Helen Fisher - Ted Talks about love Flashcards
Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth.
We found activity in a tiny, little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells, cells that actually make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and spray it to many brain regions. Indeed, this part, the VTA, is part of the brain’s reward system. It’s way below your cognitive thinking process. It’s below your emotions. It’s part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine.
But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high. Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about another human being. Somebody is camping in your head. And the obsession can get worse when you’ve been rejected.
You know, when you’ve been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life – but no, you just love them harder. That brain system – the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus – becomes more active when you can’t get what you want. In this case, life’s greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner.
Romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive. Not the sex drive - the sex drive gets you looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual.
I think of all the poetry that I’ve read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato over 2,000 years ago. He said, “The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need, it is an urge, it is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.”
I’ve also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.
It has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it’s got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more, and more, and more; withdrawals; and last: relapse.
Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.
How is technology changing love? I’m going to say almost not at all. I study the brain. I and my colleagues have put over 100 people into a brain scanner – people who had just fallen happily in love, people who had just been rejected in love and people who are in love long-term. And it is possible to remain “in love” long-term.
And I’ve long ago maintained that we’ve evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love and feelings of deep cosmic attachment to a long-term partner. And together, these three brain systems – with many other parts of the brain – orchestrate our sexual, our romantic and our family lives.
But they lie way below the cortex, way below the limbic system where we feel our emotions, generate our emotions. They lie in the most primitive parts of the brain, linked with energy, focus, craving, motivation, wanting and drive. In this case, the drive to win life’s greatest prize: a mating partner. They evolved over 4.4 million years ago among our first ancestors, and they’re not going to change if you swipe left or right on Tinder.
Even dating sites are not changing love. These are not dating sites, they are introducing sites. When you sit down in a bar, in a coffee house, on a park bench, your ancient brain snaps into action like a sleeping cat awakened, and you smile and laugh and listen and parade the way our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. We can give you various people – all the dating sites can – but the only real algorithm is your own human brain. Technology is not going to change that.
Technology is also not going to change who you choose to love. I study the biology of personality, and I’ve come to believe that we’ve evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving, linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen systems.
But technology is producing one modern trend that I find particularly important. It’s associated with the concept of paradox of choice. For millions of years, we lived in little hunting and gathering groups. You didn’t have the opportunity to choose between 1,000 people on a dating site. In fact, I’ve been studying this recently, and I actually think there’s some sort of sweet spot in the brain; I don’t know what it is, but apparently, from reading a lot of the data, we can embrace about five to nine alternatives, and after that, you get into what academics call “cognitive overload,” and you don’t choose any.
