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This is
your brain
in love
In a fascinating
new book,
evolutionary
anthropologist
Helen Fisher
examines the
chemistry
responsible for
the giddiness,
fixations and
overarching
lunacy
associated with
romantic love.

------------
By Carlene
Bauer

Jan. 27, 2004 | Claude Lévi-Strauss and Charles Darwin probably

never received letters containing such desperate pleas as "Do you think
it's possible for someone to fall in love with you after a year of being
together ... I would love to hear from you because my heart is just
breaking and I don't know what to do." But for evolutionary
anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has spent her career writing on the
biology behind human intimacy, handling such correspondence is all in
a day's work. In her latest book, "Why We Love: The Nature and
Chemistry of Romantic Love," Fisher, the author of "The Anatomy of
Love" and "The First Sex," examines the brain chemistry responsible
for the swooning, stalking and general irrationality associated with
romance. She argues that romantic love is a basic human drive like
hunger, orchestrated by neurotransmitters and hormones, that evolved to
ensure we would find mates suitable enough to raise families with,
thereby propagating the species.

According to Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, the

bliss we feel when we fall in love is the result of elevated levels of
dopamine and norepinephrine, which can result in sleeplessness,
exhilaration and single-mindedness, among other things, and low levels
of serotonin, which can set the mind racing toward obsession. What
we're feeling in those early throes of passion is an addiction, she says.
Some may think this sounds like a just-so story with footnotes, but
there's something comforting in the notion that maybe it's the dopamine
talking when it's 2 in the morning and you've been Googling your office
crush for the past seven hours.

Fisher is a gamine 58-year-old whose fine-spun blond hair and

modulated yet exclamatory manner recall Doris Day -- if Doris Day
were a Ph.D. with a penchant for giving no-nonsense advice to the
lovelorn, reporters included. Among her tips? Don't think you can
fornicate frequently and indiscriminately without, à la "A Midsummer
Night's Dream," one day waking up to find you've fallen in love with an
ass. And maybe lay off the Prozac.

The big news in this book is an experiment in which you scanned

the brains of people in love. And you found differences between
men and women.

We weren't even thinking of looking for that. Although I did write a

book on gender differences ["The First Sex"], most of what I talk about
is the evolution of a brain system that's in everybody. I'm interested in
why we're all alike. What we discovered is that the parts of the brain
that lit up and became active when someone falls in love are part of the
reward system in the brain. And one of them is the ventral tegmental
area, a tiny part in the midbrain, quite far down, that makes dopamine
and sprinkles it around the brain. When the prefrontal cortex -- the part
behind your forehead, the thinking part -- realizes that you are not
getting your reward, those dopamine cells work harder and pump out
more dopamine and you feel more motivation, more ecstasy, and that's
why -- think of Romeo and Juliet -- when there are barriers to the
relationship, you try harder and you love harder.

On average, men tended to show more activity in two regions in the

brain: One was associated with the integration of visual stimuli and the
second was with penile erection. This really shouldn't come as a
surprise. Everybody knows that men are highly visual -- men spend
their lives commenting on women, looking at porn, and the like. I
believe these visual networks evolved 1 or 2 million years ago because
men needed to look at a woman and size up her ability to give him
healthy babies. If he saw that she was young and healthy and happy, it
would be adaptive for him to become aroused to start the mating
process. Men definitely fall in love faster than women -- there's good
psychological data on that. And I think that's because they are more
visual.

And women?

Several regions associated with memory recall became active. And I

couldn't figure out why at first, and then I thought to myself, my
goodness -- for millions of years women have been looking for
someone to help them raise their babies, and in order to do that you
really can't look at someone and know whether they're honest or
trustworthy or whether they can hit the buffalo in the head and share
the meat with you. You've got to remember what they said yesterday,
what they said three weeks ago, what they gave your mother two
months ago at the midwinter festival. For millions of years women
have had the hardest job on earth -- raising tiny helpless babies for as
long as 20 years. That is an enormous job. There's no other animal on
earth for whom motherhood is so complex. And if their husband died
they'd have to expend an enormous amount of metabolic energy to find
another one, and they're that much older, and the clock is ticking -- it's
an adaptive strategy to remember all these details.

So you're saying this would explain why, a copious amount of

undergraduate women's studies notwithstanding, I feel myself
turning into Alice Kramden when, during arguments with my
boyfriend, I dredge up things he wishes I'd forget?

Women remember. It drives both sexes crazy. If women could forget a

few things, it might be better for them. Men complain about their
marriages much less than women do; they remarry faster than women
do. Throughout their lives women have many more complaints during
the marriage. But if men could remember a few things, it would
probably be better for them too!

Falling in love seems too unpredictable and individual a process to

qualify objectively. How was it possible for you to decide whether
someone was sufficiently far gone to use them as a subject?

I established about 20 primary characteristics of romantic love, and I

did it several ways. First I went through the last 25 years of
psychological literature, looking for the things that come up over and
over again. And I looked at poetry from around the world -- from
ancient Sumer, China and India [for similarities in the expression of
love across time and history]. Other anthropologists use potsherds,
arrowheads, all kinds of things, and it just seemed to me that songs and
poems are artifacts, too. Then I created a questionnaire, which I gave to
430 Americans and 420 Japanese of all ages. And those candidates who
said they were in love responded to the characteristics outlined in the
questionnaire in positive ways.

So here are the basic characteristics: You lose a sense of self, your
edges become porous -- this person almost invades, but it's a very
pleasant invasion. Then there are mood swings -- real giddiness and
ecstasy when things are going well, but if you don't hear from him via
e-mail or phone, there's despair.

But the main characteristic for me is obsessively thinking about the

person. When I was interviewing people to put into the fMRI machine,
the first thing I asked them was how long they'd been in love, because I
wanted them really crazy -- I wanted them in the beginning stages,
because these machines are expensive, they're time-consuming for
everybody. So they had to be absolutely nuts. The second question I
asked was, what percentage of the day or evening do you think about
this person? And I was looking for those who said 85, 90 percent -- as
in, I can't stop, she's never out of my mind.

You say romance is brief because nature only wanted us absolutely

nuts until we managed to conceive. After we have children,
attachment, a different chemical reaction that results in feelings of
stability, kicks in to bind a couple together to raise those kids.
What would you say to those who find the prospect of attachment
too monotonous to contemplate? And is the idea of "till death do us
part" wishful thinking?

Americans come out of a farming tradition, as all Westerners do. The

whole concept of "till death do us part," that is our idea, because we
have so much property. But we are probably built to be restless in long
relationships. And now, when we break up -- well, it's not like the
grasslands of Africa where you pick up your spear and walk off. You've
got cars and houses and college educations to pay for. But for most of
human evolution there was a lot of serial pair-bonding. You would form
a pair bond for a while, have a child, break up, fall in love again, have
another marriage, another child, break up again, and then somewhere in
middle age probably form another long-term relationship -- and maybe
were adulterous on the side. From a Darwinian perspective, this makes
sense. It enables you to raise babies in a stable partnership while you go
out and collect more resources for the babies you have with an affair, or
to have more babies if you're a man.

We live a long time, and we're nicely wired to fall in love several times
in our lives. So this trend we have now of a long period of extended
practice [with having different partners] before beginning a long
attachment is a good one. Because we weren't built to be happy; we
were built to reproduce. Lust, romantic love, attachment, these three
different systems, we all have them to various degrees, and some
people find it easier to form a long-term attachment than other people
do. And I do think that there's a chemical basis to that. Divorce does
run in families. Some people need thrills all the time -- and if they do
have a marriage they're almost always adulterous within a couple years
of that marriage. I think everyone of us lies in bed in night and tries to
decide how we're going to [find and keep love]. I mean, that's the
problem. We have a brain that can simultaneously feel deep attachment
to one person while we feel mad romantic attraction to someone else.

It seems that in your book you caution against casual sex. Did I
read you right?

All I say in the book is watch out. I'm not in the should business. But I
do think knowing what we know about how these brain systems are
connected, it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on whom you
copulate with. Because casual sex might not be so casual. Most
liberated contemporary adults have copulated with someone they will
never love. And women are just as able to copulate without love as
men. I think we have a real misunderstanding in this culture of the
intensity of male romantic love and female sexuality. Three out of four
people who kill themselves after a love relationship has ended are men,
not women. Men are much more likely because they have fewer friends
-- so they put more into relationships than women. They're not as
expressive as women.

But neither women or men are too good at love 'em and leave 'em. You
can be the other woman -- for a while. But at some point some of that
brain circuitry kicks in and you fall in love. These three brain systems
-- the sex drive, romantic love and attachment -- are connected,
particularly the romantic love and sex drive. When you fall in love you
want to start hopping in bed with the person, in part because the
elevated levels of dopamine associated with romantic love can trigger
testosterone, the hormone of desire, of sex craving. But the reverse can
happen -- testosterone can elevate the activity of dopamine and you can
fall madly in love with someone that you hadn't intended to. And so a
lot of people, the very young especially, they do a lot of sleeping
around, and some can fall in love with people they don't want to take
home, don't want to marry, could never have kids with, and boom! --
they spend the next five years with this person and spend the rest of
their lives wondering why they did that.

So the idea that one could always keep having sexual adventures
without real emotional consequences, that's a fairy tale we've been
telling ourselves?

It's not gonna happen. With orgasm, levels of oxytocin go up in women

and vasopressin in men -- they call these the satisfaction hormones
because they do give a sense of calm and peace and security and often
a cosmic sense of union. If you have enough of them with somebody
you're going to feel attached to them.

Another ostensible boon you caution against in the book is the use
of antidepressants -- specifically SSRIs, or selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors, which elevate serotonin levels. They can
endanger our ability to fall in love?

If you're about to kill yourself you should definitely take these

medications. Or if you can't get out of bed -- no question about it, they
can be absolutely essential to people. But the problem in America is
that people are on them for months and years, and they don't realize
they are jeopardizing powerful systems that are connected. Of course,
serotonin-enhancing medications blunt emotions -- that's the point. But
these medications can affect romance and attachment in more subtle
ways. SSRIs dampen the ability to have orgasms, which is a
mechanism of attachment and a form of mate assessment. And if you're
not having an orgasm with somebody on a regular basis you are not
juicing your brain with attachment chemicals.

A woman learns a great deal about a man in bed -- is he patient, is he

kind, does he persevere until she has her orgasm? The female orgasm is
what they call fickle -- it doesn't always happen. That used to be
regarded as a maladaptive trait, but evolutionary psychologists now
think it's a very adaptive one because it allows a woman to distinguish
between Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong. So when you kill a woman's
capacity to have an orgasm you're killing the mechanism by which she
assesses potential partners. There's a very sensitive ring of nerves
outside of the vagina, and the clitoris is very sensitive, and these
become less sensitive when you take SSRIs. And they are also
mechanisms that help a woman reach orgasm.

From a male's perspective, seminal fluid has dopamine and

norepinephrine in it, as well as serotonin and testosterone and estrogen
-- all kinds of things they've now shown have an antidepressant effect.
When a man doesn't deposit them in the vaginal canal, [he's not able to
influence a woman's mood positively, and therefore not able to] trick a
woman chemically into liking him. So these courtship devices are being
jeopardized. It's a little bit like taking a medication that blurs your
vision.

People from around the world are e-mailing you for relationship
advice. Do you actually respond personally to them?

I would imagine the day might come when it's too much for me. At this
point it certainly is not. I do say to them, "I'm an anthropologist -- I'm
not in this business, I'm not a psychologist, but I'll tell you, this is how
I feel about it." That whole chapter on how to control love in "Why We
Love" -- I wasn't going to put that in there. And then I thought to
myself, how could I write a whole book about love's brain circuitry,
about something that makes us suffer such despair when it goes bad,
and not say one word about how to handle this? Of course I'll take a lot
of flak from my colleagues, but I take a lot of flak anyway -- if you
write a trade book you're in trouble. But what is the point of
information if you don't broaden it out? In these e-mails, people are
bleeding with despair. And I'm supposed to say, "I'm terribly sorry. I
know all about this subject but I'm not going to talk to you"? You can't
do that to people!

So how can we control love?

The only one way I really know of to kick in that dopamine system and
to help spark love, particularly in a long-term relationship, is to do
novel things together. Novelty is associated with elevated activity of
dopamine and norepinephrine -- those are the same stimulants
associated with cocaine and amphetamines. Novelty can step up that
system. Some people can just go to a different restaurant. You don't
have to go skydiving. Other people, maybe they should.
------------

About the writer

Carlene Bauer is a writer living in New
York.

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