we I think we can reasonably imagine that it
involves untethering, your insulin response from
the other and what they're dealing with and focusing, your insular response, huh? No pun,
intended on your own
internal state or perhaps the state of someone else in.
Early, we'll talk about infidelity in a moment
and then contempt and contempt has actually been referred to as the sulfuric
acid of relationship. I didn't say that, but gottman and colleagues have that. It is such a powerful predictor of divorce and breakups in the
future and contempt. Of course, by definition is the feeling that a person or thing is beneath consideration worthlessness or
deserving scorn.
And apparently, they can identify this in the videos
of couples having discussions in
Interacting by
very elaborate eye rolls by expressions of anger in one individual
when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm or excitement about something. It's the oh, yeah, you would say that or we're deep-seated resentment toward the other so much
so that it's apparent. That
one kind of actively dislikes, the other
partner so contempt disregard for
something. That should be taken into account is the other way to the
About it, runs counter to all of the neural circuits, all three of the neural
circuits that we talked about before. It certainly is it is the antithesis of
empathy, it is anything, but a positive delusion.
It's really looking at the other
individual either accurately or inaccurately
as somebody that you kind of
despise. And then it is an absolute inversion of the autonomic
seesaw matching that I was talking about before it's a dissociating of
your seesaw from their seesaw. They're very excited about something.
Your unexcited by it. In fact, it's an inversion of their seesaw where
they're excited. You're down there down. You're up. Okay, so it's a basically, a, an inversion of all of the neural circuits that
Helen Fisher and others have identified as critical for desired love and attachment and therefore it's not surprising. That is so strongly predictive of breakups. And in the case of married, couples of divorce, for those of you that are interested in the work of the gottman's, and
Similar work. They've written several popular books. They're fairly easy to find. We can link to one of those in
the caption, but they've also developed some quite interesting online resources in their
so-called love lab. I guess it's fortunate that they didn't call it, the hate lab or The Break-Up lab, because they focused a lot on what predicts breakups,
but they've also written extensively,
and researched extensively in peer-reviewed studies. What makes people
People find appropriate partners for them and to maintain those Partnerships over time. So you can go, you can
search for love, lab
University of Washington gottman, or any number of their various books. I think you'll find some some useful resources there.
I want to shift back to
the work of Helen Fisher. She's
made some very interesting statements and some
very interesting observations that at least to my
mind map very well on to the
knowledge of neural circuitry both in humans and non-human primates and in other species. I realized that she's the only name in the game, but she's made some
observations that I think are are very, as we say parsimonious. Meaning, they allow us to organize a lot
of this stuff in
You some distinct Frameworks. She's also done. Some really beautiful studies that involve data from millions or even tens of millions of individuals on dating site. So I'm going to share those with you in a moment. But before I
do that, I just want to
paraphrase. Dr. Fisher,
who said that? Sex
drive or desire? That the pursuit of someone to mate with meaning to mate the verb, not necessarily to find a mate.
May be she didn't say definitively but maybe a way to
forage for a potential love partners that the The Arc
of this whole business is really the order that we're describing it, that it's desire,
then love, and
then attachment
and that often times, people can get a
confused. You may know some of these people you may be one of these individuals who might confuse desire for attachment or might
confuse love
for attachment.
That there's a
sequence of recruitment of these neural
circuits that's established. First from the
pursuit of someone to mate with and
she's places in the context of kind of more modern dating themes. Where depending on culture, people might explore
several may be many many individuals before quote-unquote settling down with with somebody at least for some period of time.
I think that's an interesting framework because
Was it circumvents a lot of the frankly unanswerable questions about whether or not you know,
humans were meant to be monogamous or whether or not they
weren't those are conversations that hold cultural context, that hold all
sorts of. Contexts, that really can't be addressed in a laboratory setting,
but this idea that sex drive is a way to forage for potential, love partners. And that love is a kind of a litmus test for whether or not
longer or shorter more.
Attachments can and will form is one that at least makes sense to me later in the episode. We'll talk
about this notion of sex drive and desire. I'll actually talk about some tools that are that have very strong data, really, to support them in terms of things that people can do or take to increase libido, both men and women, because our, there's actually quite good data on that
now, but in the meantime, I want to talk about some of the work that dr. Fisher has done in terms of categorizing people.
People into again. We have four groups. These are distinct
from the ABC and D attachment Styles described earlier,
although as I described them. You might be
able to map them somewhat onto those.
And these four groups are groups that were defined through her studies of people that were or
are, I don't know if they were or if they are still on match.com,
but a very extensive data set. So again, Millions if not tens of
Millions of individuals, the number I heard her quote and I forgive me if this is not accurate is that in upwards of 40 million individuals?
In terms of whether or not they're neurochemical and hormone systems are tuned toward particular types of behaviors. What do I mean by that? Well, both men and women males and females have both testosterone and estrogen. Typically
again, these are
averages but typically men have more testosterone than they do estrogen and they have more testosterone than do women and less estrogen than do women. Typically women have more estrogen than they do testosterone again averages.
And they have less
testosterone than men more estrogen, the men, and so, and so on and so forth,
but both hormone systems are active in
both sets of
individuals. And, of course, all humans. As far as we know manufacturer, both dopamine and serotonin dopamine, as I mentioned earlier, has a number of effects in the brain and body, but one of the primary effects is that it
places us into states of motivation and pursuit for
various things. There is a
Somewhat, close relationship between the dopamine system and the testosterone system in the hypothalamus,
this brain area above the roof of your mouth, and the pituitary
gland, which is responsible for making
hormones, that make the ovaries and, or testes
secrete testosterone or estrogen. So, there's a lot of signaling that occurs such that dopamine in testosterone tend to operate as kind of close cousins in a system of pursuit and conversely.
The serotonin system tends to on average collaborate with the estrogen system to impart certain
physiological functions and behaviors. So these aren't hard and fast or I guess better stated. These aren't
strict, black and white categorizations, but I think those General themes hold. When
you look at the animal and human data, so
dr. Fisher has taken some some Liberties, but I think they are what I would call logically in.
Glee in neurobiologically grounded, Liberties in classifying individuals who are on these dating sites. According to the types of things, they report about themselves. And the type of people they tend to match with on these dating sites and created these four categories categories. The four categories, are she calls one, the dopamine
category. So these are people
who would have high dopamine. And again,
that's just a name.
Doesn't mean they have
low anything else but they are high on the dopamine scale, people who rate high on on the dopamine scale, tend to be
what the scientists and psychologists call High sensation seeking novel, seeking. They like new things. They like spontaneity. They tend to be very adventurous
and I think that's largely true. If you look at it conditions where dopamine is super physiological. It's elevated Beyond. I'm normal
levels. Things like Mania.
Yeah, or when people take certain drugs of abuse
like cocaine or amphetamine, that really raised dopamine levels up very, very high for some period of time. They do tend to increase energy energy
motivation and Novelty seeking, and of course, drugs, like amphetamine and cocaine have all sorts of deleterious effects that I don't need to go into here, but it's worth pointing
out, but they don't tend to make people
calm and relaxed and seek. Soothing
interactions. Conversely the group that dr. Fisher called.
The serotonin group
tend to be more grounded. In soothing activities, quiescent type activities. They actually tend to be on average. They tend to like rules and follow rules. They tend to be
homebodies. This sort of thing. They're really. You can imagine them the sort of
stable types, but they really
like stability. They're not really into spontaneity as much again,
averages, and then she created two other categories, the testosterone category of high test.
Roster own this again could be males or females and then the estrogen
category again could be males or
females and she gave these different names that I won't go into here. You can look up her work
online, but she, you know, the names like the director and and the follower and things like
that, but I don't really want to use those as much as I want to stick to the biological terms. So we have dopamine serotonin testosterone and estrogen. Now that might seem like an unfair kind of over generalization, but
What's interesting is not necessarily the name or the neurochemical system, right? Those could have just been called category, 1, 2, 3 and 4 for all
that that
matters here. What is interesting is seeing how those different groups of individuals that she absolutely can categorize based on their self-reported
preferences about behaviors and certain kinds of interactions
how those groups tend to pair up with people in the
same.
Or opposite categories. So what her studies
reveal is that people that fall into the high sensation
seeking novelty, seeking spontaneity category, the one that she calls the high dopamine category tend to
pair up with at least in the short-term tend to pair up with people who are also in that dopaminergic category. So these would be people that would spontaneously take a trip or explore something new or new restaurant. They tend to be creative and explorative
types.
So that group, on average tends to date and mate and potentially form long-term relationships within
category, again, averages
individuals that she placed into the serotonin group or
the what she hypothesize would be a high serotonin group. Can. They didn't measure serotonin.
But people that tend to place value on stability on rules on certain forms of kind of traditional organization.
At home. And in relationships, those people also tended to pair up with selectdate.
We presume mate with and form stable relationships with people in the same category.
Now, individuals in the other two categories, the high testosterone group and again, testosterone wasn't measured, but she called it the high testosterone group, but these are people that tend to be very directive. They tend to know what they want and are comfortable telling other people.
What they want and from them, these are individuals that in her studies and in other studies tend to be a little bit challenging meaning, they not necessarily challenging to be around, but they tend to challenge other people kind of push them in order to expand their boundaries either for sake of the relationship or just in general. And the people, they tend to push are the people that they pair up with, which are the people in
the estrogen category, what she called. High
estrogen again, they didn't measure estrogen.
But the people in the estrogen category, where the ones that describe themselves and their choices in life and their preferences as being nurturing. They actually seem to like
it. When someone else is making the major decisions, not every decision. They
certainly like to be heard, of course, in terms of their preferences, but that those two types the what she called the
testosterone and the estrogen type tend to pair
up. So why are these
categorizations and these averages? Interesting to me, at least?
Interesting enough to convey to you.
The reason they're interesting to me is again, not because of their names. These molecules were not measured in these individuals, but that they once again, bring us to the themes that we addressed
before
which are the autonomic nervous system and whether or not it tends to be shifted more towards alertness in action, or more towards kind of a stable equilibrium or more towards kind of calm and whether or not individuals are selecting for
Or people who have autonomic nervous systems that are more or less, like there's before they even meet right. So again going back to this seesaw an allergy. It's almost like people who have the kind of flat seesaw alert, but calm but not extremely alert, not extremely overly calm and in situations, but kind of in the middle seem to be seeking out
people that are also at that kind of autonomic equilibrium people in the what she called, the
dopamine category, which
Really can just be described as high sensation seeking novelty seeking. They seem to want to pair with one another. So there's a selection for similar in two of the group's autonomic tone. I find that very interesting because in that decision or that preference for similar autonomic Tone. It essentially eliminates a lot of the, the requirement for figuring out how to match one's autonomic nervous system to another. They
They simply find someone with a similar tendency. Okay, whereas in the other two groups that she called testosterone and estrogen, the director type and the nurturing kind of somewhat follower type. There's a an establishment of balance, but not in the in between two individuals as a match. But rather on the whole in the relationship, one person is kind of
driving the novelty seeking and the course of decisions and actions. And the other person is
essentially agreeing to those
Assuming that those decisions are good for both people
and I emphasized good for both people because one of the themes that dr. Fisher underscores than I'd like to underscore here as well. Is that
It need not be the case that
people pair up. Exactly. According to these categorizations that I've described dopamine with dopamine serotonin, with serotonin testosterone with estrogen. So on
what is important is that there be a recognition and a respect for the other types or a recognition in a respect for the fact that both are of the same type. You could actually imagine for instance that to people of this
High sensation seeking novelty seeking could have a
terrifically
In relationship, but that it actually might be a relationship in with, in which the financial stability isn't quite there or in which the basic stability isn't there.
You could imagine, for instance, a situation in, which a relationship between two people of what she called, the high serotonin preference would have a relationship that was actually kind of dull in which, both of them found themselves,
kind of bored at some point or in which, there wasn't enough of die.
Of the dynamic tension that sometimes is required in order to keep this cycle of Desire love and attachment going something that we will talk about in a
moment. So the point here is not that one should necessarily pair up according to
the these Arrangements that I
described. The point is that on average
that's what tends to happen
and that through a recognition that these categorizations
exist similar to the recognition that the
Type ABC and D infant, and toddler type of attachments exists that we can gain better. Self awareness of
who we are and how we tend to show up in romantic attachments
and thereby navigate healthier, mate, seeking healthier breakups, if the case dictates it, and in some cases, healthy long-term relationships by understanding that the other person can either be similar or complementary to us.
One is neither better than the other it simply the case that in all
romantic attachments
from the initial Inception
of the Romantic attachment desire.
Love and attachment. There is an autonomic coordination.
And of course, there is coordination of all sorts of other things, like, you know, food sex, and sleep, and finances and where people are going to live and many other features. But that at the
core of all, that is a seeking of
Either autonomic likeness or autonomic differences. And I think that recognition can
be extremely valuable in thinking about
tools to enter and maintain relationships. If one thinks about their autonomic nervous system, not simply as something that is driven by external
people and events, but that we can actually gain some control over through
techniques of the sort that I talked about earlier and on previous podcast, but also generally, if we are able to
Just our autonomic nervous system in order
to at least appreciate or get some empathy into what someone else is experiencing. Then we gain actual
cognitive empathy
and this episode isn't about empathy per se, but the theme keeps coming up again and again and I think it's worth mentioning that when you talk to
psychologists whether or not they're psycho analyst or from another source of training, what you
find is that they don't talk about empathy as a general term. They will talk about
Emotional empathy, they'll talk about cognitive empathy and what I'm talking
about here today, is that yet a third category that is very strongly determinant of relationship Dynamics. And that's autonomic empathy. I'm a biologist. I'm not a psychologist. So I love mechanism and
fortunately. There are studies that have been done recently using modern techniques to look at neural mechanisms of
romantic attachment.
I mentioned earlier, some of the brain
Imaging studies.
That have been done on child and
mother literally Imaging the activity of neurons in the
brain as child is
nursing or as a mother is
soothing baby. And as you learned earlier, baby is soothing mother as well. Those are remarkable studies. You may have seen some of these pictures online. You can see the kind of silhouette of the infant and mother and their brains and evens on the brain. Activation patterns, really, really beautiful
studies. Similar Studies have been done in romantic couples with those couples.
Has either touching one another touching and kissing or in kind of clever, I think control experiments of the
person just touching a pillow or something or kissing a pillow in order to try and create the most reasonable control for what are actually pretty complicated interpersonal Dynamics to do in a brain Imaging scanner.
But some of the other studies that have been done recently involved so-called EEG. So these are electrical recordings that are done non-invasively.
Putting a bunch of electrodes on the outside of the
scalp. EEG is useful. In that, you can
do it non-invasively. You can do it in while people are
moving and doing things kissing touching Etc. It doesn't allow one to image or to evaluate
neural activity. Very deeply in the brain. So you
can miss out on a lot of things. It's sort of like looking at the wave
structure on the ocean without actually looking into the depths of the, of the ocean so you can miss certain things, but if you see things,
So generally you trust, they are there but you can't see what you don't see
nonetheless. There are some studies that I'll just point you to and that form the segue for what I'm going to discuss in a moment, which is a study published in scientific reports in 2021 entitled investigating, real life, emotions and romantic couples a mobile
EEG study. So this is as the
title suggests, I think people wear these EEG caps of electrodes.
Get engaged. In very
passionate emotional. Kisses emotional speech toward one, another standing at different distances. So a lot of cool stuff that you can do that. You
really couldn't do in a brain scanner because in a brain scanner people have to be there and usually in a b bar there actually to draw for extra like this. I've been in one of these things. There's not a lot of moving around to be had at least not using the current technology.
In any case, what they found was there is a shift in brain waves, brain
States things.
Like Alpha Waves was just a particular frequency of brain waves in the neocortex, the kind of outer shell of the brain, just beneath the skull,
and in people that are kissing or in people, they're engaged in romantic speech.
Or I didn't actually hear what they said to one another, but what the couple seems exciting romantic and
arousing to them. They see more Alpha wave activity. Compared to the control conditions and there was some what we
call lateralization where the left hemisphere was more active than the
And so forth. And
these studies are important because we know that the autonomic nervous
systems of individuals tend to
start to collaborate and actually
synchronize at the level of heart beats at the level of breathing during romantic interactions of different
kinds. But these studies are some of the first of their kind to start looking at neural
synchronization, between
individuals. Now, the simple version of looking at this
and the
The way I would have got this would all go was
okay to people start kissing. They start talking about what
they find particularly romantic and
arousing for them and their brain waves will just
match to one another, and that's really the basis of romantic attachment and romantic engagement in that sort of thing,
but it turns out that the opposite is true. So a really nice study. Publishing it in a really fine Journal cerebral. Cortex
is a journal that I've known about for many years. They publish strong and
Me physiology in neuroimaging. There's a study that was published first author, kajiura in and this paper really points. Again. This is 2021. And the title of this paper is brain knows who is on the same wavelength resting state connectivity can predict
compatibility of female, male relationship.
Now, what this study did was a little bit different, they looked at the resting or default mode activity of the brain. So rather than
Poked activity, as it's called where people are kissing or engage in some sort of activity.
This was neuroimaging study. Not EEG,
but fmri functional magnetic resonance. Imaging which is similar
to EG in principle, but allows you to look
deep into the brain and it has very good resolution in time and space. So fast events can be monitored and the precise location of those events can be monitored somewhat better than EG. There are exceptions to
So for you, EG years out there EEG,
don't don't come
after me with electrodes. Just understand that fmri
gives you a fuller picture of what's going on. And what cut uemura at all found was that contrary to what your reflexive
prediction might be
people tend to select people that have resting brain states that are different than theirs or
sometimes they found that are actually
The opposite to their own resting brain
State. And you might say, well that doesn't make any sense. I thought this is all about autonomic coordination. But actually, if we go back
to hell and fissures categorizations of the dopamine types, the sensation-seeking types that is
serotonin, the kind
of stable rule
following types testosterone and estrogen types. Remember that the two
categories that she called testosterone, estrogen type the director, and the, and the follower the nurturer, I guess that would be the more accurate way, the director and the
nurture. Those
A pair up across
categories, not within
category. And so, I think what's really needed for this field, which to
my knowledge hasn't happened yet is
to really start to map the neuroanatomical and
neurophysiological findings of, in this case that resting brain state is
in one form in one
individual. And they tend to seek out people whose resting brain state is different than theirs. Not similar.
That needs to be mapped onto the Moor.
Or subjective psychological
categorizations, that Helen Fisher and indeed the gottman's and others have
created the sort of the state of the field. Now and I mention this not to confuse you but to the contrary to illustrate, that it's not
just about finding someone at just like you. And it's not just about finding someone whose opposite to you. This is actually the reason that I decided to become a biologist at some point in my life,
which is that we can find verbal sayings and stories and examples.
To support just about anything. It's this is not a knock on the field of psychology as you can probably tell from today's episode. I have great respect for in reverence for the field of psychology, especially its collaboration with neuroscience and vice versa.
But in the popular culture, we can find examples and sayings that support it essentially,
anything as it relates to a
relationship. For instance. I've heard and you've probably heard absence makes the heart grow fonder. And indeed I've experienced that and I believe it's
true, but I also
So have experienced and I believe to be true that out of sight out of mind, also exist in that there will be a biological mechanism for that. The
point here is that matching of same to same or same two different can both
be effective in creating the
desire. Love attachment
process.
It's a matter of who is looking for same, and who is looking for different and there, I think dr. Fisher and the work of these neurophysiologists and brain. Imagers, really does point in a Direction.
Whereby there is not one form of
attachment that is going to be holy Above All Else and will predict good outcomes.
There is not going to be a case in
which Opposites Attract and that's always the best rule to follow. Sometimes it will sometimes it
won't. There is also not the case that people tend to pair up with similar. Sometimes it will be the case. Sometimes it won't. Now there are
certain statistics that support that statement. For
instance, people on average people pair up.
Up with individuals of
similar educational background income and attractiveness that is true on average but it's not always the case.
And again, a knowledge of
and a respect for the different categorizations of attachment, the
different
categorizations of mate seeking described by Fisher and
others. And the recognition that matching of autonomic nervous systems, but also mismatching of resting state. Brain networks are all at
play in driving what we are calling desire, love and
attachment. So in keeping with the
Duration of the fact that there's a saying or a book, or a song or an example of pretty much any
relationship. Dynamic,
I wanted now talk about an article that came out a little over 10 years ago, that talked about the
universality of love and the ability to fall in
love. So this would be very much in line with the
George Bernard. Shaw? Quote, that I mentioned earlier that love is really overestimating, the differences between individuals.
And again, I should say that is
not something that I personally believe, although, maybe I'm
Just deluding myself. I like to think that the people that we fall in love with our really special for us that they could not easily be replaced with anybody else that simply my stance. I'm not basing that on any hardcore neurobiological mechanism, but nonetheless
an article was published in the New York Times in 2015, that related to some psychological studies that were done as well as some clinical work as well as some
I would, I would call pop psychology or things that fall outside that the domains of academic science.
And the whole basis of this article was 36 questions that lead to love. And it involved a listing
out. Indeed of 36 questions, set
divided into set 1, set 2 and set three that progress from somewhat ordinary questions about life experience and self-reports two more.
Let's call them deep questions about
people's values and things that are emotionally close to them. And I'll just give an example of a few of these. You can find this easily online by just putting into the your search engine 36 questions that lead to love some of the questions in set. Number one were for instance. What would constitute a perfect day for you? For what in your life. Do you feel most grateful kind of standard questionnaire
stuff in set to what is your most treasured memory was your most terrible memory. So these are
Until our drilling a little bit deeper, into one's personal experience, and emotional system.
And then set three questions. 25 through 36 are things, you know, what is a very embarrassing moment in your
life. When did you last cry in front of another person? And by yourself?
What is something that's too serious to be joked about. So it's going deeper into one's emotional system and even questions, like, of all the people in your family,
who's death?
Would you find most disturbing and why so pretty, pretty heavy stuff there at the end. Now, the
reason this article got so much traction in. The reason I'm bringing up today is that there was a statement that was made in and around this article that if two people
Went on a date
or simply sat down and asked each other. These questions and each answer these questions, and
the other
was paying attention carefully and
at some level emotionally responding or not
responding, but certainly paying attention to the answers of the other
person that by the end of that exchange where one person asks,
36, questions in the other person answers all 36. And then the other person,
All 36 in the other person answers, all 36 that they would fall in love, right? Which seems like a kind of a ridiculous thing.
And yet it is the case that people who go through this exercise report feeling as if they know the other person, quite well and feeling certain levels of attachment or even love and desire for the other person that they were would not have predicted. Scuse me would not have predicted. Had they not gone through.
That
process. So, what's going on in this exchange of questions and answers of a progressively more emotional and deep level.
Well, what I predict is going on, is that inside of that exchange people are creating a sort of delusional story about the
nature of the exchange, being a reflection of some deeper
attachment. And so even though people are just exchanging words. They're not physically touching.
They are not at least, not at the point where there?
These kinds of questionnaire studies, they may touch afterwards for all I know and probably did in some cases
but they're not exchanging life experience in
an immediate way. They're not actually going off into the world and doing things together yet.
They are simply exchanging narrative, but we know, based on recent studies, and I've covered this before on
this podcast, but I'll mention again. There was
a study published in cell reports, a cell, Press Journal, excellent Journal showing that.
That when individuals listen to the same narrative, their heart rates tend to
synchronize or at least follow a very
similar pattern, even if they're not in the same room
listening to a given narrative,
whereas in this case people are facing one another listening to the narratives of each other. Certainly, they are having autonomic responses. And it stands to reason that their autonomic nervous systems are synchronizing much in the same way that the cell report study found that people will synchronize their autonomic nervous systems to a
Shared heard story from another. In other
words, whether or not we hear a story, watch a movie, listen to a song or exchange our own individual stories. Our autonomic nervous systems have the potential
to map onto one another.
So I'm not all that surprised that people find that they fall in
love in quotes
after answering these questions to one another. Because essentially the way these questions are laid out, is they establish a narrative. They established a very
The Narrative and the other person is listening, very closely and we don't have physiological
or brain Imaging studies, to,
to support what I'm about to say, but the the reasonable
interpretation is that that's causing some sort of autonomic
synchronization. So, if you want to try this on a date, or even
it's actually been hypothesized. That this could be useful for existing couples,
even if they already know the answers to some of these questions. And that doesn't surprise me either. I think the autonomic coordination is present during
Mating behavior. Its present during shared experience of the outside world movies,
concerts watching. One's children with somebody else
etcetera and it's established by
sharing one's own Narrative of their own personal experience.
So I don't want to seem overly reductionist. I'll never proposed
that all of our sensation, perception action and experience in life, boils down to us, just being bags of chemicals and the action of those chemicals or any aspect of our nervous system. And yet,
Get
in looking across the psychological literature of
development of attachment, in the psychological literature of adult and romantic attachment and what makes and breaks. Those attachments. It's very clear to me and I
think courses through the literature at multiple levels that autonomic coordination is absolutely
key for the establishment of Desire love and attachment. In fact, I talked earlier about how our actual conception is born out of autonomic.
Even of one sort or another.
So again, it doesn't necessarily mean the autonomic nervous system is
always be synchronized. In the case of the to categorizations that fisher, proposed of the director / testosterone, type in the, the nurturing
follower / estrogen type. It was actually the coordination. But in opposite directions
of individuals that fall into each of those categories that led to more stable attachments, or the seeking out of those,
Attachments, that you would say.
But nonetheless, it's at least to my mind, very clear that autonomic coordination is a Hallmark feature of desire,
a Hallmark feature of what we call
love and a Hallmark feature
of what we call attachment and that the breaking of attachments or the failure has of Desire, the failures of love and the failures of attachment overtime in line with the work of gottman and others and in even just simply what's
Wired for mating behavior
is also
reflected in the autonomic nervous system. But in that case, a failure to coordinate the autonomic nervous systems in some sort of concerted way any
discussion about desire
love and attachment would be incomplete if we didn't talk about the dreaded infidelity and cheating. Much has been made of infidelity and cheating and whether or not people who are higher on dopamine and sensation-seeking tend to cheat more or less.
Frankly. I don't think there's any solid evidence for that.
That
I think there are a lot of examples that we can draw from in our own lives and in the lives of others, that would generally support one or the other model, but I'm not aware
of any decent
physiological studies or psychological studies. That really point to that, for instance. I
would never say that
the serotonergic phenotype as described by Fisher is less prone to cheat or that the, you know, people who have an insecure attachment or more likely to cheat. It says,
For instance. I don't think those correlations have been drawn in any kind of meaningful way yet. So I would be cautious about assigning them without that evidence. However, there are some
interesting studies involving again, neuroimaging
and some subjective measures in humans. Meaning asking them questions that there are good ways to tease out, lies from truths and in these sorts of studies,
and whether or not people tend to find their partner.
Or others more or less attractive, depending on how
people feel about themselves.
And I think this is a very
interesting aspect to desire, love and attachment. For the following
reason.
You hear a lot out there that, you know, in
order to form a really strong
relationship. You have to have a good relationship with yourself or you have to love yourself or you often hear for instance, that you know, it's exactly when you're not looking for a relationship that you're going to find what you hear this stuff. Right?
But none of that is really grounded in any studies. Again, that's like out of sight,
out of mind or absence makes the heart
grow fonder. There are many life examples to support those.
Statements and their many
life examples to support statements to the
opposite.
There's a particular study that I found. This was published in
Frontiers in Psychology, but it's a
experimental study, that involves neuroimaging the title. This study is manipulation of self-expansion Alters
responses to attractive alternative partners,
and I love the design of the study. What they did in this study is they took couples and they evaluated members of that relationship for what's called self-expansion now self-expansion.
Metric that involves one's perception of self as seen through
the relationship to the other. And this is something that was developed by the
authors are Aaron and
Aaron, so they have the same last name. So, I'm assuming this was either a sibling team or somehow related team were romantic couple team Aro, n and Aro, n
Erin and Aaron in 1986 proposed, the self-expansion
model of close.
And
chips and they propose that people are motivated to enter relationships. I'm reading here in order to enhance the
self and increase. Self-efficacy.
In other words that one of the
reasons why many people enter relationships
is that it makes us feel good about ourselves and more capable. And I
would see that as a healthy interdependence, not necessarily codependence.
This is especially strong at the beginning
of a relationship. It turns out
when people are forming pair bonds, and it's the case that pleasure arousal and
Again, all Hallmark features of autonomic nervous system function. Pleasure arousal and excitement. Give rise to self-expansion meaning to self-efficacy. So what this self-expansion model is really about is how great other people that we are close to in
romantically attached, you can potentially make us feel
in terms of what they say. In terms of what they do, in terms of the way in which we believe they feel about us
So it doesn't necessarily have to involve explicit
statements of them telling us how great we are or them doing great gestures for us. But how we actually feel, they feel about us
turns out to be a very strong parameter in terms of how we
feel about ourselves and the relationship
overall. Now, some of you out there are probably thinking oh, yeah isn't there this thing up the Love
Languages, right? I don't have any Neuroscience to support that. I think the Love Languages. I'm not super familiar with this. I didn't list it out, but that some people are
Yeah, their autonomic nervous system. If you will tend to be very responsive to gifts or to Quality Time or to physical touch or acts of kindness. I think I've got a few of these, right? I probably have a few wrong. Anyway, they're easy to find online.
And people do tend to have a kind of a biased
toward two or three of these things that are, especially meaningful for them. And when I hear meaningful, I hear they tend to push the autonomic nervous system and neurochemical systems of the brain and body in a direction that makes us feel good as opposed to lousy or neutral.
In any event, this study looked at whether or not people have high levels of self
expansion through the actions or statements of their significant
other and how that influences, their perception of people outside the relationship, meaning, how
attractive they perceive people outside, the relationship, to be
turns out to be strongly influenced by a, whether or not they're self-expansion.
Very strongly driven by the other person that they are involved with that. They're in the Romantic relationship with and whether or not that's being
expressed to them. So, here's how the study went.
First of all, they rated or
categorized individuals, on the basis of the self-expansion metric. Some people have more of a
potential to experience self-expansion through others. Write, some of us feel great about ourselves and we're kind of topped off at the others, don't feel so great about themselves, but
But they can feel much better in response to praise and particular, praise or self-expansion type behaviors, are statements from people that we really care about, and still other people
are a mixture of the two, the kind of moderate levels of both.
So they rated them on the scale and then they had people experience, self-expansion
narratives. They heard their significant other say, really terrific
things about them and about the relationship in particular, that the
relationship that they have was
exciting novel and
challenging. So that was one
Myself expansion and they went into some detail as to why that was the case in their particular
relationship. Or they heard a narrative from us from their significant other about
strong feelings of love between the two that had been experienced previously in the
relationship. So, in the one case, it sort of directed more towards them. And in the other case,
it's more about the relationship itself.
And then they did brain Imaging of one
person in the relationship. While that person assess the attractiveness of
S of people outside the relationship
and what they found was that people who were primed for this self-expansion had lower activation of brain areas associated with assessing others, attractiveness, then did the people
who experienced a lot of self-expansion.
Now, the takeaway from
that, at least the way I read this study is
if you're with somebody who really benefits from or experiences a lot of self expansion.
Unless you really want them
to pay attention to the attractiveness of other people. It
stands to reason that they would benefit from more
self-expansion type gestures or statements. Okay,
not so much centered on the
relationship. We have such a great relationship. There's so much love. It's so great
that too, but in the context of this study in these findings that the person is really terrific, that the relationship that they've created together, is
really exciting novel
and challenging that there's a narrative around the
Ship that really has a lot to do with the Dynamics between the individuals in particular, that the person who really likes self-expansion is vital to that Dynamic. Okay, so it's not looking down at the relationship as a set of equals. There is sort of this bias written into this of that. This person is really essential for the relationship. I'm not saying this is something that anyone has to do. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. This is just what the data say,
but what's remarkable is that, in the absence of those statements?
People who have or that rate high on this scale of self expansion, rate attractive, alternative Partners as more attractive. Now, that's interesting to me because it means that their actual perception
of others is changing.
It's not that their opportunity to
see others is changing, right? This is not a matter of them.
Somehow, getting access or no access
to attractive alternative Partners again, attractive alternative Partners, literally the language in the title of this paper
there. Still.
Seeing all these Attractive people. It's just that if they're feeling filled
up in air quotes, psychologically, filled up, emotionally filled up,
autonomically, filled,
enhanced in the language that we're using today. By The self-expansion
Narrative will, then the same set of attractive faces appear less
attractive to a given individual.
Now, whether or not this predicts cheating or loyalty, I certainly
can't say that would be very hard to assess in it in neuroimaging.
Aging and they're of course, people
rarely if ever report
accurately. They're cheating Behavior. There's some studies in which confidentiality is assured to the point where people seem to be more trusting and willing to reveal cheating Behavior. But if you look at the statistics on cheating Behavior, it's very hard to track because people lie all the time about their cheating in and outside of the context of psychological and neuroimaging studies, but
I find this study again, the title
Elation, of self-expansion Alters responses to attractive alternative Partners to be absolutely fascinating. Because, again, it points to the fact that the interactions with
our significant others
shapes, our autonomic arousal shapes, our perception
of self
and thereby shapes. Our perception of other potential
Partners in the outside
world, or shuts us down to the potential of other people in the outside world. So when I hear statements such as it's important that you love yourself in order to
Lee fall in love with somebody else or it is when one is not looking for a relationship that they're
most likely to fall in love and form a stable relationship.
I can filter that through these findings to say that it's really the person who needs a lot of self-expansion, stimulating statements or actions coming from other people. That is most prone to seeing
Other potential Partners
out in the world as attractive.
And in this sense, we can return to the autonomic nervous system is kind of a kind of a glass that it can be filled up through various contexts. It can be filled up through our own ability to regulate it.
It can be filled up
through other people's ability to enhance our sense of well-being and in some sense this points to an idea where it is true that the better that we can feel about ourselves in the absence of
any self-expansion.
Input from somebody else
really does place on more stable ground. Such that when we do receive
that, praise, or we do receive those acts of kindness or service or physical touch, or whatever. They are
that we are able to, to further
enhance the way that we feel,
but that we don't necessarily tether all of our feelings of self-worth or self-expansion to that one individual. So you might think that if person a can only receive the self-expansion,
From the statements from the
action of the person they're involved with person be that that will form a very
stable Bond. But what this study points to is the fact that that's a very
unstable bond that person a is actually very susceptible to the attractiveness of others because they're so desperately attached to this notion of self expansion, even if they don't realize it. And
so this really does point to the idea that while it is important to link our autonomic
nervous systems to establish desire,
love and attachment.
That we want to have a stable,
internal representation of ourselves a stable, autonomic nervous system to some degree or another so that we can be
in
stable romantic partnership with another individual. If that's what we're really trying to
do. So, until now, I've been weaving together studies from the field of experimental
psychology and the fields of Neuroscience and particular neuroimaging. But if you recall back to the very beginning of the episode, when I was discussing, how
ow, odors and how hormones and how even birth control can shape people's ratings of attractiveness of others,
you'll realize that there's a deeper layer to
all this, which is that
our biology that resides below our conscious
awareness things like our hormones, things like pheromones, even are shaping the way that
we choose interpret and
Act with other potential romantic Partners or the Romantic partners that we already
have. Now, this cannot be
overemphasized. All right,
no matter how much we would like to create a sort of top-down
description, meaning from the cortex in our
understanding of things
onto what we find attractive, who we find attractive, what we enjoy, what? We don't enjoy in the pursuit and romantic interactions with others.
There, always seems to be an
Indeed, there always is a deeper layer in
which our subconscious processing drives us to find a particular person to be particularly attractive or
in which we have chemistry with
somebody or in which we lack chemistry with
somebody. And I would say that one of the more exciting fascinating and indeed mysterious aspects
of Desire. Love and attachment, are those subconscious processes? Those things that we
Chemistry,
right? I mean, people will report for instance, that somebody smell is just absolutely positively intoxicating for them or that somebody smell is absolutely
repulsive to them. And they don't know why that the
taste of someone's breath. And I don't mean that in any kind of poetic sense. I literally
mean the taste of somebody's breath in. Some cases can be very exciting to somebody and believe or not. We can taste each other's breath. I talked about this in the chemical sensing.
Showed
some months back, but we actually have receptors for taste and smell that engaging coordinated action such that we can't really separate taste and
smell at some level. And this is especially true when it comes to the formation of romantic relationships. And what we call Chemistry now is chemistry.
Absolutely required for forming, stable attachments for love. And for desire. No, of course, they're not but in general,
These are primitive mechanisms that exist in all animals. They exist in special forms in humans, but that they drive us toward behaviors that will
As the theory goes lead to
love and attachment, not always as dr. Fisher pointed out, that
sex. And sex drive is one way to
explore potential, love relationships and to explore potential attachments, which of course, are major Investments that extend. Well beyond, you know, one night or a week or a vacation or even a year when we talk about stable attachments in general that means long-term attachments in humans. Now,
there is a biology
to
Of that chemistry stuff and the studies of oral
contraception and Men, finding women, more attractive at certain phases of their menstrual cycle and women finding men more attractive at certain
phases of the woman's, menstrual
cycle point to the incredible
power of those deeper biological mechanisms.
In the huberman lab podcast, I discussed
both science and science based tools. And so I'd be remiss if I didn't actually cover some of the tools that relate to those deeper biological
mechanisms, how
the hormones testosterone and estrogen are almost always the first
biological chemicals and hormones. That are mentioned in described and explored when thinking about desire and love and attachment to, for that matter since
Attachment stem from desire.
I did an entire episode about the
biology of testosterone. And estrogen, and ways to optimize testosterone and estrogen, you can easily find that episode at huberman, lab.com., It's
time-stamped there. You can find, all sorts of
information about how certain behaviors or absence of behaviors drive up or down testosterone and estrogen. I also dispel some myths about sexual behavior and things like masturbation and
How they relate to testosterone and estrogen, as well as some myths about how those hormones change across the lifespan. I also talked about the role of exercise. I talked about supplementation, and I also talked a little bit about hormone replacement therapy. Although that will be the topic for a future episode. So if you're
interested in the biology of testosterone and estrogen to hormones that absolutely
influence things like libido and desire, please check out that episode as well as what I'm going to talk about in just a moment here. The
Stereotyped version of the hormones testosterone and estrogen are that testosterone drives libido or increases. It AKA sex drive and that estrogen somehow blunted or is not involved in libido and sex drive and that is simply not
the case. As I described in that
testosterone and estrogen optimization episode and is I'll tell you
now. Yes, testosterone and some of its other forms. Like the Hydra testosterone are strongly
related to
IB, do and sex drive in the pursuit and ability to mate. However,
the hormone estrogen
is also strongly associated with libido, and mating behavior
so much. So that for people that either chemically or for some other reason have
very low estrogen libido can severely suffer. So it's a coordinated dance of estrogen and testosterone in both males and females that leads to libido or sex drive. So I absolutely want to
Clear. That it's not a simple relationship between testosterone and sex drive, or estrogen, and sex drive, both are required at appropriate ratios.
Now, with that said, there are things that can shift
libido in both men and women
in the direction of more
desire or more desire to mate, either to seek mates or to mate, with existing
partners, and there's a
A quite solid literature around a
few of those substances. Now, a common
misconception is that because dopamine is
involved in motivation and drive
that simply increasing dopamine
through any number of different mechanisms or tools will increase libido and sex drive. And that's simply not the case
either. It is true that some
level of dopamine or increase in dopamine is required for increases.
In libido, however, because of dopamine's relationship to the autonomic nervous system and because the autonomic nervous system is so intimately involved. No pun
intended in sexual
activity in seeking an actual mating behavior. As I described earlier. It's
actually the case that if people drive their dopamine system too high, they will be in states of arousal that are high enough such that they seek and
want
sexual activity, but they can't actually engage the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system sufficient to become physically aroused.
Now, there's a whole description of this that awaits
us, in a future episode, but
I'll summarize Now by saying for people that are taking substances just simply to increase dopamine in order to increase libido
that can be a potentially hazardous route to follow because
Depending on whether or not that dopamine level is high enough that it puts them into a mode of seeking
mates or mating,
but they can't adjust their autonomic nervous system during actual mating behavior. What essentially is I'm saying is it can place people into a chronic Pursuit, but an inability to perform
sexually, and this is true for men and women. Okay, so I would just caution people against just thinking, oh, a lack of libido is simply a lack of dopamine. That is
Not the case. It could be from lower levels of dopamine, but it could also be for other reasons.
And so these systems, the signaling systems and these neuro chemicals are very intricate and just simply ramping up, dopamine has actually been
found for instance in and feta mean and cocaine users. There is a phenomenon which they become
hyper aroused but can't perform. Sexually. This is also true for people who take elevated levels of
other recreational drugs or who take antidepressants.
That increase the dopamine system too much, right? Dosage has to be worked out with your physician, with your psychiatrist, such that,
you know, mood is enhanced and the various aspects of healthy well-being, mind and body are enhanced. But not so much. So that that what we call the arousal Arc is locked with the Seesaw in the sympathetic Drive position, such that sexual arousal can't occur.
Okay. So this is a, an important point to make. Because I think that a lot of
People are under the impression that if they
just drive up testosterone increased dopamine and generally get themselves into high states of autonomic arousal that that's going to increase the libido. That's simply not the way, the system works. It's that seesaw in that see-sawing back and
forth. That is the Arc
of arousal that we talked about earlier.
Now, there are substances legal over-the-counter substances that fall under
the category ization of
supplements that do indeed.
Increase libido and arousal.
And so I'm going to talk about some of those in the context of peer-reviewed literature. Now,
I want to be clear. However, that these are by no means
required, many people have healthy libidos or have libidos that are healthy for their
life and what they need and want. And as always in any discussion about supplementation. You absolutely have to check
with your physician. I don't just say that to protect us. I say that to
protect you, your health and well-being is dependent on you doing certain things and not doing others. And
Buddy is different. Nonetheless. There are studies that point to specific substances that are sold over the counter that at least in the United States are legal and that have been shown to be statistically significant in increasing measures of libido. There are many such substances, but three that in particular have good peer reviewed research to support them are Maka
Mac a which is actually a root
tone got
Ali. Also, sometimes called long Jack, I didn't name them forgive me and Tribulus or Tribulus. It's sometimes called I'm going to talk
about each of these in sequence. But
on the whole, the studies on Maka are quite convincing that consumption of 2 to 3 grams per day of maca,
which generally is sold as a powder or a capsule.
Typically consumed early in the day
because it can be
Of a stimulant meaning, it can increase alertness, and you wouldn't want it to interfere with sleep by taking it too late in the day,
but in studies, that include both men and women of durations anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks of athletes and non-athletes and different variations of maca. Turns out there's black, Maka, red, Maka, yellow. Maka, they're a bunch of different forms of Makkah, but that they can increase subjective reports of sexual.
All desire independent of hormone
systems. Meaning it does not seem at least based on the existing literature that
Maca increases
testosterone or changes estrogen at least not on the timescales of these studies were done or with the measures that were performed in these studies,
but that Maka again
consumed in doses of anywhere from 2 to 3 grams per day, has been shown to significantly increase libido.
And in fact,
Those dosages of Makkah have been shown to offset so-called SSS or I induced sexual dysfunction. So there are various routes
to sexual dysfunction.
The ssris are selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors.
They go by name brands, like Prozac and Zoloft. And there are many others
now on generic forms and so forth. Those don't
always, I should point out lead to sexual dysfunction. There's a
dose-dependent. Some people do quite well on
Ssris and don't have any issues with sexual function. Other people suffer quite a lot from sexual dysfunction, while taking ssris
highly variable. You need to work with
physician a qualified psychiatrist, but nonetheless,
everything I've been saying about Makkah. Thus far has also been
explored in the context of SSRI and do sexual dysfunction. The
paper that I referring to here is a double-blind randomized, pilot dose finding study of maca,
root.
It goes by the name. L. My any these always have fancy names in the Latin names in biology are always cut more complicated, but it's maca root
for the management of SSRI and do sexual dysfunction. First author, is door. Ding dor D ing. This was a study done at Mass general,
which is one of the satellite locations around. Harvard Harvard
Med, is associated with Harvard Med, that found significant improvements in libido when people were taking a pretty low.
It was actually in this case, just 1.5 grams per day up to a
high dose, three grams per day
of Makkah and they were doing this in 20 remitted. Depressed. Outpatients of these are people that had
depression. Their Depression was successfully treated with ssris, but they were suffering from some of
these SSRI related sexual effects and Maka seem to offset some of those effects significantly in this population. The other studies
exploring the lack of effect on serum testosterone.
And in what in adult healthy men was a 12-week. Study, again consuming anywhere from 1 Point
5 to 3 million milligrams, meaning one, excuse
me, 1,500 milligrams to 3000 mg or Placebo. So again, this is 1.5 up to 3 grams of Makkah or Placebo and they raided
sexual desire depression and
other measures such as testosterone in the blood. Again, no change in testosterone or
estrogen estrogen.
All levels in men, treated with Makkah and those treated with
Placebo. But nonetheless, there was a significant
and positive effect on libido with this dosage of 1.5 to 3 grams per day.
Maka? And there are several other
studies that also show this again in people that are taking us or ssris and people that are not taking ssris and in chronically over
trained athletes. This was also found to be the case. So it seems like across the board.
Maca is a fairly useful
supplement for those that are seeking to increase their libido. And there are
fewer studies involving women, but there are a
few such studies that also point to the same general positive effect on libido in women, taking Maca at equivalent doses. To those. I just described, I think it's noteworthy. That Maka supplementation, does not seem to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels to any significant degree, but it does change libido. I think that
To the fact that there are multiple systems in the brain and body that influence, libido, not just testosterone and
estrogen, and indeed. We know that
to be the case, things like Peña, which is a substance found in chocolate. And is a substance that some people supplement is known for instance, to increase sexual
desire, but also the perception of sexual experiences as
more stimulating for instance. So there are a lot of Pathways in the brain, in particular in the hypothalamus, this ancient area of our brain.
That Harbors
neurons and
hormone secreting cells, including neurons that can shape our perceptions of our even just are tactile experience of others and their attractiveness and indeed can shift levels of
Desire. Independent of changing levels of circulating
hormones. Another substance that has been shown to increase libido. Across a range of human. Populations is so
called tone. Got Ali. I've talked a little bit about this before.
Or on the human Lab podcast in reference to testosterone. And I've talked about it extensively as a guest on other podcasts.
Tonga Ali, goes by a number of different names. One of them is exceedingly difficult for me to pronounce its Yuri, coma longifolia. Also called long Jack, but Tonga Ali is the typical name. This is an herb. There's a Malaysian version and an Indonesian version. My understanding is that the Indonesian variety of Tonga. Ali is the
one that is most potent
for its effects on libido.
Previously. I've talked about tone, golly taken in 400 mg per day capsules, as a means to increase the amount of free, meaning, Unbound testosterone. So
testosterone has a both
bound form in an Unbound form. Very briefly. The bound form is bound to albumin in the blood or to so-called sex hormone-binding globulin when it's bound. It can't
The biologically active at many cells. It is
important that some of it be
bound in order to get a sort of time
release and and proper distribution of testosterone through the body. But is the Unbound
free testosterone that can really have its most potent
effects. And there's some evidence that Tonga Ally can increase the amount of Unbound, so-called free testosterone by
lowering sex hormone-binding globulin. Although it is
almost certain that it has other
routes of mechanism as well.
Nonetheless.
There are some reports of Tonga Ali increasing libido. One particular article last author, or I
should say last name
of the first author. Scuse me. This male is Mal. This was published in a in evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine is from 2012. Reports a significant increase in libido and sexual function. There are other such studies and not a lot of them, not as many robust.
Controlled quality, peer reviewed studies, as there are from Makkah, nonetheless, a number of people men and women that I know do
take Tonga Ali and it seems to work well for them. The
question, always comes up around discussion of supplements. Do you need to cycle these things? The only way
to determine that is really to do your blood. Work, monitor, liver enzymes, honor hormone levels, and so forth. So I simply can't say whether or not you need to, or you don't need to cycle them.
Typically Tonga
Ali and Maja are
not
Cycled in any regular kind of way that I'm aware of. But again, you really need to
check with your doctor. If you're
going to initiate taking any of these things
and you certainly should do your best to monitor. Your blood work as well as subjective measures in evaluating whether or not. They're working for you say, for you and so
forth. The third and final substance / supplement
that I want to touch on as it relates to libido
is called Tribulus terrestris. So that's TR. IB u l u s--
interests is TE RRS.
TR is this is a commonly sold over-the-counter supplement for increasing
testosterone for you know
Fitness purposes and so on whether or not it actually does that to a meaningful degree isn't clear, but I'm aware of for peer-reviewed studies that we're focused on both males and females ranging anywhere from 18 years old. All the
We up to
65. Plus they say 65 plus. I guess it could be seven. You could be 80. I don't know,
but a fairly broad age range, where people took anywhere from 750 milligrams per day, divided into three equal doses. So 750 total per day divided into three equal doses of Tribulus or Placebo for 120 days. This particular study was focused on females and according to
The female sexual function index questionnaire, no significant difference between any of the groups, however, free and bioavailable testosterone increased in the group taking Tribulus terrestris. Total testosterone did not reach
statistical significance. So,
there's a sort of the inverse of what we see with Maka where there
do seem to be increases in testosterone,
which would predict that there would be increase in libido. In this case, in this was postmenopausal women. There was no increase in libido. There
was an
In testosterone, I mention it only because there might be instances in which people want to increase their testosterone. It does seem that Tribulus. At least in that population is capable of doing that.
Now, there's a separate study that was done a double blind study lasting anywhere from one to six months. That had a clear and significant increase in libido. Now this was taking six grams. So that sticks. 6,000 milligrams of Tribulus root for
60 days
and it did.
Seemed to increase various aspects of sexual function.
And there was a what appeared to be a substantial 16.3 percent increase in testosterone, but in this particular study because of the variability across individuals that did not
actually arrive at statistical significance.
Now, there were a number of other studies that explored the role of Tribulus in particular in females. And one of those studies was a study that was actually quite short. It was two to four weeks and involved 67 subjects. These were
Objects that had experienced a loss of libido and took Tribulus divided into two equal doses compared that to Placebo and they did see a significant Improvement in
these measures of sexual desire and function on this female sexual function index.
So there is some evidence that Tribulus can be effective in increasing
testosterone in certain
populations in increasing sexual desire and
function in certain populations in particular
in females. I think more studies are certainly
Needed. But these three substances / supplements, Maka, Tonga Ally in particular, Indonesian Tonga, Ali and Tribulus can indeed create significant increases in sexual
desire. And in some cases B, adjusting the testosterone and estrogen system. In some cases, not by adjusting the testosterone and estrogen
system. Again, pointing to the complexity
of neurochemicals and features. That adjust things like libido egg.
A desire, so we covered a lot of material today related to desire love and attachment. And yet I
acknowledge that it is not
exhaustive of the vast landscape. That is the psychology and biology of Desire. Love and attachment nonetheless.
I hope that you found the information interesting
and hopefully actionable in some cases toward the relationships of your past of present and potentially for the relationships of your future,
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huberman Lab podcast, we discussed supplements.
Well, supplements aren't necessary or appropriate for everybody. Many people drive
tremendous benefit from them for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing Focus
or as discussed today, for enhancing libido and desire. If you want to see the supplements that I take, you can go to Thorn that's th OU our any.com the letter U / hubermann and there, you can get 20% off any of the supplements that I take and if you navigate deeper into the thorn site through that portal
thorn.com.,
Are you / hubermann, you
can also get 20% off
any of the other supplements that thorn
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supplements and the Precision of the amounts of those supplements.
Thank you for joining me. For today's discussion about desire love and attachment and last but certainly not least.
Thank you for your interest in science.
