How Love Actually Works - Dr Anna Machin

Nice to see you again. I really enjoyed our first conversation. We talked about dads, the importance of fatherhood. Today, your most recent book, Why We Love, I wanna talk about that.

Mm-hmm.

Very universal. Perhaps one of the most universal things that humans have got.

Yep.

W- why did love evolve at all?

Okay. So, love evolved basically in the same way that most things evolved, is because it aids our survival. So, humans are arguably the most cooperative species on the planet, both in terms of the number of relationships we can keep going at once, which is about 150, uh, in terms of the duration of those relationships that can last decades, and in terms of the very many different categories of relationships that we have. So, we're very cooperative. But cooperation is really hard as un-... We, we all know, we all know getting along with our friends, with our family, with our coworkers can be a little bit stressful sometimes, and it would actually be much, much easier to be solitary. But we have to live in a group and we have to get along with, with each other to just survive. And so, evolution came up with love basically. It's, it's kind of like a form of biological bribery at the most basic level. So it's, it's a set of neurochemicals which motivate and reward you for starting and then maintaining what we call your survival critical relationships. So those relationships that are critical to you both surviving on a day-to-day basis, but also passing your genes down to the next generation. So at the most basic level, that is all love is. It's just this biological bribery to make us feel good about doing this really quite difficult thing.

Are there any animals that don't have love? Are there any animals that haven't evolved that?

It's hard to say because love is a really nebulous concept, and it depends w- how you define it. I think we all have our own definition of love, and it depends at what stage you, you define it. I think a lot of animals feel what we would call basic love. So, all the mammals, for example, experience attachment. All the mammals are underpinned by things like oxytocin and dopamine. Um, you know, all mammals have those sort of caring, nurturing relationships, particularly be- between mothers and offspring. So we would say all mammals experience love. What we get a little bit hot in the head about is whether any animals experience human-type love, which is a little bit more complicated. And what I find (laughs) a little bit sad really is, you know, when... We just assume all humans feel love. So if I said to you, "Do you know what love is? Have you experienced love?" You'd go, "Yeah." And I'd go, "Okay." Um, but with animals, we hold them to a very high level of evidence. And so, to actually tell whether an animal experiences human-like love, you kind of have sort of a ch- a checkbox of five different things. So do they experience attachment? Is there, um, neurochemistry, does their neurochemistry involve beta-endorphin as well? Beta-endorphin is a more complex neurochemical that's involved in human love, which we don't see in the lesser mammals. Do they grieve, which is the loss of love? Uh, do they have friendships? So do they have relationships which have nothing really directly to do with reproduction or passing genes down, just for the hell of it essentially? And do they experience cognitive empathy? So there are different types of empathy. Um, there's emotional contagion, which is just, "Oh my God, you scream, I scream. I have no idea why I'm screaming, but something's scary." That's... A lot of animals have that. There's emotional empathy, which is, "I can see you're really upset, but I don't know what to do about it." And then there's cognitive empathy, which is, "I can see you're really upset, and I'm gonna help you in the appropriate way," which is what humans have. So I think if we use those five things, um, then we can say yeah, some high- higher mammals definitely do. So for example, cetaceans, the dolphins, the whales do. Um, gorillas, chimps do. Um, beyond that, it's a little bit tricky to say. Dogs might. Um, we're still not sure on the cognitive empathy with dogs, but dogs certainly may experience human levels of love. Um, there's a wonderful effective neuroscientist, unfortunately he's no longer w- with us now, called Jaak Panksepp, and he spent his whole life researching love. And what he said about human love is he said, you know, "Love is like the cupcake, and loads of animals have the cupcake, but what humans have done is they've over-decorated the cupcake. They put lots of rubbish on top, which is mostly the cultural stuff we associate with love. But all that lovely decoration on top isn't actually necessary to experience love. We've just kind of overly complicated it." So, I would say yes, a lot of animals experience love. I, I think keeping it exclusively for humans and setting this very high bar is, is maybe not fair, I think.