The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment |

Huberman Lab Podcast #59 - Transcript

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Transcript

[0:00:00] Andrew Huberman: Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss
science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a
professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we
are going to talk about the psychology and the biology of desire, love, and attachment.
Today happens to be Valentine's Day 2022. However, the themes we are going to discuss
pertain to Desire, love, and attachment on any given day.

[0:00:30] Andrew Huberman: And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss
almost certainly were at play 1000 of years ago, 100 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 1000 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.

[0:01:24] Andrew Huberman: 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 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.

[0:02:11] Andrew Huberman: They are amenable to change in response to both what we
think and what we feel as well as what we do. However, all 3 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, and serotonin and neural circuits, brain
areas, and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain that control Whether or

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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. In order to just how powerfully our biology can shape our perception of the
attractiveness of other people, I wanna share with you the results of a couple of studies.
Both studies explore How people rate other people's attractiveness.

[0:03:12] Andrew Huberman: And in both studies, the major variable is that women are at
different stages of their menstrual cycle. Now in the 1st 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?

[0:03:44] Andrew Huberman: 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 preovulatory 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 preovulatory phase of
their menstrual cycle will rate men's odors as more attractive than at other stages of their
cycle. So the simple way to put this is that there seems to be something special About the
preovulatory phase of a woman's menstrual cycle that makes men rate them as more
attractive during that time, and women rate men as more attractive during that particular
time as well.

[0:04:38] Andrew Huberman: So this is a bidirectional effect. The way that the 2nd 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 Cherts 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 preovulatory phase of their cycle. So, again, the point is that
that preovulatory phase of the cycle seems to create a bidirectional mutual attractiveness.

[0:05:19] Andrew Huberman: 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 prefer the odors of more
symmetrical men during the pre ovulatory phase of their cycle. Now I wanna 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.

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[0:06:10] Andrew Huberman: And If women took oral contraception, it prevented them
from preferring more symmetrical men based on the odors of those men. Now I realize
there are a lot of variables here. We've got odors. We've got symmetry. We've got
menstrual cycle, preovulatory, nonpreovulatory, and we have, whether or not people are
taking contraception or not.

[0:06:29] Andrew Huberman: 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, their skin, their hair, etcetera. 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 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 Field, he emphasized
findings that odor for many people is a maker or a deal Breaker, meaning there are some
people that even if somebody has all the characteristics that they're looking for in terms of
kindness and Activeness and values and other features that would would would and
should be of 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, etcetera, that That's often a complete and total deal breaker.

[0:07:51] Andrew Huberman: I'm sure there are some of you that can relate to that, and
there are some of you, perhaps for which that is not the case, and you can't even Imagine
that being such a powerful variable, and yet the data suggests that indeed it is a powerful
variable for many people out there. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this
podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. 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 1st sponsor is Thesis.

[0:08:23] Andrew Huberman: Thesis makes custom nootropics. Now nootropics is not a
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[0:08:40] Andrew Huberman: And each of those different forms of intelligence or

expressions of intelligence involves different brain circuits, different neurochemicals, and
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phosphatidylserine, which I also use on occasion. However, they've taken different
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[0:09:27] Andrew Huberman: For instance, I have thesis nootropics that are for
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[0:09:56] Andrew Huberman: So none of the formulations that they've made for me
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[0:11:08] Andrew Huberman: Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens,

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[0:12:37] Andrew Huberman: So, again, if you go to athleticgreens.com/huberman, you

can get a special offer The athletic greens, 5 free travel packs, and the year's supply of
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[0:13:20] Andrew Huberman: Now one of the major issues with blood tests and DNA tests
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[0:14:10] Andrew Huberman: Just use the code huberman at checkout. 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 Perms a little bit before going any further. Of course,
we can have many different kinds of loves. There's romantic love.

[0:14:28] Andrew Huberman: There's love of family, so called familial love. There's love of
pets. We can even love objects where we can feel as if we love objects. We can love
Certain activities, we can have friends that we love and so on and so forth. The word love
is used to encompass a lot of different types of relationships.

[0:14:44] Andrew Huberman: Today, we are mainly going to be focused on romantic love
and the neural mechanisms of romantic love. I wanna acknowledge here at the outset
said that most of the studies of romantic love have focused on monogamous

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heterosexual love. And, also, 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 nonmonogamous relationships, in
homosexual or in relationships of any kind or variation.

[0:15:22] Andrew Huberman: 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.

[0:15:41] Andrew Huberman: The formal study of Love and desire and attachment goes
back to the early 1900. One of the classic studies on this is Entitled Love and Desire, it
was published in 1912 and really focused on 2 opposing themes Within romance. 1 is
love, which in that paper was really meant to include attachment Independence or
interdependence between individuals. Right? And the other end of the spectrum being
desire or the sexual desire for another.

[0:16:17] Andrew Huberman: And romance was meant to encapsulate both those things,
love and desire. And for much of the 1900, 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 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 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.

[0:17:19] Andrew Huberman: So today, we're gonna 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.

[0:17:52] Andrew Huberman: I think it's about 50% with a slight skew toward more ending
in divorce than, persist until death Do them part. But, nonetheless, it's about half, and
most marriages end before the 8 year period is up. Most PhDs Take anywhere from 4 to 9
years. So there was a bit of a smearing of averages there, but the point he was trying to
make really landed home for me. It did not scare me Out of, relationships nor did it scare
me out of a PhD, obviously.

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[0:18:23] Andrew Huberman: 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 gonna stay in those marriages. I don't think most people enter
marriages thinking they're gonna 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 gonna 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.

[0:19:01] Andrew Huberman: 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, people have looked at these sorts
of things, believe it or not, in ducks, in laboratory mice, in Different types of birds,
etcetera. 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, there's a Species of animal called the prairie vole, in one portion
of the United States, this prairie vole species is monogamous.

[0:19:48] Andrew Huberman: They only mate With 1 other prairie vole, only raise young
with 1 other prairie vole for their entire life. And in another region of the United States that
same species of animal, the prairie bull, will mate with many individuals. They're
nonmonogamous. And the major difference, at least as far as we know, between the
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.

[0:20:16] Andrew Huberman: It has Numerous biological roles, it's in responsible, for
instance, for controlling the amount of urine that you excrete, the amount of water that
you retain, and for sexual desire, as well as, mate seeking. Levels of vasopressin in
prairie voles are strongly determinant of whether or not a prairie vole is going to be
monogamous or nonmonogamous. And why do I raise this? Well, I raise this because the
literature on prairie voles Is quite beautiful and has been discussed quite a lot in the
popular press. You can look it up with an easy easily just, web engine search.

[0:20:50] Andrew Huberman: 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, mating behavior and their mate
selection behavior, you can essentially find examples of anything. You can find Examples
of, polygamy.

[0:21:20] Andrew Huberman: You can find examples of, cheating, you know, of infidelity.
You can find examples of all sorts of different behaviors that In your own mind, you can
map to human behavior, but it's really hard to make the leap from animal models to

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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 gonna 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.

[0:21:59] Andrew Huberman: But by and large, we're gonna focus on human studies
today. So unless I say otherwise, the data that I'm referring to today are entirely from
human beings. So let's talk about attachment and attachment styles. And this will offer
you the opportunity to answer some important questions for yourself, Such as, what is my,
meaning your attachment style in relationship? One of the most robust findings in the field
of psychology is this notion of attachment styles, and this was something that was
discovered through a beautiful set of Studies that were done by Mary Ainsworth in the 19
eighties in which she developed a laboratory condition called the strange situation task.

[0:22:39] Andrew Huberman: 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 3 different psychologists. I spoke to a
psychoanalyst. I spoke to a cognitive behavioral psychologist, and I actually 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 3 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.

[0:23:25] Andrew Huberman: 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 is part of the
experiment.

[0:23:53] Andrew Huberman: 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 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.

[0:24:11] Andrew Huberman: 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 2 or 3 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 4
different categories of attachment style And that these attachment styles can predict

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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. I should
mention also that Attachment style is plastic, meaning it can change across the lifespan.

[0:25:17] Andrew Huberman: So as I described the results, I described the different

attachment styles that are out there. And if any of those, resonate with you or, 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, 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 wanna review what the 4 different attachment styles are and
typically people fall into 1 group or another, but not several. So the 4 patterns of
attachment that were revealed by these studies, Again, were revealed by examining the
behavior of the child in response to the mother leaving, the and the mother returning, and
the child's response to the stranger that is in the room with them.

[0:26:16] Andrew Huberman: The first style is the so called secure attachment style. In
the nomenclature of this kind of, 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 might whine. They might cry.

[0:26:51] Andrew Huberman: 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 preverbal.

[0:27:09] Andrew Huberman: This is happening long before the child can express how
they feel with words. And the interpretation of this is that the secure child Feels confident
that the caregiver is available and will be responsive to their needs and their
communications so that when the child whines And 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 Trust that if the parent or caregiver leaves, that the parent will come back
and that they're happy that they do. These children are also very good at Exploring novel
environments after the parent is gone and while the parent is there. And almost always,
when the parent is there, they will explore more broadly, literally in space. They'll venture
out further than they will when the parent is gone.

[0:27:56] Andrew Huberman: 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 1 in
which they're kind of suspicious of this person to 1 in which they're At least somewhat
trusting. Okay? So those are the general contours of the secure attachment style. And
fortunately, nowadays, there Or physiological studies measuring things like heart rate and
breathing and other measures that correlate with the, subjective assessment of what
these children are feeling. Okay.

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[0:28:25] Andrew Huberman: So 1st category is secure attached. The 2nd category is a
so called anxious avoidant or insecurely attached, which are the category a, babies. The
the children with anxious avoidant insecure attachment patterns, generally tend to avoid
or ignore The caregiver, alright, meaning the parent, and show very little emotion when
the parent leaves or returns. So this is the reason they call them avoidant or anxious
avoidant and kind of insecure. There isn't this Happiness or joy that the parent is back.

[0:28:59] Andrew Huberman: They don't seem to express that. They do not exhibit
distress on separation, and They generally tend to have, some tendency to approach the
the caregiver when they return, but it but there doesn't seem to be an a general 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.

[0:29:26] Andrew Huberman: So that's the the second one. The 3rd category is the so
called anxious ambivalent slash resistant insecure category. Yeah. I didn't name these
categories, so you have to blame others in, in this one instance. For everything else,
blame me.

[0:29:40] Andrew Huberman: But in this instance, you have to blame, the psychologists
that that name this category. The anxious ambivalent slash 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. K? 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.

[0:30:18] Andrew Huberman: They tend to show either what seems to be resentment in
response to the parents' absence, we don't really know what they're feeling, or some sort
of helpless Passivity. And there's actually subcategorizations that the psychologists have
come up with with c one subtypes and c two subtypes. We don't have to get bogged
down in that. But just know that there isn't one absolute measure, that says, oh, well, this,
person is anxious, ambivalent, resistant, insecure. They could be somewhat passive, or
they could be, seem somewhat angry at the caregiver.

[0:30:47] Andrew Huberman: 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 Just cortisol
also support that statement. And the 3rd category of attachment style is the so called
disorganized or disoriented or d For the letter d, babies. This is a categorization that was
added later to this strange situation task that is a real Hallmark of developmental,
psychology studies, it was developed by, Mary Ainsworth graduate student, Mary Maine,
who I actually had the great But now is generally accepted.

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[0:31:35] Andrew Huberman: The key feature of the disorganized, disoriented category is
that the toddlers tend to be Tense, and they tend to encompass a lot of, kind of odd
physical postures. They tend to hunch their shoulders. They'll put their hands behind their
neck. They'll, cock their head to the side. For those of you listening, I'm doing this on the
video version.

[0:31:56] Andrew Huberman: It's not, where you don't have to go see that. But for those of
you that are watching this on video, they tend to kind of constrain their their body size a
bit and go into odd postures that they normally wouldn't, do anywhere else. So this is why
it's called the disorganized or disoriented, category. It seems like these children just don't
really know how to react to a separation, And they just, start to manifest behaviors and
emotional tones that aren't observed in other situations. Okay.

[0:32:25] Andrew Huberman: So we've got our 4 categories. I'll try and use the shortest
possible names for each category. We've got category 1, which is securely attached.
We've got category 2, which is insecurely attached, Also sometimes called anxious
avoidant. Then we've got category 3, which is the resistant insecure category, which is
anxious ambivalent.

[0:32:44] Andrew Huberman: And then there's this 4th category, the disorganized
disoriented category or the so called debabies. Now What's interesting about this from the
perspective of desire, love, and attachment is that the categorizations of children into one
Of these 4 different categories, as toddlers, is strongly predictive of their attachment style
in romantic partnerships later in life, which is, to me, both amazing and surprising and not
surprising all at the same time. Amazing because it means that, first of all, we are
relatively 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 or at
least in some way repurposed for entirely different types of attachments later in life. So
when we hear the psychologists, talk about how, you know, we formed a template early in
life based on experiences that were even preverbal before we had language, And those
templates are superimposed on our relationships or, we should say, our later relationships
are superimposed on those templates.

[0:34:09] Andrew Huberman: There really is a basis for that. We now have neuroimaging
studies to support, for instance, the work of of Alan Shore from UCLA showing that when
a mother and child interact Either through very soothing interactions like bottle feeding or
breastfeeding or singing to one's baby or putting them to sleep, that the brain of the child
And the brain of the mother are entering a coordinated state of relaxation. And it's not one
direction mother to child. The child is also calming the mother. Typically, these studies
were done with mothers, again, sometimes with fathers, but typically with mothers.

[0:34:45] Andrew Huberman: 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

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of excitement, and there's the release of neurochemicals like dopamine into the
bloodstream. Whereas in the relaxation Scenario and the soothing scenario, there's we
know the the release of things like serotonin and oxytocin. So the neural systems for
attachment And the neural systems for what we call autonomic arousal, for being alert
and calm, don't act in a vacuum. They are tethered to other people in our environment.

[0:35:26] Andrew Huberman: And, of course, we know this. Right? We sometimes hear
the statement, no one can make you feel anything. I've always had a little bit of a problem
with that statement. I don't think I'm, contradicting anyone in particular, but you hear that a
lot.

[0:35:37] Andrew Huberman: No one can make you feel anything. Indeed, they can.
Right? A physical injury can make you feel something. If somebody says something that
you very much like, it can make you feel something.

[0:35:46] Andrew Huberman: 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, 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.

[0:36:24] Andrew Huberman: When I say neuroimaging, I mean, brain scans support that.
Measures of hormones in the body and brain support that. Measures of neurochemical
support that. There's simply no way around this truth that we have a set of road maps in
our mind that are reused for Entirely different purposes later in life. That is vitally
important to understand because if one Is successful in forming romantic attachments,
maintaining them, etcetera, or not does in fact reflect the earlier templates that you've
created.

[0:36:57] Andrew Huberman: 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 1, 2, 3, or 4, or you know somebody or involved with somebody who
falls into category 1, 2, 3, and 4.

[0:37:34] Andrew Huberman: 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

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secure bonds in adult romantic relationships. And, there's a book that has really tapped
into this. I think it's the 1st book that has really addressed Head on.

[0:37:54] Andrew Huberman: And that book comes from 2, Columbia professors. 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.
Again, both of them are, 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.

[0:38:48] Andrew Huberman: Why does everybody want that? Well, secure attachment
allows people to be both In relationship or if they choose to be on their own or to be in
relationship but physically separated from somebody else or even emotionally separated
from somebody 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 some sense of clarity and not excessive discomfort. So is there a goal in all
of this stuff about love, desire, and attachment? Indeed, there is.

[0:39:20] Andrew Huberman: The the secure attachment style is the one that leads to the
most stable and predictable long term relationships. Put differently, Babies, toddlers,
adolescents, teens, and young adults that have a secure attachment style are more likely
to find and form long term than are people in the other categories. But people in other
categories can learn and eventually migrate into the Secure attachment style. And I think
that book Attached, I have no affiliation to the authors or or the book itself. I should just
mention Attach the New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and
Keep Love.

[0:39:57] Andrew Huberman: Really, it sounds very, pop psychologie esque, but it is really
Rounded 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, 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.

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[0:41:03] Andrew Huberman: So if you're interested in attachment styles and how they
influence adult romantic attachments. And, certainly, if you are a parent, I would
encourage you to check out, the book Attached. Again, it's quite good, and I think that it
offers a number of actionable tools to both form and hold on to secure attachment styles.
So I mentioned that the neural circuits For child parent or child caregiver attachment are
repurposed for romantic attachment later in life. But what are these neural circuits?

[0:41:34] Andrew Huberman: What do they do? I mean, it's so, attractive, if you will, to
think about a brain area that controls Love or a brain area that controls desire or a brain
area that controls attachment, but it simply doesn't work that way. As I've talked about
before on this 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, in the mode of love, or in the mode of
attachment.

[0:42:32] Andrew Huberman: But beneath all of That is this element of autonomic arousal.
And I wanna focus on autonomic arousal just for a bit longer because it really is One of
the 3 core elements by which we form and maintain loving attachments and by which we
break Loving attachments. The autonomic nervous system, as the name suggests, is
automatic. In fact, that's what autonomic means. Now it's actually the case that we can
control our autonomic nervous system to some degree or another.

[0:43:04] Andrew Huberman: But the autonomic nervous system Controls things like
digestion, our breathing, whether or not we're conscious of that breathing or not. It
controls things It's 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.

[0:43:47] Andrew Huberman: 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 it's kind of a seesaw. We go
back and forth between being very alert.

[0:44:02] Andrew Huberman: Can be alert and calm, or we can be very, very alert. We
can be in a state of panic. We can be fast asleep, so we can be extremely calm, or we
can just be kind of sleepy, Semi calm, and but still also alert. So think about it like a

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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.

[0:44:26] Andrew Huberman: Our autonomic tone is how tight That hinges. And there are
biological mechanisms to explain this, but here, I just wanna 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 the
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.

[0:44:58] Andrew Huberman: 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 2. 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, in 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.

[0:45:58] Andrew Huberman: Alright? 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 referred to the
beautiful work of Alan Shore at University of California Los Angeles.

[0:46:28] Andrew Huberman: And, again, his name is is Shore spelled s c h o r e. I'm,
looking down briefly at the floor here because, I'll just reach for for the book. 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, 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, etcetera. 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.

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[0:47:25] Andrew Huberman: And not on this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but
on many other previous episodes as the master stress episode or some of the, optimized
health episodes. You can find these if you want at hubermanlabdot A lot of the tools and
techniques that are recommended there have to do with readjusting the autonomic
nervous system in deliberate ways as an adult. Again, I won't go into the the, specific
tools, but for instance, the the physiological sigh, This, tool that I've talked about
extensively of 2 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.

[0:48:15] Andrew Huberman: 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 wanna 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, 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.

[0:49:17] Andrew Huberman: 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.

[0:49:44] Andrew Huberman: And, actually, in researching this episode there, I discovered
there's an extensive literature finding that the feelings that one has after a breakup are
very much like a clinical depression in many cases. But there are individuals that can look
at a breakup as a transient event that they don't interpret as Going to mean so much for
all aspects of their life or 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, Oh, you know, stress to calm or can't take ourselves from
exhausted to more alert if we need to do that on our own, and so that's why tools to for
doing that exist.

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[0:50:32] Andrew Huberman: But attachment itself is about where our autonomic nervous
system resides. So if I were to offer a set of tools Around these topics of desire, love, and
attachment, I would say, first of all, you might wanna think about whether or not you fall
into the secure, insecure, or other, attachment styles. Second, I think it is vitally important
for all of us, but certainly for people that are in relationships or seeking relationships, to
be able to At least have some recognition of where our autonomic nervous system tends
to reside both in terms of when we are with somebody and when they leave. When we
are apart for long periods of time, can we calm ourselves? Can we self soothe?

[0:51:14] Andrew Huberman: 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.

[0:51:34] Andrew Huberman: This was a I believe the term was first coined by Pia
Mellody, and it actually does 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 all about trauma bonding with an expert at, some point in the
future. But codependence and codependency, the the term can sometimes be
misinterpreted, as any dependence on another isn't good. Interdependence, healthy
interdependence, of course, is Good. It is the hallmark of healthy child parent relations,
sibling relations, and romantic relations.

[0:52:12] Andrew Huberman: But a key element of healthy interdependence is that, Yes.
Our autonomic nervous system is adjusted by the presence of another, but that also that
we can adjust our own autonomic nervous system even in the absence of that person.
That if the person goes away temporarily or permanently, that we can still regulate our
own autonomic nervous system, Both from states of stress to states of calm, both from
states of exhaustion to states of more, alertness. And, of course, we all need sleep to go
from to alertness, but what I'm referring to here is the ability to regulate when distraught
or regulate when, fatigued, or feeling depressed. And that is and is all about the
autonomic nervous system.

[0:52:56] Andrew Huberman: 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. So if the autonomic nervous system is one key
component of desire, love, and attachment, What are the other 2? And what I'm gonna
tell you next is largely the pioneering work of Helen Fisher, Who, 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 neuro Anatomical journal, which is the Journal

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of Comparative Neurology. The Journal of Comparative Neurology has been around for
more than a 100 years and is considered the Archival location for placing, really high
quality anatomy.

[0:54:02] Andrew Huberman: They have tremendously high standards. And, the study I'm
referring to is entitled Romantic Love, an fMRI, meaning functional magnetic resonance
imaging study of a neural mechanism for mate choice. And, doctor Fisher is, a author on
this paper as is Arthur Aaron and Lucy Brown, so all very fine researchers. And This
study as well as several other studies using magnetic resonance imaging, things like
EEG, 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 2 categories of neural circuits essential for desire, love, and attachment.

[0:54:48] Andrew Huberman: 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, 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, a mate when you want 1,
to mate when you want 2, warmth when you're cold, etcetera, etcetera. Okay.

[0:55:30] Andrew Huberman: So it's not for one specific purpose, but the brain areas
associated with dopamine involve, for instance, the ventral tegmental area, substantia
nigra, areas of that sort, the basal ganglia. You don't need to know these names. Just
understand that these are networks of neurons that Tend to put the person, you, into a
state of forward action and pursuit and craving and motivation. They are not about being
quiescent, relaxed, etcetera. The neural circuits for quiescence and relaxation are most
associated with love and attachment, not surprisingly.

[0:56:05] Andrew Huberman: And they're 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 makes serotonin as well and oxytocin as well, but they tend to be associated
with the kind of warmth and calm and, The soothing that we feel in the presence of
another.

[0:56:46] Andrew Huberman: 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
or different degrees. And we were turning 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,

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including in states of, neurochemically modified states, as it were in when we talk about
things like MDMA, so called ecstasy. But in the meantime, I wanna just discuss the 2
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 3 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.

[0:57:49] Andrew Huberman: And then there's the 3rd category, and this might surprise
some of you. It certainly surprised me. But the data point to the fact that the 3rd neural
circuit that's very important for establishing bonds is one associated with positive
delusions. So given that the neural circuits for empathy are Absolutely crucial for falling in
love and maintaining stable attachments. I'd like to talk about those neural circuits and
what they are.

[0:58:13] Andrew Huberman: Now Often when we hear empathy, we think, oh, empathy is
really about listening to and really understanding what somebody else is feeling, maybe
even feeling what they're feeling. And, indeed, that's the case. But what do we mean by
that? Right? What is it to feel what another feels?

[0:58:29] Andrew Huberman: 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.

[0:58:54] Andrew Huberman: 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 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.

[0:59:33] Andrew Huberman: 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 1
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.

[1:00:21] Andrew Huberman: Last I checked, The only way that new humans can be
created is by way of sperm meeting egg, either in body or in dish, but Sperm meets egg,
and then typically 9 months later, we have a human baby. The process of bringing Sperm

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to egg, right, mating behavior, sex behavior in humans is one of autonomic regulation.
And What I mean by that is the process of finding a mate, and in this case, I mean,
actually, someone to mate with typically, while scenarios Very typically is one of elevated
autonomic arousal, meaning increased activation of the so called sympathetic 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.

[1:01:19] Andrew Huberman: 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, At play
here, the the word simpa means together, and the activation of the autonomic nervous
system toward more alert state is because of a sympathetic nervous system, meaning the
Coactivation 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.

[1:02:09] Andrew Huberman: Okay? To be quite direct about this, if the sympathetic
nervous system activation is too high, the sexual arousal response cannot happen in
either males or in females. It's inhibited. However, the orgasm and ejaculation response,
which, if you think about it, is required for sperm to meet egg, is sympathetic driven. And
then after orgasm and ejaculation, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back in,
and there's a calming and relaxation.

[1:02:42] Andrew Huberman: 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 what 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.

[1:03:17] Andrew Huberman: 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, their 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 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.

[1:04:05] Andrew Huberman: And, of course, nowadays, there are technologies like in
vitro fertilization, intra 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

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way it was done, historically for, if not, 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, animal studies, that Classic studies of this were
done by 2 individuals.

[1:04:41] Andrew Huberman: I'll just briefly mention them in case you wanna 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, what's called the lordosis
response. Unlike in humans, The, 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, the male mounting is almost always from behind in some species of primates.
And that lordosis response is only going to occur during particular phases of the Esters
cycle.

[1:05:22] Andrew Huberman: The estrous cycle is sort of the, analog to the menstrual
cycle, but it's not 28 days. It's 4 days or some other, Duration in other animals depending
on the animal. The lordosis response is strongly regulated by odors, by contact, and is
estrogen and testosterone, controlled. And then the male portion of of the mating
sequence in animals, the mounting and thrusting in ejaculation is a call there mounting
thrusting. Intromission and ejaculation, those are the 4 scientific categories that have
been described.

[1:05:53] Andrew Huberman: That's presence in rodents and also in in dogs where it was
primarily studied by Frank Beach who was, at University of California Berkeley for a long
time. And the entire literature around the neural circuitry for sexual mating behavior in
animals largely stemmed, From the work of Donald Foff and Frank Beach and their
scientific offspring, not their actual offspring, you can look at that literature if you like.
There have been human neuroimaging studies of the process that I described a few
minutes ago, believe it or not, of People in brain scanners, not necessarily mating with
other people, but going through that arc of arousal, 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. The
spinal cord areas that control, things like, erection, vaginal lubrication, ejaculation, and
orgasm, those have also been mapped out.

[1:06:58] Andrew Huberman: And this has all been explored from the perspective of both
of both basic science, just to get an understanding of how our species, Has sexual
interactions and reproduces, but also from the perspective of, for instance, trying to
repair, sexual function after Spinal cord injury, which, is, you know, a prominent concern
for a lot of people depending on where they have their injury, but in, in the number of
people that have spinal cord injuries. So this is both vital biological and clinical data. The
neural circuits For everything that I just described, reside in the autonomic nervous
system and are coordinated with the neural circuits that are associated with empathy. The
neural circuits for empathy, Again, there are many, but mainly 2 structures that you should
know about, the prefrontal cortex, which is how we perceive things outside of us and

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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, the
dinner and date portion of the mating dance or the Actual physical dance, part of the main
dance, or actual mating and and sexual behavior, kissing or otherwise, that is a
coordinated Activity of 2 bodies, typically, it's 2.

[1:08:26] Andrew Huberman: I realize sometimes it's more, sometimes it's only 1, but
typically, it's 2, Bodies and at least in the framework we're using here, that coordinated
dance is one in which the autonomic nervous system of 1 individual, In general, it's
coordinating with the autonomic nervous system of the other individual, and the insula is
essentially splitting one's attention between how we feel ourselves, how our body feels,
what we're thinking, with the thinking and The body's bodily sensations of the other. And
that can be communicated obviously through words. It can be communicated through
sounds. It can be communicated through touch, And it can be communicated through a
number of, of kind of more subtle cues like pupil size or whether or not, certainly in cases
where we recognize the person and we kind of Know their responses, their autonomic
responses under different conditions. We can assess it.

[1:09:17] Andrew Huberman: Is the person comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are
they, 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, it's, time to tip the seesaw to one to one side
or the other depending on whether or not the other person seesaw is tilted higher or lower
than the other. Okay.

[1:09:42] Andrew Huberman: 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 Say, what's out there, and do I wanna match
to it or not? Okay? And then the 3rd category of neural circuit Helen Fisher and others
have found to be important for desire, love, and attachment is the neural circuit
associated with self delusion. What do we mean by that?

[1:10:14] Andrew Huberman: Well, first of all, self delusion implies a kind of, cynicism
about love and attachment. And I think it was George Bernard Shaw that said, love is
really about overestimating the differences between individuals. Actually, when I hear that
and as I say it, really don't like that quote. I have no bone to pick with George Bernard
Shaw, but what it suggests, and I think what he meant, was that, you know, In love and
attachment, we tend to put so much value in the other that we forget that many of the
processes that are going on in our brain and body Actually, it 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, everything, or
somebody's particular thing or things can really becomes so vital for our autonomic
nervous system to feel soothed and to feel elated, etcetera.

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[1:11:11] Andrew Huberman: So I think that, while the quote is Accurate in the one sense,
I think it does overlook, the neural circuits for attachment and just how deeply wired those
can become for us. So I We'll balance that quote with, an enormous number of other
quotes that I I I won't, mention, but that you can find out there that really point to, You
know, how incredible, the person is that one tends to be attached to, that there's really
only 1 or, you know, or or several, people that could ever exist that could evoke those
feelings from us. And, of course, you can read your, you know, in music and poetry and
and writing. So for every cynical quote about these neural circuits being generic and,
could be activated by anybody, I think you'll find, an ample number of, opposing quotes
that these neural circuits can only be activated by That special someone or that particular
person or maybe in just a small set of those people. So what of delusion?

[1:12:11] Andrew Huberman: Well, the work of Helen Fisher and others has really pointed
to the fact that desire, love, and attachment are 3 separate phases of 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 slash sexual interactions, it doesn't
necessarily have to be sex itself, but certainly, Something that involves intimacy of some
kind, right, and generally touch of some kind eventually transitions into 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, 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. Cortex is plural,
cortices. And, again, there's our friend the insula.

[1:13:16] Andrew Huberman: 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 they're associated with touch,
the somatosensory areas, but More interestingly, the insular 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 number of brain areas, the amygdala, orbit of 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, positive delusion is Predictive of long term
attachment.

[1:14:28] Andrew Huberman: 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

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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.

[1:15:11] Andrew Huberman: They actually get access to our control panel. So it's our
autonomic nervous system empathy and this positive dilution. Now positive dilution is
critical. If you look at the stability of relationships over time, something that's been
extensively studied mainly by psychologists but now also by neurobiologists, what you
find is that there are Some 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.

[1:15:55] Andrew Huberman: This is largely the work of the Gottmans. It's actually a
husband and wife team up at the University City of Washington in Seattle. The Gottmans,
have run a laboratory in the department of psychology for a long time. They've also done
a lot of public facing work around Relationships. And they've talked about, the various
aspects of relationships and interactions between People that predict either staying
together or breaking up so much so that they've established a method by which they can
Look at video interactions between couples and with very high degree of certainty, predict
whether or not those couples will Stay together or break up over time.

[1:16:34] Andrew Huberman: And they've identified what they call the 4 horsemen of
relationships. These are things that, essentially Almost always predict that a couple will
break up, and I think the current number on this is that Gottman can predict divorce with
94% accuracy, which, if you think about, is pretty remarkable. So even though, these are
purely psychological studies, I'm not aware of any, 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 with 94% accuracy. So what
are those things? Those 4 behaviors, what they call the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse,
for relationships, are, 1, criticism, 2, defensiveness, 3, stonewalling, And 4, contempt,
with contempt being, the most powerful predictor of, breaking up.

[1:17:34] Andrew Huberman: Criticism, of course, does not mean that there's, no place for
criticism in stable relationships. Of course, there is. It has to do with how frequent and
how intensely that criticism is voiced. Defensiveness, of course, is defensiveness, we
know as The sort of lack of ability to hear another or to adopt their stance, so lack of
empathy, I think, is is one way to interpret defensiveness. Stonewalling, which is actually
another form of lack of empathy.

[1:18:04] Andrew Huberman: It's a turning off of this neural circuit That's so critical for,
desire, love, and attachment. The stonewalling essentially means, the emotional
response or the Request of another is completely cut off. So it's it's, I don't think there's
been brain imaging of this, but we I think we can reasonably imagine that it involves,
untethering your insular response from the other and what they're dealing with and

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focusing your insular Response, no pun intended, on your own internal state or perhaps
the state of, someone else entirely. I'll talk about Fidelity in a moment and then contempt.
And contempt has actually been referred to as the sulfuric acid of relationship.

[1:18:43] Andrew Huberman: I didn't say that, but Gottman and colleagues have That it is,
such a powerful predictor of divorce and breakups, in the future. And contempt, of course,
by definition is The feeling that a person or thing is beneath consideration, worthlessness,
or deserving scorn. And, apparently, they can identify this In the videos of, couples having
discussions and reacting by, very elaborate eye rolls, by expressions of Anger in 1
individual when their partner is actually expressing enthusiasm or excitement about
something. It's the, oh, yeah. You would say that, or, or deep seated resentment toward
the other, so much so that it's apparent that one kind of actively dislikes the other Partner.

[1:19:30] Andrew Huberman: So contempt, disregard for something that should be taken
into account is the other way to think about it. That runs counter to all of the neural
circuits, all 3 of the neural circuits that we talked about before. It certainly is, it is the
antithesis of empathy. It is Anything but a positive delusion, it's really looking at the other
individual either accurately or inaccurately as somebody that you kind of despise. And
then it is an Absolute inversion of the autonomic seesaw matching that I was talking
about before.

[1:20:00] Andrew Huberman: It's a dissociating of your seesaw from their seesaw. They're
very excited about something. You're unexcited by it. In fact, it's an inversion of their
seesaw where they're excited, you're down. They're down, you're up.

[1:20:14] Andrew Huberman: 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, surprising that is so strongly predictive of breakups
and in the case of married couples of divorce. For those of you that are interested in the
work of the Gottmans and similar work, they've written several popular books. They're
fairly easy to find. We can link to one of those in the caption.

[1:20:43] Andrew Huberman: But they've also developed some, quite interesting online
resources, in their so called love lab. I guess it's fortunate that they didn't call it the, hate
lab Lab or the breakup lab because they focused a lot on, what predicts breakups. But
they've also, written extensively and researched extensively in peer reviewed studies,
what makes people find appropriate partners for them and, to maintain those partnerships
over time. So you can go, you can search for LoveLab University of Washington,
Gottman, or any number of their various books. Think you'll find some, some useful
resources there.

[1:21:24] Andrew Huberman: I wanna shift back to the work of Helen Fisher. She's made
some very interesting statements and some very interesting observations that, at least to
my mind, map very well onto the knowledge of neural circuitry both in humans and in
nonhuman primates and in other species. I realized that, she's not The only name in the
game, but she's made some observations that I think are, are very, as we say,

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parsimonious, meaning they allow us to organize a Lot of this stuff into some distinct
frameworks. She's also done some really beautiful studies, that involve data from millions
or even Tens of millions of individuals on dating sites. So I'm gonna share those with you
in a moment.

[1:22:05] Andrew Huberman: But, before I do that, I just want to, Paraphrase, doctor
Fisher, who said that, sex drive or desire, the Suit of someone to mate with, meaning to
mate the verb, not necessarily to find a mate, May be she didn't say definitively, but may
be a way to forage for potential love partners, that the the arc of this, whole business is
really the order that we're describing it, that it's desire then love and then attachment. And
that oftentimes people can get Confused. You may know some of these people. You may
be one of these individuals who might confuse desire for attachment or might confuse,
love, for attachment, 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 us in
the context of kind of more modern dating themes where, depending on culture, people
might explore several, maybe many, many, individuals before, quote, unquote, settling
down, with with somebody at least some period of time. I think that's a an interesting
framework, because it circumvents a lot of the, Frankly, unanswerable questions about
whether or not, you know, humans were meant to be monogamous or whether or not they
Those are conversations that hold cultural context, that hold, all sorts of context that really
can't be addressed in a laboratory setting.

[1:23:42] Andrew Huberman: But this idea that, sex drive is a way to forage for potential
love partners And that love is a a 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. Later in the
episode, we'll talk about this notion of of sex drive and desire. I'll actually talk about some
tools, That are that have very strong data really to support, them in terms of things that
people can do or take to increase libido, both men and women, because there there's
actually quite good data on that now. But in the meantime, I want to talk about some of
the work that Doctor Fisher has done in terms of categorizing people into again, we have
4 groups. These are distinct From the a, b, c, and d attachment styles described earlier,
although as I described them, you might be able to map them somewhat on to those.

[1:24:36] Andrew Huberman: And these 4 groups, are groups that were defined through
her studies of people that were or are 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, forgive me if this is not accurate, is that
In upwards of 40,000,000 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.

[1:25:20] Andrew Huberman: Again, these are averages. But, typically, men have more
testosterone than they do estrogen, And they have more testosterone than do women
and less estrogen than do women. Typically, women have more estrogen than they do
testosterone, Again, averages, and they have less testosterone than men, more estrogen

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than men, and so and so on and so forth. But Both hormone systems are active in both,
sets of individuals. And, of course, All humans, as far as we know, manufacture both
dopamine and serotonin.

[1:25:53] Andrew Huberman: Dopamine, as I mentioned earlier, has a number of in the

brain and body, but one of the primary effects is that it places us into states of motivation
and pursuit, for various things. There is a somewhat Close relationship between the
dopamine system and the testosterone system, in the hypothalamus, this brain area
above the roof your mouth and the pituitary gland, which is responsible for making
hormones that make the ovaries and or testes, secrete, testosterone or estrogen. So
there's a lot of signaling that occurs such that dopamine 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, or, I guess, better stated.

[1:26:48] Andrew Huberman: These aren't, Strict black and white categorizations, but I
think those general themes hold when you look at the animal and, human data. So doctor
Fisher has Taking some some liberties, but I think they are, 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 4 the 4
categories are, she calls 1 the dopamine, category. So these are people, who would have
high dopamine. And, again, that's just a name. It doesn't mean they have low anything
else, but they are high on The dopamine scale.

[1:27:39] Andrew Huberman: People who rate high on on the dopamine scale tend to be
what the scientists and psychologists call high Sensation seeking, novel seeking, they like
new things. They like spontaneity. They tend to be very adventurous. I think that's largely
true. If you look at conditions where dopamine is, super physiological.

[1:27:59] Andrew Huberman: It's elevated beyond abnormal Levels, things like mania, or
when people take certain drugs of abuse like cocaine or amphetamine that Really raise
dopamine levels up very, very high for some period of time. They do tend to increase
energy energy motivation and novelty seeking. And, of course, drugs like amphetamine
and cocaine have all sorts of deleterious effects, that I don't need to go into here, but it's
worth pointing out. But they don't tend to make people calm and relaxed and seek,
soothing, interactions. Conversely, the group that, doctor Fisher calls the serotonin group,
tend to be, more grounded in soothing activities, quiescent type activities.

[1:28:43] Andrew Huberman: They actually tend to be, on average, they tend to like rules
and follow rules. They tend to be homebodies, this sort of thing. They're really, you can
imagine them the sort of Stable types, but they really like stability. They're not really into
spontaneity as much. Again, averages.

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[1:28:58] Andrew Huberman: And then she, created 2 other categories, The testosterone
category of high testosterone, this, again, could be males or females, and then the
estrogen Category, again, could be males or females. And she gave these different
names, that I won't go into here. You can look up her work online, but she you know,
Names like the director and, and the follower and things like that. But I I don't really
wanna use those as much as I wanna stick to the the biological terms. So we have
dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, Testosterone and estrogen.

[1:29:28] Andrew Huberman: Now that might seem like an unfair, kind of,
overgeneralization, but What's interesting is not necessarily the name or the
neurochemical system. Right? Those could have just been called category 1, 2, 3, and 4
for all that, that, matters here. What is interesting is seeing how those different groups of
individuals that She absolutely can categorize based on their self reported preferences
about behaviors and certain kinds of interactions, How those groups tend to pair up with
people in the same or opposite categories. So what her studies reveal is that People that
fall into the high sensation seeking, novelty seeking, spontaneity category, the one that
she calls the high dopamine category, Tend to pair up with, at least in the short term, tend
to pair up with people who are also in that dopaminergic category.

[1:30:23] Andrew Huberman: So, would be people that would spontaneously take a trip or
explore something new or a new restaurant. They tend to be, creative and explorative
types. So that group on average tends to date and mate and potentially, form long term
relationships within category. Again, averages. Individuals that she placed into the
serotonin group or the what she hypothesized would be a high serotonin group, again,
they didn't measure Perotone.

[1:30:54] Andrew Huberman: But people that, tend to place value on stability, on rules, on,
certain forms of kind of traditional organization At home and in relationships, those people
also tended to pair up with select date, We presume mate with, and form stable
relationships with people in the same category. Now individuals In the other 2 categories,
the high testosterone group and, again, testosterone wasn't measured, but she called it
the high testosterone group. But these are people that Tend to be, very directive. They
tend to know what they want and are comfortable telling other people, what they from
them. These are individuals that, in her studies and in other studies, tend to be a little bit
Challenging, meaning they, not necessarily challenging to be around, but they tend to
challenge other people, kind of push them in order to, expand their boundaries either, for
sake of the relationship or just in general.

[1:31:55] Andrew Huberman: And the people they tend to push are the people that they,
pair up with, which are the people in the estrogen Category, what she called high
estrogen. Again, they didn't measure estrogen, but the people in the estrogen category,
were the ones that, describe themselves and their Choices in life and their preferences as
being nurturing. They actually seem to like it when someone else, is making, the major
decisions, Not every decision. They certainly like to be heard, of course, in terms of their
preferences. But that those 2 types, the, what she called the testosterone and the
estrogen type tend to pair up.

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[1:32:29] Andrew Huberman: So why are these categorizations and these averages
interesting to me, at least Interesting enough to convey to you. The reason they're
interesting to me is, again, not because of their names. These molecules were not
measured in these individuals. But that They once again bring us to the themes that we
addressed before, which are the autonomic nervous system and whether or not it tends to
be shifted more towards Alertness in action or more towards kind of a stable equilibrium
or more towards kind of calm, and whether or not individuals are selecting for people who
have autonomic nervous systems that are more or less like theirs before they even meet.
Right?

[1:33:10] Andrew Huberman: So, again, going back to this seesaw analogy, it's almost
like people who have the kind of flat seesaw, alert but calm, but not extremely alert, not
Extremely, overly calm in in situations, but kind of in the middle seem to be seeking out
people that are also at that kind of, autonomic equilibrium. People in the, what she called,
the dopamine category, which really can just be described as high sensation seeking,
novelty seeking, They seem to want to pair with one another. So there's a selection for
similar in 2 of the groups, autonomic tone. I find that very interesting because in that
decision or that preference for similar autonomic tone, it Essentially eliminates a lot of the,
the requirement for, figuring out How to match one's autonomic nervous system to
another. They simply find someone with a similar tendency.

[1:34:06] Andrew Huberman: Okay? Whereas in the Other 2 groups that she called
testosterone and estrogen, the director type and the nurturing kind of somewhat follower
type, there's a, an establishment of balance, but not in the in between 2 individuals as a
match, but rather On the whole, in the relationship, 1 person is kind of driving the novelty
seeking in the course of decisions and actions, and the other person Is essentially
agreeing to those, now assuming that those, decisions are good for for both people. And I
emphasize good for both people because one of the themes that doctor Fischer
underscores, and I'd like to underscore here as well, is that it need not be the case that
people pair up exactly according to these categorizations that I've described. Dopamine
with dopamine, serotonin with serotonin, testosterone with estrogen, and so on. What is
important is that there be a recognition and a respect for the other types or A recognition
and a respect for the fact that both are of the same type.

[1:35:08] Andrew Huberman: You can actually imagine, for instance, that 2 people of this
high sensation seeking, novelty seeking, could have a terrifically exciting relationship, but
that it actually, might be a relationship in with in which, the financial stability isn't quite
there or in which the basic stability isn't there. You could imagine, for instance, a a
situation in which a relationship between 2 people of, what she called the high serotonin,
preference would have a relationship that was actually kind of dull in which both of them
found themselves kinda bored at some point or, in which there wasn't enough of die of the
dynamic tension, that sometimes is required in order to keep this The cycle of desire,
love, and attachment going, something that we will talk about in a moment. So the point
here is not that one should necessarily pair up according to the, these arrangements that
I described. The point is that on average, that's what tends to happen, and That through a

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recognition that these categorizations exist, similar to the recognition that the Type a, b, c,
and d, infant and toddler type attachments exist that we can gain better self awareness of
who we are and how we tend to show up in romantic attachments and thereby navigate
healthier mate Seeking healthier, breakups, if if the the case, dictates it, and in some
cases, healthy long term relationships by understanding that The other person can either
be similar or complementary to us.

[1:36:44] Andrew Huberman: 1 is neither better than the other. It's simply the case that In
all romantic attachments from the initial inception of the romantic attachment, desire,
Love and attachment, there is an autonomic coordination. And, of course, there is
coordination of all sorts of other things like, you know, food, sex, and sleep, and, finances,
and, where people are going to live, and many other features. But that at the core of all
that is a seeking of either autonomic likeness or autonomic differences. And I think that
recognition can be extremely Nervous system not simply as something that is driven by
external people and events, but that we can actually gain some control over Through
techniques of the sort that I talked about earlier and on previous podcasts, but also
generally, if we are able to adjust our autonomic nervous system In order to at least
appreciate or get some empathy into what someone else is experiencing, then we gain
Actual cognitive empathy.

[1:37:56] Andrew Huberman: And this episode isn't about empathy per se, but the theme
keeps coming up again and again. And I think it's Worth mentioning that when you talk to
psychologists, whether or not they're psychoanalysts or from another, source of training,
What you find is that they don't talk about empathy as a general term. They will talk about
emotional empathy. They'll talk about cognitive empathy. And what I'm talking about Here
today is a yet a third category that is very strongly determinant of relationship dynamics,
and that's autonomic empathy.

[1:38:27] Andrew Huberman: I'm a biologist. I'm not a psychologist, so I love mechanism.
And fortunately, there are studies that have been done Recently, using modern
techniques to look at neural mechanisms of romantic attachment. I mentioned earlier
some of the brain imaging studies that have been done On child and mother, literally
imaging the activity of neurons in the brain as child is nursing or as A mother is soothing
baby, and as you learned earlier, baby is soothing mother as well. Those are remarkable
studies.

[1:39:00] Andrew Huberman: You may have seen some of these pictures online. You can
see the kind of of the infant and mother and their brains and, even some of the brain
activation patterns. Really, really beautiful studies. Similar Studies have been done in
romantic couples, with those couples either touching one another, touching and kissing,
Or, in kind of clever, I think, control experiments of the person just touching a pillow or
something or kissing a pillow, in order to try and create the most, reasonable control for
what are actually pretty complicated interpersonal dynamics to do in a brain imaging
Scanner. But some of the other studies that have been done recently involved so called
EEG.

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[1:39:41] Andrew Huberman: So these are electrical recordings that are done
noninvasively, putting a bunch of electrodes on the outside of the scalp. EEG is useful in
that you can, do it non invasively. You can do it, in While people are moving and doing
things, kissing, touching, etcetera, it doesn't allow one to image or to evaluate neural
activity very deeply in the brain, so you can miss out on a lot of things. It's sort of like
looking at the wave structure on the ocean without actually looking into the depths of the
of the ocean. So you can miss certain things, but if you see things, generally, you trust
they are there, but you can't see what you don't see.

[1:40:18] Andrew Huberman: Nonetheless, there are some studies that I'll just point you
to, and that form the, segue for what I'm going to, discuss in in a moment, which is a
Study published in Scientific Reports, in 2021, entitled Investigating Real Life Emotions in
Romantic Couples, a mobile EEG study. So this, is as the, title suggests, having people
wear these EEG caps of electrodes, get, Engage in very passionate emotional kisses,
emotional speech toward one another, standing at different distances. So a lot of, cool
stuff that you can do that you really couldn't do in a brain scanner, because in a brain
scanner, people have to be there in a usually in a bite bar. There are actually jaw works
like this. I've been in one of these things.

[1:41:02] Andrew Huberman: A lot of moving around to be had, at least not using, the
current technology. In any case, what they found was, there Is a shift in brain waves,
brain states, things like alpha waves, which is just a particular frequency of brain waves in
the neocortex, the kind of shell of the brain just beneath, the skull. And in people that are
kissing or in people that are engaged in romantic speech or I, I didn't actually, hear what
they said to one another, but what the couple seems, exciting, romantic, and arousing to
them, they see more alpha wave activity compared to the control conditions, and there
was some, what we call lateralization where the left hemisphere was more active then the
right, and so forth. And these studies are important because we know that the autonomic
nervous systems of individuals tend to start to collaborate and actually synchronize at the
level of heartbeats, at the level of breathing, during romantic interactions of different
kinds. But these studies are some of the first of their kind to start looking at neural
synchronization between individuals.

[1:42:09] Andrew Huberman: Now The simple, version of looking at this and the way I
would have thought this would all go was, okay, 2 people start kissing, they Start talking
about what they find particularly romantic and arousing for them, and their brainwaves will
just match to one another. And, that's really the basis of Romantic attachment and
romantic engagement, in that sort of thing. But it turns out that The opposite is true. So a
really nice study published in a in a really fine journal, Cerebral Cortex is a journal that
I've known about many years, they published strong anatomy, physiology, and
neuroimaging. There's a a study that was published.

[1:42:48] Andrew Huberman: First author, Kajimura, in and this paper really points again,
this is 2021. And the title of this paper is Brain knows who is on the same wavelength.
Resting state connectivity can predict compatibility of female male relationship. Now what

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this study did was a little bit different. They looked at the resting or default mode activity of
the brain.

[1:43:12] Andrew Huberman: So Rather than evoked activity, as it's called, where people
are kissing or are engaged in some sort of activity, this was a neuroimaging study, not
EEG, but fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is similar to to EEG in
principle, but allows you to look deep into the brain. And it has Very good resolution in
time and space. So fast events can be monitored, and, the precise location of those
events can be monitored, somewhat better than EEG. There are exceptions to this. So for
you EEGers out there, EEG, don't, don't come after me with, electrodes.

[1:43:50] Andrew Huberman: Just understand that fMRI, gives you a fuller picture of
what's going on. And what Kajimura et al found was that contrary to what, your reflexive
prediction might be, people tend to select People that have resting brain states that are
different than theirs or sometimes they found that are actually opposite to their own
resting brain state. And you might say, well, that doesn't make any sense. I thought this is
all about autonomic, coordination. But, actually, if we go back to Helen Fisher's
categorizations of the the dopamine types, the sensation seeking types, that is, serotonin,
the kind of, Stable rule following types, testosterone and estrogen types.

[1:44:34] Andrew Huberman: Remember that the 2 categories that she called
testosterone and estrogen type, the director and the the follower, the nurturer, I guess it
would be the more accurate way, the director and the nurturer, those tend to pair up
across categories, not within category. And so I think what's really needed for this field,
which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet, is to really start to map the Neuroanatomical
and neurophysiological findings of, in this case, that resting brain state is in one Form in 1
individual, and they tend to seek out people whose resting brain state is different than
theirs, not similar. That needs to be mapped onto the More subjective psychological
categorizations that Helen Fisher and indeed the Gottmans and others have created.
That's sort of the state of the field now. And I mention this not to confuse you, but to the
contrary, to illustrate that It's not just about finding someone just like you, and it's not just
about finding someone who's opposite to you.

[1:45:35] Andrew Huberman: This is actually the reason that I decided to become A
biologist at some point in my life, which is that we can find verbal sayings and stories and
examples to support just about anything. It's this is not a knock on the field of psychology.
As you can probably tell from today's episode, I have great respect for and reverence for
the field of psychology, especially, its collaboration with neuroscience and vice versa. But
in the popular culture, we can find examples and sayings that support essentially anything
as it relates to a relationship. For instance, I've heard and you've probably heard,
absence makes the heart grow fonder, and indeed, I've experienced that, and I believe it's
true.

[1:46:13] Andrew Huberman: But I also have instance, I believe to be true that out of
sight, out of mind also exists and that there will be a biological mechanism for that. The
point here is that matching of same to same or same to different can both be effective in

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creating the desire, love, attachment process. It's a matter of Who is looking for same and
who is looking for different? And there, I think, doctor Fisher and the work of these
neurophysiologists and brain imagers really does point in a direction whereby there is not
one form of attachment that is going to be wholly above all else and will predict Good
outcomes. There is not going to be a case in which opposites attract, and that's always
the best rule to follow.

[1:46:58] Andrew Huberman: Sometimes it will, Sometimes it won't. There is also not the
case that people tend to pair up with similar. Sometimes it will be the case, sometimes it
won't. Now there are certain Statistics that support that statement. For instance, people
on average, people pair up with individuals of similar educational background, income,
and attractiveness.

[1:47:19] Andrew Huberman: That is true on average, but it's not always the case. And,
again, a knowledge of and a respect for the different categorizations of attachment, the
different categorizations of mate seeking described by Fischer and others, and the
recognition that matching of autonomic nervous systems But also mismatching of resting
state brain networks are all at play in driving what we are calling desire, love, and
attachment. So in keeping with the exploration of the fact that there's a saying or a book
or a song or an example of pretty much any relationship dynamic, I want dynamic. I want
to now talk about an article that came out a little over 10 years ago that Talked about the
universality of love and the ability to fall in love. So this would be very much in line with
the George Bernard Shaw quote that I mentioned earlier that, love is really overestimating
the differences between individuals.

[1:48:10] Andrew Huberman: And, again, I should say that is not something that I
personally believe, although maybe I'm just deluding myself. I like to think that the people
that we fall in love with, are really special for us that they could not Easily be replaced
with anybody else. That's simply my stance. I'm not basing that on any, hardcore
neurobiological mechanism. But, nonetheless, an article was published in The New York
Times in 2015 that related to some Psychological studies that were done as well as some
clinical work as well as some, what I would call, pop psychology or things that fall side the
the domains of academic science.

[1:48:50] Andrew Huberman: And the the whole basis of this article was, 36 questions
that lead to love, and it involved a listing out, indeed, of 36 questions, Set divided into set
1, set 2, and set 3 that progress from somewhat ordinary questions about life experience,
and self report to more, let's call them deep questions about people's values and and
things that are emotionally close to them. And I'll just give an example a few of these. You
can find this easily online by just, putting into the your search engine 36 questions that
lead to love. Some of the Questions in set number 1 were, for instance, what would
constitute a perfect day for you? Stuff.

[1:49:38] Andrew Huberman: In set 2, what is your most treasured memory? What's your
most terrible memory? So these are are, as you can tell, are drilling a little bit deeper into
one's Personal experience and and emotional system. And then set 3, questions 25

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through 36. Are things, you know, what is a a very embarrassing moment in your life?

[1:50:00] Andrew Huberman: When did you last cry in front of another person, and by
yourself? What is something that's too serious to be joked about? So it's going, deeper
into, one's emotional system and, even questions like, Of all the people in your family,
whose death would you find most disturbing and why? So pretty pretty heavy stuff there
at the end. Now The reason this article got so much traction and the reason I'm bringing it
up today is that there was a statement that was made in and around this article that if 2
people went on a date or simply sat down and asked each other these questions, And
each answered these questions, and the other was paying attention carefully and, At
some level, emotionally responding or not responding, but certainly paying attention to
the answers of the other person, that by the end of that exchange, where one person
asks 36 questions and the other person Change where 1 person asks 36 questions and
the other person answers all 36, and then the other person asks all 30 6 and the other
person answers all 36, that they would fall in love, right, which seems like kind of a
ridiculous thing.

[1:51:08] Andrew Huberman: And yet, It is the case that people who go through this
exercise report feeling as if they know the other quite well and feeling certain, levels of
attachment or even love and desire for the other person that they Were would not have
predicted, excuse me, would not have predicted, had they not gone through that process.
So what's going on in this exchange of questions and Answers of a progressively more
emotional and deep level. Well, what I predict is going on is that inside of that exchange,
People are creating a sort of delusional story about the nature of the exchange being a
reflection of some deeper attachment. And so even though people are just exchanging
words, they're not, physically touching. They are not at least not at the point where they're
Running these kinds of, questionnaire studies.

[1:52:03] Andrew Huberman: They may touch afterwards for all I know and probably did
in some cases, But they're not exchanging life experience in an immediate way. They're
not actually going off into the world and doing things together yet. They are simply
exchanging narrative. But we know based on recent studies, and I've covered this before,
On this podcast, but I'll mention again, there was a study published in Cell Reports, a Cell
Press journal, excellent journal, showing That when individuals listen to the same
narrative, their heart rates tend to synchronize or at least follow a very similar pattern
Even if they're not in the same room listening to a given narrative. Whereas in this case,
people are facing one another, listening to the narratives of each other.

[1:52:46] Andrew Huberman: Certainly, they are having autonomic responses, and it
stands to reason that their autonomic nervous systems are synchronizing Much in the
same way that the Cell Reports study found that people will synchronize their autonomic
nervous systems to a shared Heard story from another. In other words, whether or not we
hear a story, watch a movie, listen to a song, or exchange our own individual stories, Our
autonomic nervous systems have the potential to map onto one another. So I'm not all
that surprised that people find that they fall in love, In quotes, after answering these

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questions to one another. Because, essentially, the way these questions are laid out is
they establish a narrative. They establish a very personal narrative, and the other person
is listening very closely.

[1:53:32] Andrew Huberman: And we don't have physiological or brain imaging studies to,
to support what I'm about to say, but the the reasonable interpretation is that that's
causing some sort of autonomic Synchronization. So if you wanna try this on a date or
even, it's actually been, hypothesized that this could be useful for existing couples, even if
they all ring know the answers to some of these questions, and that doesn't surprise me
either. I think the autonomic coordination is present during mating behavior. Present
during shared experience of the outside world, movies, concerts, watching one's children
with somebody else, etcetera. And it's established by sharing one's own narrative of their
own personal experience.

[1:54:15] Andrew Huberman: So I don't wanna seem overly reductionist. I'll never propose
that all of our sensation, perception, action, and experience in life boils down to, us just
being bags of Chemicals and the action of those chemicals or any aspect of our nervous
system. And yet, in looking across the Psychological literature of development of
attachment in the psychological literature of adult and romantic attachment and what
makes and breaks Those attachments. It's very clear to me, and I think courses through
the literature at multiple levels, that autonomic coordination is absolutely key for the
establishment of desire, love, and attachment. In fact, I talked earlier about how our
actual conception is born out of Autonomic coordination of one sort or another.

[1:55:02] Andrew Huberman: So, again, it doesn't necessarily mean that autonomic
nervous systems always be synchronized. In the case of the 2 categorizations that
Fischer proposed of the director slash testosterone type and the, the nurturing, Follower
slash estrogen type, it was actually the coordination but in opposite directions of
Individuals that fall into each of those categories that led to more stable attachments or
the seeking out of those attachments, as you'd say. But nonetheless, it's, At least to my
mind, very clear that autonomic coordination is a hallmark feature of desire, a hallmark
feature of What we call love and a hallmark feature of what we call attachment, and that
the breaking of attachments or the failures of desire, The failures of love and the failures
of attachment over time in line with the work of Gottman and others and in even just
simply what's required For mating behavior is also reflected in the autonomic nervous
system, but in that case, a failure to coordinate the autonomic nervous systems in some
sort of concerted way. Any discussion about desire, love, and attachment would be
incomplete if we didn't talk about the dreaded infidelity and Cheating. Yeah.

[1:56:20] Andrew Huberman: Much has been made of infidelity and cheating and whether
or not people who are higher on dopamine and sensation seeking tend to cheat more or
less. Frankly, I don't think there's any solid evidence for that. I think there are a lot of
examples that we can draw from in our own lives and, in the lives of others Would
generally support 1 or the other model, but I'm not aware of any decent physiological
studies or psychological studies that really point to that. For instance, I would never say
that, the serotonergic phenotype as described by Fischer, is less prone to cheat or That

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the, you know, people who have an insecure attachment are are more likely to cheat,
etcetera, for instance. I don't think those correlations have Been drawn in any kind of
meaningful way yet, so I would be cautious about, assigning them, without that evidence.

[1:57:11] Andrew Huberman: However, There are some interesting studies involving,
again, neuroimaging and some subjective measures in humans, meaning asking them
questions that, they're Good ways to tease out lies from truths in in these sorts of studies.
And whether or not people tend to find their partner or others More or less attractive
depending on how people feel about themselves. And I think this is a very interesting
Back to desire, love, and attachment for the following reason. You hear a lot out there
that, you know, in order to Form a really strong relationship, you have to have a good
relationship with yourself, or you have to love yourself, or, you often hear, for instance,
that, you know, it's exactly when you're not looking for a relationship that you're gonna
find when you hear this Right? But none of that is really grounded in any studies.

[1:58:05] Andrew Huberman: Again, that's like out of sight, out of mind, or absence makes
the heart grow fonder. There there are many life examples to support, those, statements
and there are many life examples to support statements to the opposite. There's a
particular study that I found. This was published in Frontiers in Psychology, but it's a
experimental study that involves, neuroimaging. The title of this study is manipulation of
self expansion alters responses to Tractive alternative partners.

[1:58:35] Andrew Huberman: And I love the design of this study. What they did in this
study is they took couples and they evaluated members of that relationship for what's
called self expansion. Now self expansion is a metric that involves One's perception of
self as seen through the relationship to the other. And, this is something that was
developed by, the The authors are Aaron and Aaron, so they have the same last name.
So I'm assuming this was either a sibling team or a somehow related team or a or a A
romantic couple team, a r o n, and a r o n.

[1:59:13] Andrew Huberman: Aaron and Aaron, in 1986, Proposed the self expansion
model of close relationships, and they propose that people are motivated to enter
relationships, I'm reading here, in order to enhance the self and increase self efficacy. In
other words, that one of the reasons why many people enter relationships is that it makes
us feel good about ourselves and more capable. And I would see That is a healthy
interdependence, not necessarily codependence. This is especially strong at the
beginning of a relationship, it turns out, when people are forming pair bonds. And it's the
case that pleasure, arousal, and excitement, again, all hallmark features of autonomic
nervous system function, Pleasure, arousal, and excitement give rise to self expansion,
meaning to self efficacy.

[1:59:59] Andrew Huberman: So what this Self expansion model is really about is how
great other people that we are close to and romantically attached to can potentially make
us feel in terms of what they say, in terms of what they do, in terms of the way in which
we Believe they feel about us. So it doesn't necessarily have to involve explicit
statements of, them telling us how great we are Or them doing great gestures for us, but

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how we actually feel they feel about us turns out to be a very strong parameter in terms of
how we feel about ourselves in the relationship overall. Now some of you out there are
probably thinking, oh, yeah. Isn't there this thing, the love languages? Right?

[2:00:40] Andrew Huberman: I don't have any neuroscience support that I think the love
languages, I'm not super familiar with this. I didn't list it out, but that some people are,
Their autonomic nervous system, if you will, tends to be very responsive to gifts or to
quality time or to physical touch or of kindness. I think I've got a few of these right. I
probably have a few wrong. Anyway, they're easy to find online.

[2:01:01] Andrew Huberman: And people do tend to have a kind of a bias toward 2 or 3 of
these things that are especially meaningful for lousy or neutral. In any event, this study
looked at whether or not people have high levels of self expansion through the actions or
statements of their significant other and how that influences their perception of People
outside the relationship, meaning how attractive they perceive people outside the
relationship to be, turns out to be strongly influenced By, a, whether or not their self
expansion is very strongly driven by the other person that they are Involved with, that
they're in the romantic relationship with, and whether or not that's being expressed to
them. So here's how the study went. First of all, they rated or categorized individuals on
the basis of the self expansion metric. Some people have more of a potential To
experience self expansion through others.

[2:02:11] Andrew Huberman: Right? Some of us feel great about ourselves and we're
kinda topped off at the others don't feel so great about themselves, But they can feel
much better in response to praise, in particular praise or self expansion type, behaviors or
statements from people that we really care about, and Still, other people are a mixture of
the 2, the kinda moderate levels of both. So they rated them on this scale, and then they
had people experience Self expansion narratives. They heard their significant other say
really terrific things about them and about the relationship, in particular, That the
relationship, that they have was exciting, novel, and challenging, so that was one form of
self expansion. And they went into some Detail as to why that was the case in their
particular relationship, or they heard a narrative from us from their significant other about
Strong feelings of love between the 2 that had been experienced previously in the
relationship.

[2:03:04] Andrew Huberman: So in the one case, it's sort of directed More towards them,
and in the other case, it's more about the relationship itself. And then they did brain
imaging of 1 person in the relationship while that person while that person assessed the
attractiveness of people outside the relationship. And what they found was that people
who were primed for this self Expansion had lower activation of brain areas associated
with assessing others' attractiveness than did the people who experienced A lot of self
expansion. Now the takeaway from that, at least the way I read this study, is If you're with
somebody who really benefits from or experiences a lot of self expansion, unless you
really want them to pay attention to attractiveness of other people. It stands to reason that
they would benefit from more self expansion type gestures or statements.

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[2:04:00] Andrew Huberman: Okay. Not so much centered on the relationship. We have
such a great relationship. There's so much love. It's so great.

[2:04:06] Andrew Huberman: That too. But in the context of this study and these findings
that The person is really terrific, that the relationship that they've created together is really
exciting, novel, and challenging, that there's a narrative around the relationship That
really has a lot to do with the dynamics between the individuals, in particular, that the
person who really likes self expansion is vital to that dynamic. Okay. So it's not looking
down at the relationship as a set of equals. There is sort of this bias written into this of
that this person is really essential for the relationship.

[2:04:34] Andrew Huberman: I'm not saying this is something that anyone to do. I'm not
saying this is right or wrong. This is just what the data say. But what's remarkable is that
in the absence of those statements, People who have or that rate high on this scale of
self expansion rate attractive alternative partners as more attractive. Now that's
interesting to me because it means that their actual perception of others is changing.

[2:05:00] Andrew Huberman: It's not that their opportunity to see others is changing.
Right? This is not a matter of them somehow getting access or no access to attractive
alternative partners. Again, Attractive alternative partners, literally the language in the title
of this paper. They're still seeing all these attractive people.

[2:05:17] Andrew Huberman: It's just that if they're feeling filled up, in air quotes,
Psychologically filled up, emotionally filled up, autonomically filled, enhanced, in in the
language that we're using today By the self expansion narrative, well, then the same set
of attractive faces appear less attractive to a given individual. Now whether or not this
predicts cheating or loyalty, I certainly can't say. That would be very hard to assess in it in
neuroimaging. And there, of course, people, rarely, if ever, report accurately, their
cheating behavior. There's some studies in which, confidentiality is assured to the point
where people Seem to be more trusting and willing to reveal, cheating behavior.

[2:06:01] Andrew Huberman: But if you look at the statistics on cheating behavior, it's very
hard to track because people lie all the time about cheating in and outside of the context
of of, psychological and neuroimaging studies. But I find this study again, the title
manipulation of self Expansion alters responses to attractive alternate partners to be
absolutely fascinating because, again, it points to the fact that The interactions with our
significant others shapes our autonomic arousal, shapes our perception of self, and
thereby shapes our perception of other potential partners in the outside world or shuts us
down to the potential of other people in the outside world. So when I hear statements
such as it's important that you love yourself in order to really fall in love with somebody
else, or It is when one is not looking for a relationship that they're most likely to fall in love
and form a stable relationship. I can filter that through these findings to say that it's really
the person who needs a lot of self expansion Stimulating statements or actions coming
from other people that is most prone to seeing Other potential partners out in the world as
attractive. And in this sense, we can return to the autonomic nervous system as kind of a
as kind of a a Last, that it can be filled up through various contexts.

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[2:07:24] Andrew Huberman: It can be filled up through our own ability to regulate it. It
can be filled up through Other people's ability to enhance our sense of well-being. And in
some sense, this points to an idea where It is true that the better that we can feel about
ourselves in the absence of any self expansion type, Input from somebody else really
does place us on more stable ground such that when we do receive that praise or we do
receive those acts of kindness or service or physical touch or whatever they are that we
are able to to further enhance the way that we feel, but that we don't necessarily tether All
of our feelings of self worth or self expansion to that one individual. So you might think
that If person a can only receive the self expansion from the statements, from the action
of the person they're involved with, person b, That that will form a very stable bond. But
what this study points to is the fact that that's a very unstable bond, that Person a is
actually very susceptible to the attractiveness of others because they're so desperately
attached to this notion of self expansion even if don't realize it.

[2:08:32] Andrew Huberman: And so this really does point to the idea that while it is
important to link our autonomic nervous systems to Establish desire, love, and
attachment that we wanna have a stable internal representation of ourselves, A stable
autonomic nervous system to some degree or another so that we can be in stable
romantic partnership with another individual if that's what we're really trying to do. So until
now, I've been weaving together studies from the field of experimental psychology and
the fields of neuroscience, in particular, neuroimaging. But if you recall back to the very
beginning of the episode when I was discussing how Odors and how hormones and how
even birth control can shape people's ratings of attractiveness of others, You'll realize that
there's a deeper layer to all this, which is that our biology that resides below our
conscious awareness, Things like our hormones, things like pheromones even are
shaping the way that we Choose, interpret, and act with other potential romantic partners
or the romantic partners that we already have. Now this cannot be overemphasized.
Right?

[2:09:52] Andrew Huberman: No matter how much we would like to create a sort of top
down description, meaning from the cortex and our understanding of things onto what we
find attractive, who we find attractive, what we enjoy, what we don't enjoy in the pursuit In,
romantic interactions with others, there always seems to be, and indeed there always is,
a deeper layer in which our Subconscious processing drives us to find a particular person
to be particularly attractive or in which we have chemistry with somebody or in which we
lack chemistry with somebody. And I would say that one of the more exciting, Fascinating
and indeed mysterious aspects of desire, love, and attachment are those Subconscious
processes, those things that we call chemistry. Right? I mean, people will report, for
instance, that somebody's smell is just Absolutely, positively intoxicating for them or that
somebody's smell is absolutely repulsive to them and they don't know why. That The taste
of someone's breath, and I don't mean that in any kind of, poetic sense.

[2:11:00] Andrew Huberman: I literally mean the taste of somebody's breath in some
cases can be very exciting to somebody. And believe it or not, we can taste each other's
breath. I talked about this in the chemical sensing episode, some months back, but we

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actually have receptors for taste and smell that engage in coordinated action such that we
can't really separate taste smell at some level. And this is especially true when it comes
to the formation of romantic relationships and what we call chemistry. Now is chemistry
absolutely required For forming stable attachments for love and for desire?

[2:11:36] Andrew Huberman: No. Of course, they're not. But in general, These are
primitive mechanisms that exist in all animals. They exist in special forms in humans, but
that they drive us toward behaviors that will, As the theory goes, lead to love and
attachment. Not always, as doctor Fisher pointed out, that Sex and sex drive is one way
to explore potential love relationships and to explore potential attachments, which, of
course, are Major investments that extend well beyond, you know, 1 night or a week or a
vacation or even a year.

[2:12:13] Andrew Huberman: When we talk about stable attachments, In general, that
means long term attachments in humans. Now there is a biology to all of that chemistry
Stuff. And the studies of oral contraception and men finding women more attractive at
certain phases of their menstrual cycle And women finding men more attractive at certain
phases of the woman's menstrual cycle point to the incredible power of those deeper
biological mechanisms. In the Huberman Lab Podcast, I discuss both science and
science based tools, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't Actually, cover some of the tools that
relate to those deeper biological mechanisms. Now the hormones, testosterone and
estrogen, are almost always the 1st biological chemicals and hormones that are
mentioned and described and explored When thinking about desire and love and
attachment too for that matter, since love and attachment stem from desire.

[2:13:16] Andrew Huberman: I did an entire episode about the biology of testosterone and
estrogen and ways to Optimize testosterone and estrogen. You can easily find that
episode at hubermanlab.com. It's time stamped. There, you can Find all sorts of
information about how certain behaviors or absence of behaviors drive up or down
testosterone and estrogen. Also dispel some myths about, sexual behavior and things like
masturbation and how they relate to testosterone and estrogen, as well as some myths
about How those hormones change across the lifespan.

[2:13:49] Andrew Huberman: I also talk about the role of exercise. I talk about
supplementation, and I also talk a little bit Hormone replacement therapy, although that
will be the topic for a future episode. So if you're interested in the biology of testosterone
and estrogen, 2 hormones that absolutely influence Things like libido and desire. Please
check out that episode as well as what I'm gonna talk about in just a moment here. The
simple stereotyped version of the hormones Testosterone and estrogen are that
testosterone drives libido or increases it AKA sex drive, And that estrogen somehow
blunts it or is not involved in libido and sex drive, and that is simply not the case.

[2:14:28] Andrew Huberman: As the Some of its other forms like the hydro testosterone
are strongly related to libido and sex drive and the pursuit and ability to mate. However,
the hormone estrogen is also strongly associated with libido and mating behavior. So
much so that for people that either chemically or for some other reason have very low

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estrogen, libido can Severely suffer. So it's a coordinated dance of estrogen and
testosterone in both males and females that leads to libido or sex drive. So I Absolutely
wanted to make clear that it's not a, a simple relationship between testosterone and sex
drive or Estrogen and sex drive, both are required at appropriate ratios.

[2:15:23] Andrew Huberman: Now with that said, there are things that can shift libido in
both men and women in the direction of more desire or more desire to mate, either To
seek mates or to mate with existing partners, and there's a quite solid literature around a
few of those substances. Now a common misconception is that because dopamine is
involved in motivation and drive, that simply increasing dopamine through any number of
different Mechanisms or tools will increase libido and sex drive, and that's simply not the
case either. It is true that some level of dopamine or increase in dopamine is required for
Increases in libido. However, because of dopamine's relationship to the autonomic
nervous system and because the autonomic nervous system is So intimately involved, no
pun intended, in sexual activity, in seeking an actual mating behavior as I described
earlier. It's actually the case that if people drive their dopamine system too high, they will
be in states of arousal that are high enough such that they seek and want sexual activity,
but they can't actually engage the parasympathetic Arm of the autonomic nervous system
sufficient to become physically aroused.

[2:16:51] Andrew Huberman: Now there's a whole description of this, that awaits us in a
future episode, but I'll summarize now by saying for people that are taking substances
just simply to increase dopamine, In order to increase libido, that can be a potentially
hazardous route to follow because Depending on whether or not that dopamine level is
high enough that it puts them into a mode of of seeking mates or mating, but they can't
adjust their autonomic nervous system during actual mating behavior. What essentially is
I'm saying is it can place people into pursuit, but an inability to perform sexually. And this
is true for men and women. Okay? So I would just caution people against just thinking,
Oh, a lack of libido is simply a lack of dopamine.

[2:17:40] Andrew Huberman: That is not the case. It could be from lower levels of
dopamine, but it could also be for other reasons. And so these systems, these signaling
systems and these neurochemicals are very intricate, and just simply ramping up
dopamine Has actually been found, for instance, in, amphetamine and cocaine users.
There is a phenomenon in which they become hyper aroused but can't perform sexually.
This is also true for people who take Elevated levels of other recreational drugs or who
take antidepressants that increase the dopamine system too much.

[2:18:13] Andrew Huberman: Right? Dosage has to be worked out with your physician,
with your psychiatrist such that, you know, mood is enhanced and, the various aspects of
a healthy well-being, mind and body are enhanced, but not so much so that that what we
call the arousal arc is locked with the seesaw in The sympathetic drive position such that
sexual arousal can't occur. Okay? So this is a an important point to make Because I think
that a lot of people are under the impression that if they just drive up testosterone,
increase dopamine, and generally get themselves into high states of autonomic arousal
that that's gonna increase their libido. But that's simply not the way the system works.

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[2:18:54] Andrew Huberman: It's that seesaw and that Seesawing back and forth, that is
the arc of arousal that we talked about earlier. Now there are Substances, legal, over the
counter substances, that fall under the categorization of supplements that do indeed
Increase libido and arousal. And so I'm gonna talk about some of those in the context of
peer reviewed literature now. I wanna be clear, however, that these are by no means
Acquired. Many people have healthy libidos or have libidos that are healthy for, their life
and and what they need and and want.

[2:19:29] Andrew Huberman: And as always, in any discussion about supplementation,

you absolutely have to check with your physician. I don't just say that to protect us. I say
that to protect you. Your health and well-being is dependent on you doing certain things
and not doing others, and everybody is different. Nonetheless, there are studies that point
to Specific substances that are sold over the counter that at least in the United States are
legal and that have been shown to be statistically significant in increasing measures of
libido.

[2:19:56] Andrew Huberman: There are many such substances, but 3 that particular, have
good peer reviewed research to support them are maca, m a c a, which is actually a root.
Tongkat Ali, also sometimes called long jack. I didn't name them. Forgive me. And tribulus
or tribulus, it's sometimes called.

[2:20:18] Andrew Huberman: Gonna talk about each of these in sequence. But on the
whole, the studies on maca are quite convincing that Consumption of 2 to 3 grams per
day of maca, which generally is sold as a powder or a capsule, Typically consumed early
in the day because it can be somewhat of a stimulant, meaning it can increase alertness,
and you wouldn't want it to interfere, with sleep, by taking it too late in the day, but in
studies that include both men and women of durations anywhere from 8 to 12 weeks Of
athletes and non athletes and different variations of maca. Turns out there's black maca,
red maca, yellow maca. There are a bunch Different forms of maca, but that they can
increase subjective reports of sexual desire Independent of hormone systems, meaning it
does not seem, at least based on the existing literature, that maca increases testosterone
drone or changes estrogen, at least not on the timescales that these studies were done or
with the measures that were, performed in these studies. But that maca, again,
consumed In doses of anywhere from 2 to 3 grams per day has been shown to
significantly increase libido.

[2:21:37] Andrew Huberman: And in fact, Those dosages of maca have been shown to
offset so called Function. So there are various routes to sexual dysfunction. The SSRIs
are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They go by name brands like Prozac and
Zoloft, and there are many others now on generic forms and so forth. Those don't always,
I should point out, lead to sexual dysfunction.

[2:22:04] Andrew Huberman: There's a dose dependence. Some people do quite well on
SSRIs and Don't have any issues with sexual function. Other people suffer quite a lot,
from sexual dysfunction while taking SSRIs. Highly variable. You need to work with a
physician, a a qualified psychiatrist.

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[2:22:22] Andrew Huberman: But, nonetheless, Everything I've been saying about maca
thus far has also been explored in the context of SSRI induced sexual dysfunction. The
paper, that I'm Referring to here is, a double blind randomized pilot dose finding study of
maca root. It goes by the name L. Latin names in biology are always more complicated,
but it's Maca Root for the management of SSRI and new sexual dysfunction. First author
is Doording, d o r d I n g.

[2:22:53] Andrew Huberman: Was a study done at Mass General, which is, one of the
satellite, locations around Harvard Harvard Med. It's associated with Harvard Med, that
found, significant improvements, in libido when people were taking a a pretty low dose. It
was actually, in this case, just one point 5 grams per day, up to a high dose, 3 grams per
day of maca, and they were doing this in, 20 remitted depressed outpatient, so these are
people that had depression. Their depression was successfully treated with SSRIs, but
they were suffering from some of these SSRI related, sexual effects, and maca seem to
offset some of those effects, significantly, in this population. The other studies Exploring
the lack of effect on serum testosterone in what in adult healthy men, was a 12 week
study.

[2:23:42] Andrew Huberman: Again, consuming anywhere from 1.5 to 3 milli milligrams,
meaning 1, excuse me, 1500 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams or placebo. So, again, this is
1.5 up to 3 grams of maca or placebo, and they rated, sexual desire, depression and and
other measures such as testosterone in in the blood. Again, no change in testosterone or
estrogen, estradiol levels, in men treated with maca and those treated with placebo. But,
nonetheless, there was a significant and positive effect on libido with this dosage of one
point Five to 3 grams per day of maca. And there are several other studies, that also
show this.

[2:24:25] Andrew Huberman: Again, in People that are taking s r SRIs and people that are
not taking SSRIs in in chronically, overtrained athletes, this was also to be the case. So
seems like, across the board, maca is a fairly useful, supplement for those that are
seeking to increase their libido. And there are fewer studies involving women, but there
are a few such studies that also point to the same general positive effect on libido in
women taking maca at equivalent doses to those I just described. I think it's noteworthy
that maca supplementation does not seem to adjust Testosterone or estrogen levels to
any significant degree, but it does change libido. I think that points to the fact that there
are multiple systems in the brain and Body that influence libido, not just testosterone and
estrogen.

[2:25:15] Andrew Huberman: And indeed, we know that to be the case. Things like PEA,
which is found in chocolate and is a substance that some people supplement is known,
for instance, to increase Sexual desire, but also the perception of sexual experiences as,
more stimulating, for instance. So there are a lot of pathways in the brain, in particular, in
Pthalamus, this ancient area of our brain that harbors neurons and hormone secreting
cells, including neurons, that can Shape our perceptions of our even just our tactile
experience of, others and their attractiveness, and indeed can shift levels of desire are
independent of changing levels of circulating hormones. Another substance that has been

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shown to increase libido Across a range of human populations is so called Tongkat Ali.
I've talked a little bit about this before on the Huberman Lab Podcast in Reference to
testosterone, and I've talked about it extensively as a guest on other podcasts.

[2:26:16] Andrew Huberman: Tonga Ali goes by a number of different names. One of
them is exceedingly difficult for me to pronounce. It's, Eurycoma longifolia, also called
longjack, but Tonga Ali is the Typical name. This is an herb. There's a Malaysian version
and an Indonesian version.

[2:26:34] Andrew Huberman: My understanding is that the Indonesian variety of Tonga AlI
is the one that is most potent for, its effects on libido. Previously, I've talked about Tonga
Ali Taken in 400 milligram per day capsules as a means to increase the amount of free,
meaning unbound testosterone. So Testosterone has a both bound form and an unbound
form. Very briefly, the bound form is bound to albumin in the blood or to so called sex
hormone binding globulin, when it's bound, it can't be biologically active at many cells. It
is important that some of it be bound in order to get a sort of time release and and proper
distribution of testosterone through the body, but it is the unbound free Testosterone that
can really have its most potent effects.

[2:27:23] Andrew Huberman: And there's some evidence that Tonga Ali can increase the
amount of unbound, so called free testosterone by lowering sex hormone binding
globulin, although it is almost certain that it has other routes of mechanism as well.
Nonetheless, there are some reports of Tonga Ali increasing Libido, one particular article,
last author, or I should say, last name of first author, excuse me, Ismail, I s m a l. This
was, published in a in evidence based complimentary and alternative medicine. It's from
2012. Reports a, significant, increase In libido and sexual function, there are other such
studies.

[2:28:06] Andrew Huberman: Not a lot of them, not as many robust, controlled, Quality
peer reviewed studies as there are from Maca. Nonetheless, a number of people, men
and women, that I know do take Tonga Ali, and it seems to to work well for them. The
question always comes up around discussion of supplements. Do you need to cycle
these things? The only way to determine that is really to do your blood work, monitor liver
enzymes, monitor hormone levels and so forth.

[2:28:32] Andrew Huberman: So I I simply can't say whether or not you, need to or you
don't need to cycle them. Typically, Tonga Ali and Maca are not cycled in any regular
kinda way that I'm aware of. But, again, you really need to check with your doctor if you're
Going to initiate taking any of these things, and you certainly should do your best to
monitor your blood work as well as subjective measures in evaluating whether or not
they're working for you, safe for you, so forth. The 3rd and final substance slash
supplement that I wanna touch on as it relates to libido is called tribulus terrestis. So
that's t r I b u l u s, Terrestris, t e r r e s t r I s.

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[2:29:12] Andrew Huberman: This is a commonly sold over the counter supplement for
increasing testosterone for, you know, fitness purposes and and so on, whether or not it
actually does that to a, meaningful degree, isn't clear. But I'm aware of 4 Peer reviewed
studies that were focused on both males and females, ranging anywhere from, 18 years
old all the way up to 65 plus. They say 65 plus. I guess, it could be 70. It could be 80.

[2:29:45] Andrew Huberman: I don't know. But a fairly broad age range, Where people
took anywhere from, 750 milligrams per day divided into 3 equal doses, so 750 total per
day divided into 3 equal doses of tribulus, or placebo for a 120 days. This particular study
was focused on females, and according to the female sexual function index
questionnaire, no significant difference between any of the groups. However, free and
bioavailable testosterone increased in the group taking Tribulus terrestis, total
testosterone did not reach statistical significance. So this is sort of the inverse of what we
see with maca where there do seem to be increases in testosterone, which would predict
that there would be increase in libido.

[2:30:34] Andrew Huberman: In this case, in this was postmenopausal women. There was
no increase in libido. There was an increase in testosterone. I mention it only because
there might be instances in which People want to increase their testosterone. It does
seem that Tribulus, at least in that population, is capable of doing that.

[2:30:51] Andrew Huberman: Now there's a separate study that was done, a double blind
study, lasting anywhere from 1 to 6 months that had A clear and significant increase in
libido. Now this was taking 6 grams, so that's 66,000 milligrams of Tribulus root for 60
days, And it did seem to increase various aspects of sexual function, and there was a
What appeared to be a substantial 16.3% increase in testosterone, but in this particular
study, because of the variability across individuals that did not actually arrive Statistical
significance. Now there were a number of other studies that explored the role of tribulus,
in particular, in in females. And one of Those studies was a study that was actually quite
short. It was 2 to 4 weeks.

[2:31:40] Andrew Huberman: It involved 67 subjects. These were subjects that had
experienced a loss of Libido and took Tribulus divided into 2 equal doses, compared that
to placebo, and they did see a significant improvement in These measures of sexual
desire and function on this female sexual function index. So there is some evidence that
Tribulus can be effective in increasing Testosterone in certain populations, in increasing
sexual desire and function, in certain populations, in particular, In females, I think more
studies are certainly needed, but these 3 substances slash supplements, maca, Tonga
Ali, in particular, Indonesian Tonga Ali and Tribulus can indeed create significant
increases in sexual desire, and in some cases, by adjusting the testosterone and
estrogen system, in some cases, not by adjusting the testosterone and estrogen system.
Again, pointing to the complexity of neurochemicals and features that adjust things like
libido aka desire. We covered a lot of material today related to desire, love, and
attachment, and yet I acknowledge that it is not exhaustive of The vast landscape that is
the psychology and biology of desire, love, and attachment.

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[2:32:59] Andrew Huberman: Nonetheless, I hope you found the information interesting
and hopefully actionable in some cases toward the relationships of your past, of present,
and potentially for the relationships of your future. If you're enjoying and or learning from
this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a very straightforward zero
cost way to us, and it really does help us. In addition, please subscribe to our podcast on
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review.

[2:33:30] Andrew Huberman: In addition, please leave us comments, feedback, and

suggestions for future guests in the comment section on YouTube. We do read all of
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today's episode. That is the best way to support the Huberman Lab Podcast. In addition,
we have Patreon.

[2:33:47] Andrew Huberman: It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman, and there you can

support the podcast at any level that you like. Please also follow us on Instagram and
Twitter. I teach neuroscience and neuroscience related tools on both Instagram and
Twitter. Some of that material overlaps with material covered on the podcast. Some of it is
unique material only covered on Instagram and Twitter.

[2:34:08] Andrew Huberman: During today's episode and on many previous episodes of
the Huberman Lab Podcast, we discussed Supplements. While supplements aren't
necessary or appropriate for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from
them for things like enhancing sleep, enhancing focus, or as discussed today, for
enhancing libido and desire. If you wanna see the supplements that I take, you can go to
thorne, that's thorne.com/theletteru/huberman. And there, you can get 20% off any of the
supplements that I take. And if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site through that
portal, thorne.com/letteru/huberman, you can also get 20% off any of the other
supplements that Thorne makes.

[2:34:48] Andrew Huberman: We partnered with Thorne because Thorne has the absolute
highest standards with respect to the quality of the ingredients in supplements and the
precision of the amounts of those supplements. Thank you for joining me for today's
discussion about desire, love, and attachment. And last but Certainly not least, thank you
for your interest in science.

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