The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment

Andrew Huberman 0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. (instrumental music plays) 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 given day. And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss almost certainly were 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 caregivers 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 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 we're 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 continue to include the elements of desire and love over time or not.

Andrew Huberman 2:59 In order 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 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 pre-ovulatory 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 bidirectional effect. 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. They actually had these men divided into groups, it was more of a continuum rather, 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 pre-ovulatory phase of the cycle seems to create a bidirectional, 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 not, 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 preferred the odors of more symmetrical men during the pre-ovulatory phase of their cycle. Now, I want to make sure that it's especially clear that it is not the case that oral contraception 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, pre-ovulatory, non pre-ovulatory, and we have, uh, 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, I don't know, how they look, uh, their skin, their hair, et cetera. 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. (laughs) Uh, 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- would- would and should be a very high priority in selecting a mate, that if they d- if someone does not like the way that person smells, their innate body odor, independent of colognes and perfumes and soaps, et cetera, that that's often a complete and total deal breaker. I'm sure there are some of you that can relate to that, and there's some of you, um, perhaps for which that is not the case, and you can't even imagine that being such a powerful variable. And yet the data suggests that indeed it is a powerful variable for many people

Andrew Huberman 8:04 out there. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Thesis. Thesis makes custom nootropics. Now, nootropics is not a word that I'm usually a fan of, because nootropic means smart drug. And there are a lot of different aspects to being smart or to intelligence. There's the ability to focus, there's the ability to task switch, there's the ability to be creative. And each of those different forms of intelligence or expressions of intelligence involves different brain circuits, different neurochemicals, and indeed different hormones in the body. So, I think it's rather naive to think that there could be one smart drug or nootropic. 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Andrew Huberman 14:13 Let's talk about desire, love, and attachment. And 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, so-called familial love. There's love of pets. We can even love objects, or 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 i- 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, or 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-term 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 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 dependence or interdependence between individuals, 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 1900s, it was thought that love and desire were on sort of opposing ends, or in kind of a push-pull. And it was the dynamic push and pull between love and a... and 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, meaning 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 over 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 a relationship or not. I'd like to begin 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 end in divorce. I think it's about 50% with a slight skew toward more ending in divorce than, um, 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. Um, it did not scare me o- out of, uh, relationships, nor did it scare me (laughs) 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 that 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 breaks in attachments, and indeed what can lead to reattachments.

Andrew Huberman 19:01 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. What I mean by that are field studies and laboratory studies in primates of different kinds, such as macaque monkeys or bonobos. Um, people have looked at these sorts of things, believe it or not, in ducks, in laboratory mice, in different types of birds, etc. And if 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, uh, 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, the 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 and 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 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, um, mate seeking. Levels of vasopressin in prairie voles are strongly determinant of whether or not a prairie vole is going to be monogamous or non-monogamous. Now 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 a 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 mechanisms 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 we just sort of lean back and look at the giant mass of studies in animals and their, uh, 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, um, 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 we're mainly going to focus on those studies today, and where appropriate, we will map those findings back to the findings in animals to see if there's some universal truths or some universal principles about how the neural circuits and biological 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

Andrew Huberman 22:06 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 was 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 psychologists. I spoke to a psychoanalyst, I spoke to a cognitive behavioral psychologist, and I actually spoke to a psychiatrist, excuse me, not a psychologist, but a psychiatrist with a medical 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 task 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. It's not just some random person off the street. And the child is allowed to move about the room. They can observe 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 oftentimes, this will have two or three different phases where the mother will bring the child in then leave, then come back in, and leave. There are 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 adolescent, teen, young adult, and even adult attachment styles, not in strange situations of the sort that I just described, but in romantic attachments. (smacks lips) I should mention also that attachment style is plastic, meaning it can change across the lifespan. So as I describe the results, I describe the different attachment styles that are out there, and if any of those, uh, resonate with you or, um, bring to mind certain people in your life, please do not assume that those attachment styles are rigid and fixed for the entire lifespan. There are also terrific data that indicate that through specific processes, both psychological and some biological, um, 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 four patterns of attachment that were revealed by these studies, again, were revealed by examining the behavior of the child in response to the mother leaving, the re- 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, um, study, these are the so-called B babies as in the letter B, bulldog, B. 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 whine, they might cry, they might even tantrum a bit. However, when the caregiver, meaning the mother or father or 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. (smacks lips) 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 or, or is, 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, 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're 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, um, subjective assessment of what these children are feeling. Okay, so first category is secure attached. The second category is a so-called anxious avoidant or insecurely attached, which are the category A, uh, babies. The chu- the children with anxious avoidant insecure attachment patterns, um, generally tend to avoid or ignore the caregiver, all right? Meaning the parent, um, 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, um, some tendency to approach the, the re- the caregiver when they return, but it, but there doesn't seem to be an, 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, the second one. The third category is the so-called anxious ambivalent/resistant insecure category. Okay, I didn't name these categories, so you have to blame others in, um, in this one instance. For everything else, blame me. But in this instance, you have to blame, uh, the psychologist that, that named this category. The anxious ambivalent/resistant insecure category, also called the C 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.Okay? So they're distressed even before the mother leaves the room, and they tend to be very clingy and really hard to calm down when the mother returns. (smacks lips) They tend to show either what seems to be resentment in response to the parent's absence, we don't really know what they're feeling, or some sort of helpless passivity. And there's actually subcategorizations that the psychologists have come up with, with C1 subtypes and C2 subtypes. We don't have to get bogged down in that. But just know that there isn't one absolute measure, uh, that says, "Oh, well, this, uh, person is anxious-ambivalent/resistant-insecure." They could be somewhat passive, um, or they could be, uh, 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, uh, babies. This is a categorization that was added later to this strange situation task, that is a real hallmark of developmental, um, psychology studies. It was developed by, um, Mary Ainsworth graduate student, uh, Mary Main, who I actually had the great fortune of, of taking a course from and learning from when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, uh, many years ago. (smacks lips) And this fourth categorization was controversial for a while, but now is generally accepted. The key feature of the disorganized/disoriented category is that the toddlers tend to be tense, and they tend to encompass a lot of, um, kind of odd physical postures. They tend to hunch their shoulders. Um, they'll put their hands behind their neck. They'll, um, cock their head to the side. Um, for those of you listening, I'm doing this on the video version. It's not, um, where, you don't have to go see that, but for those of you that are watching this on video, um, they tend to kind of constrain their, their body size a bit and go into odd postures that they normally wouldn't, um, do anywhere else. Um, so this is why it's called the disorganized or disoriented, uh, category. It seems like these children just don't really know how to react to a separation, and they just, uh, 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 one, which is securely attached. We've got category two, which is insecurely attached, also sometimes called anxious-avoidant. Then we've got category three, which is the resistant/insecure category, which is anxious-ambivalent. And then there's this fourth category, the disorganized/disoriented category, or the so-called D babies. Now,

Andrew Huberman 32:52 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, uh, first of all, we are relatively hardwired 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 leaving. But also that the same neural circuitries, 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, uh, 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, uh, 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, of Allan Schore from UCLA, showing that when a mother and child interact, either through very soothing interactions, like bottle-feeding or breast-feeding 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 the, 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 bidirectional 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 r- 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. Um, I don't think I'm, uh, contradicting anyone in particular, but you hear that a lot, "No one can make you feel anything." Indeed they can, right? A physical injury can make you feel something. Um, 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 scans support that. Measures of hormones in the body and brain support that. Measures of neurochemicals support that. There's simply no way around this truth that we have a set of roadmaps in our mind that are reused for entirely different purposes later in life. That is vitally important to understand, because if one is successful in forming romantic attachments, maintaining them, et cetera, 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 understanding 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 into category one, two, three, or four, or you know somebody or are involved with somebody who falls into category one, two, three, and four, the mere knowledge of that can be very useful. But you might ask, "Well, 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, uh, there's a book that has really tapped into this. I think it's the first book that has really addressed this head-on, and that book comes from two, uh, Columbia professors. Uh, and the title of the book is Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love. The, the authors of this book are Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. Um, again, both of them are, um, skilled academics and researchers who have really taken the literature that I described on the Strange Situation Task 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 style, or for 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?

Andrew Huberman 38:50 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 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? I- indeed there is. 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 and 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, um, I have no affiliation to the authors or, or the book itself, I should just mention that. Um, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love, really, um, it sounds very, um, pop psychology-esque, 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 whereby 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, um, adults of, at 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 attached 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, um, I would encourage you to check out, um, the book Attached. Uh, 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

Andrew Huberman 41:23 that the neural circuits for child-parent or child-caregiver attachment are repurposed for romantic attachment later in life. But what are these neural circuits? What do they do? I mean, uh, it's so, uh, attractive, if you will, to think about a brain area that controls love or a brain area that controls desire or a brain area (laughs) that controls attachment. 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 anything as complex as desire, love, or 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, 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 mode that we call desire, or 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 au- automatic. In fact, that's what autonomic means. Now, i- 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, our breathing, uh, whether or not we're conscious of that breathing or not. Uh, 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 parent, either soothing interactions or fun, playful interactions, or dare I say, scary interactions, our 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 how tired we are late in the day. If we've been awake for a while, we tend to get sleepy. Early in the day, if we're very rested, we tend to wake up and feel very alert. So, the way to think about the autonomic nervous system is as 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, m- semi-calm, um, and, but still also alert. So, the... Think about it like a seesaw, and that seesaw has a, 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 hinge is. 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 soothed until we go to sleep. And of course, we each have a seesaw, the parent and the child has a seesaw, and they're interacting. What do I mean by that? Well, there are beautiful studies and beautiful, not in the sense that they focused on a pleasant topic, but beautiful 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 II. 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 mothers that, that were explored in these studies, had turned this whole business of going into the bomb shelters into somewhat of a game, right? Taking it seriously, but essentially telling the children, "Okay, it's time to go." But not expressing much stress or distress. The 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 refer to the beautiful work of Allan Schore at University of California, Los Angeles. Um, and again, his name is, is Schore, spelled S-C-H-O-R-E. I'm, uh, looking down briefly at the floor here because, um, I'll just reach for, for the book. Um, he has a, a wonderful book called Right Brain Psychotherapy. It's a little bit technical, but if you're interested in some of the studies, um, this book, Right Brain Psychotherapy, details how everything from nursing of children to playtime 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, et cetera. And indeed, all types of caregiver-child interactions tune up that autonomic nervous 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 Huberman Lab Podcast, but on many other previous episodes such as the Master Stress episode or some of the, uh, optimize health episodes, you can find these if you want at hubermanlab.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, um, specific tools. But for instance, the, the physiological sigh, this, um, tool that I've talked about extensively of two inhales through the nose as deeply as you can on the first one, sneaking in a little bit more air on the second one, and then a long exhale through the mouth, is a way of adjusting that autonomic seesaw. 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 hyperventil- 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 to 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 and 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, um, (smacks lips) 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, um, 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 or sh- or 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, uh, 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 t- for doing that exist. But attachment itself is about where our autonomic nervous system

Andrew Huberman 50:39 resides. So if I were to offer a set of tools around these topics of desire, 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, um, 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 ner- 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, a hallmark of, 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 Mellody. 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, um, some point in the future. But co-dependence and co-dependency, th- the term can sometimes be misinterpreted, um, as any dependence on another isn't good. Um, interdependence, uh, healthy interdependence, 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, um, alertness. And of course, we all need sleep to go from exhaustion, um, to alertness, but what I'm referring to here is the ability to regulate when distraught or regulate when, uh, fatigued, um, or feeling depressed. And that is and is all about the autonomic nervous system. So as we talk about attachment styles and we talk about infant and toddler and adult attachment styles, what we are really talking about is a complex set of neural circuitries. And one of those neural circuitries, which is absolutely crucial, is this autonomic nervous system.

Andrew Huberman 53:11 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, um, is really an anthropologist who's become a bit of a neuroscientist and has collaborated with neuroscientists to establish brain areas and neural circuits that are associated with different aspects of attachment, 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. Uh, the Journal of Comparative Neurology has been around for more than 100 years and is considered the archival location for placing, um, really high-quality anatomy. They have tremendously high standards. And, uh, 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, uh, Dr. Fisher is, uh, 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 f-Magnetic resonance imaging, things like EEG, neuroanatomical tracing, etcetera, have identified a large number of brain areas that are associated with different aspects of desire, 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 desire, 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 neurochemical sometimes associated with reward, but as some of you have heard me say, uh, before, it is mainly a molecule of motivation, craving, and pursuit. And that motivation, craving, and 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, uh, a mate when you want one, two mate when you want two, uh, warmth when you're cold, etcetera, etcetera. Okay? So it's not for one specific purpose, but the brain areas associated with dopamine involve, um, for instance, the ventral tegmental area, the substantia nigra, uh, areas of that sort, the basal ganglia. Um, 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 quiescent, relaxed, etcetera. The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation are most associated with love and attachment, not surprisingly, and there, the neurochemical 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, of serotonin in your body is made in your gut, and indeed that's true, but I hate to break it to you, the serotonin in 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 are other areas of the brain that make serotonin as well, and oxytocin as well, but they tend to be associated with the kind of warmth and calm, and, um, 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 ver- or different degrees. And we will turn in a little bit to what happens when levels of dopamine are very high and levels of serotonin are low, and vice versa and so on, including in states of, um, uh, neurochemically modified states, um, as it were, in when we talk about things like MDMA, so-called ecstasy. But in the meantime, I want to just discuss the two neural circuits that use dopamine, that use 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.

Andrew Huberman 58:02 So given that the neural circuits for empathy are absolutely crucial 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? (laughs) What is it to feel what another feels? Well, what it means is that their 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 are 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 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're 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. Um, 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 vary, typically, is one of elevated autonomic arousal. Meaning increased activation of the so-called sympathetic nervous 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 whereby 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 parasympathetic 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, uh, at play here. That, the word sympa means together, and the activation of the autonomic nervous system toward more alert state is because of a sympathetic nervous system, meaning 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 parasympathetically driven, okay? Um, 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 bond, not always. There, the return to more parasympathetic activation after orgasm and ejaculation is thought to increase the exchange of pheromonal orders, odors, excuse 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 intrauter- intrauterine insemination. There are a variety of ways that technology has allowed 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, uh, historically for, if not, uh, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. That process is also what happens in all mammalian species that mate, okay? So, I'm overlooking an entire literature of, um, animal studies, um, that classic studies of this were done by two individuals. I'll just briefly mention them in case you want to look at the, the literature. There's a, a guy at the Rockefeller University named Donald Pfaff, P-F-A-F-F, who has done beautiful studies identifying the neural circuitry of what's called the lordosis response. Unlike in humans, the, um, mating behavior of animals is rather stereotyped in terms of the positions that they occupy and the lordosis response is a kind of a U-shaping or a, a bending up of the hindquarters of typically of rodents, but of other animals as well. The male, um, the male mounting is, uh, 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 estrous cycle is sort of the, um, uh, analog to the menstrual cycle, but it's not 28 days, it's four days or some other, um, duration in, uh, other animals, depending on the animal. The lordosis response is strongly regulated by odors, by contact, and is estrogen and testosterone, um, controlled. And then the male portion of, of the mating, uh, sequence in animals, um, the mounting and thrusting and ejaculation as they're called, or mounting, thrusting, intromission, and ejaculation, those are the four, uh, scientific categories that have been described. Um, that's presence in rodents and also in, in dogs where it was primarily studied by Frank Beach, who was, um, at, uh, University of California, Berkeley for a long time. And the entire literature around, uh, the neural circuitry for sexual mating behavior in animals largely stemmed, um, from the work of Donald Pfaff and Frank Beach and their scientific offspring, not their actual offspring. Uh, 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, um, not necessarily mating with other people, but going through that arc of arousal, um, uh, sympathetic activation during orgasm or ejaculation and then the post-ejaculatory or, or orgasmic phase in both men and women. And the brain areas associated with those-... have all been mapped out now. Um, the spinal cord areas that control, um, things like, uh, um, erection, uh, vaginal lubrication, ejaculation, and orgasm, those have also been mapped out. And this has all been explored from the perspective of o- of both basic science, just to get an understanding of how our species, um, has sexual interactions and reproduces, but also from the perspective of, for instance, um, trying to repair, uh, sexual function after spinal cord injury, which, um, is, you know, a prominent concern for a lot of people depending on where they have their injury, but in, um, 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 two 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-U-L-A. The insula is a really interesting brain area that allows us to interocept, to pay attention to what's going on inside our body, and to split some of our attention to exterocept and the mating dance, whether or not it's, um, the dinner and date portion of the mating dance, or the actual physical dance part of the mating dance, or actual mating and, and sexual behavior, kissing or otherwise, that is a coordinated activity of two bodies, typically it's two. I realize sometimes it's more, sometimes it's only one, but typically it's two, uh, bodies in, 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 i- 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, uh, it can be communicated through sounds, it can be communicated through touch, and it can be communicated through a number of, um, of kind of more subtle cues, like pupil size or whether or not, um... Certainly in cases where we recognize the person and we kind of know their responses, their autonomic responses under different conditions, we can assess. Does the person comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they, um, are they more focused on me or on themselves? This is the, the coordinated silent dance that if we look at in neurobiological terms, we can really see is all about the autonomic nervous system. Whether or not, um, it's, uh, time to tip the seesaw to one, (laughs) to one side or the other, depending on whether or not the other person's 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

Andrew Huberman 1:10:02 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. Well, what do we mean by that? Well, first of all, self-delusion implies a kind of, um, cynicism about love and attachment. And I think it was George Bernard Shaw that said, uh, "Love is really about overestimating the differences between individuals." Um, actually when I hear that and as I say it, I really don't like that quote. Um, I have no bone to pick with George Bernard Shaw, but what it suggests, and I think what he meant was that, uh, you know, in love and attachment, we tend to put so much value in the other that we forget that many of the processes that are going on in our brain and body actually could be evoked by many other people too. But I think it somewhat overlooks the enormous power of attachment and the ways in which somebody's smell, somebody's voice, somebody's, um, 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, et cetera. So I think that, um, while the quote, um, is accurate in the one sense, I think it does overlook, um, the neural circuits for attachment and just how deeply wired those can become for us. So I will balance that quote with, um, an enormous number of other quotes that I, I, I won't, um, mention, but that you can find out there that really point to, you know, how incredible, um, the person is that one tends to be attached to, that there's really only one or, you know, or, or several, uh, uh, people that could ever exist that could evoke those feelings from us. And of course, you can read your, you know, um, Neruda poetry and your... You can find these things all over the place in music and poetry and, and writing. So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits being generic and, uh, could be activated by anybody, I think you'll find, um, an ample number of, uh, opposing quotes that these neural circuits can only be activated by that special someone or that particular person or maybe even 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 intim- 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 a- an article, um, a research article I should say, the title of it is Relationship-specific encoding of social touch in somatosensory and insular cort- cortices. Cortices being cortex. Cortexes, plural. Cortices. And again, there's our friend insula. So this is 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 that are associated with touch, the somatosensory areas, but more interestingly, the insula cortex, are strongly activated by touch. So touch and 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 and at the surface of our skin, with events external. And they found activation of a number of brain areas, the amygdala, orbital frontal 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 assign that a value, or assign 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 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 individuals, is and 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

Andrew Huberman 1:15:20 delusion 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 key 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 and what those exactly look like. But there are also just a handful of things that predict that a relationship will fail over time. This is largely the work of the Gottmans, it's actually a husband and wife team up at the University of Washington in Seattle. Um, the Gottmans, uh, have r- 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, um, 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 call the four horsemen (laughs) of relationships. These are things that, um, 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 it, is pretty remarkable. So even though, um, these are purely psychological studies, um, I'm not aware of any, uh, analyses of underlying physiology, there are some things that they can observe between couples that can lead them to predict whether or not a couple will 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, (laughs) uh, for relationships, um, are one, criticism, two, defensiveness, three, stonewalling, and four, contempt. With contempt being, um, the most powerful predictor of, uh, breaking up. Um, criticism, of course, does not mean that there's, uh, no place for criticism in stable relationships. Of course there is. Uh, it has to do with how frequent and how intensely that criticism is voiced. Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness, uh, we know as the sort of lack of ability to hear another or to adopt their stance. So lack of empathy, I think is, is, uh, 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, um, desire, love, and attachment. The stonewalling essentially means, uh, the emotional response or the request of another is completely cut off. So it's- it's, uh, I don't think there's been brain imaging of this, but we, I think we can reasonably imagine that it involves, um, untethering your insula response from the other and what they're dealing with and focusing your insular response, (laughs) , um, no pun intended, on your own internal state or perhaps the state of- of someone else entirely. We'll talk about infidelity in a moment. And then contempt. And contempt has actually been referred to as the sulfuric acid of relationship. Uh, I didn't say that, but Gottman and colleagues have, that it is, uh, such a powerful predictor of divorce and breakups, uh, in the future. And contempt, of course, uh, 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, uh, couples having discussions and reacting by, um, very elaborate eye rolls, by expressions of i-... anger in one individual when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm or excitement about something. It's the, uh, "Oh, yeah, you would say that," or, um, or deep-seated resentment toward the other, so much so that it's apparent that one, uh, uh, kind of actively dislikes the other partner. Um, so contempt, uh, disregard for something that should be taken into account is the other way to think about it, th- runs counter to all of the neural circuits, all three of the neural circuits that we talked about before. It certainly is, um, (smacks lips) 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, you're un-excited by it. In fact, it's an inversion of their seesaw, where they're excited, you're down. Um, they're down, you're up, okay? So it's a, it's a, basically a, an inversion of all of the neural circuits that Helen Fisher and others have identified as critical for desire, love, and attachment, and therefore, it's not, um, surprising that it 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 Gottmans and similar work, uh, they've written several popular books. Uh, they're fairly easy to find. Uh, we can link to one of those in the, uh, caption. Um, but they've also developed some, um, quite interesting online resources, um, in their so-called Love Lab. Um, I guess it's fortunate that they didn't call it the, um, Hate Lab or the Breakup Lab 'cause they focused a lot on, uh, what predicts breakups. But they've also, um, written extensively and researched extensively in peer-reviewed studies, uh, what makes people find appropriate partners for them and, uh, to maintain those partnerships over time. So you can go, uh, you can search for Love Lab University of Washington Gottman, uh, or any number of their various books. I think you'll find some, um, some useful resources there.

Andrew Huberman 1:21:22 (smacks lips) I want to shift back to the work of Helen Fisher. Um, she's made some very interesting statements and some very interesting observations that, at least to my mind, um, map very well onto the knowledge of neural circuitry both in humans and in non-human primates and in other species. I realize that, uh, she's not the only name in the game. Um, but she's made some observations that I think are, uh, are very, as we say, parsimonious, meaning they allow us to organize a lot of this stuff into some distinct frameworks. Uh, she's also done some really beautiful studies, uh, that involve data from millions or even tens of millions of individuals on dating sites. So, I'm going to share those with you in a moment. But, uh, before I do that, I just want to, um, uh, paraphrase, um, Dr. Fisher, um, who said that, um, sex drive or desire, th- the pursuit of someone to mate with, meaning to mate, the verb, um, not necessarily to find a mate, uh, may be, she didn't say definitively, but may be a way to forage for potential love partners, that the, the arc of this, uh, whole business is really the order that we're describing it, that it's desire, then love, and then attachment, and that oftentimes people can get af- confused. Um, you may know some of these people, um, you may be one of these individuals who might confuse desire for attachment or might confuse, um, love, uh, for attachment, but 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 placed this in the context of kind of more modern dating themes where, depending on culture, um, people might explore, um, several, maybe many, many, um, individuals before, quote unquote, settling down, uh, with, with somebody, at least for some period of time. Um, I think that's, uh, an interesting framework, uh, because it circumvents a lot of the, uh, frankly, unanswerable questions about whether or not, um, you know, humans were meant to be monogamous or whether or not they weren't. Those are conversations that hold cultural context, that hold, um, all sorts of context, that really can't be addressed in a laboratory setting. But this idea that, um, sex drive is a way to forage for potential love partners and that love is a, uh, kind of a litmus test for whether or not longer or, term or deeper attachments can and will form is one that at least makes sense to me. Uh, later in the episode, we'll talk about this notion of, of sex drive and desire. I'll actually talk about some tools, um, that are, that have very strong data really to support, um, them in terms of things that people can do or take to increase libido, both men and women, um, because there are, 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 into, again, we have four groups. Um, these are distinct from the A, B, C, and D attachment styles described earlier, although as I describe them you might be able to map them somewhat onto those. And these four groups, uh, 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 dataset. So again, millions if not tens of millions of individuals. The number I heard her quote, and I, um, forgive me if this is not accurate, is that in upwards of 40 million individuals in terms of whether or not their 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. Um, and they have less testosterone than men, more estrogen than men and so, and so on and so forth. But both hormone systems are active in both, um, uh, sets of individuals. And of course, all humans, as far as we know, manufacture both dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine, as I mentioned earlier, has a number of, of effects in the brain and body. But one of the primary effects is that it places us into states of motivation and pursuit, uh, for various things. There is a somewhat close relationship between the dopamine system and the testosterone system, um, 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, uh, secrete, uh, testosterone or estrogen. So there's a lot of signaling that occurs such that dopamine and 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, um, or I guess, uh, better stated, these aren't, um, strict black and white categorizations, but I think those general themes hold when you look at the animal and, uh, human data. So Dr. Fisher has taken some, some liberties, but I think they are, um, what I would call logically and scientifically and 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 cata- uh, categories. Um, the four categories are, um, she calls one the dopamine, um, category. So these are people, uh, who would have high dopamine. And, um, again, eh, that's just a name. It doesn't mean they have