Love Neurons

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You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions and crunchiest conundrums.

And then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

We're going to do an episode on love today.

Now, I'm a bit cautious about talking about this topic because one of the first things that I ever did for like a public audience

was a TED talk called The Maths of Love.

This is when I was young, fresh-faced, newly engaged, and I stood up confidently on stage and proclaimed how easy it was for you to use equations and mathematics to describe romance and success in long-term relationships.

Would you like to know what's happened since then?

Yeah, go on.

Getting divorced.

Okay, let's...

What's the matter that?

True love doesn't always last, put it away.

Okay, well, we're not claiming we'll solve it, all right?

No, no, no, we are not.

Should we have a listen to the question?

Please.

My name is Alison.

I'm from North Hertfordshire.

And my question is, what happens to our brains when we fall in love?

Why are teenagers prone to have crushes?

I also remember from when I was young, it's a long time ago, how uncontrollable love is.

I had a big crush on the Beatles,

George Harrison, and I really don't know where that came from.

I'm trying to describe it.

What did he look like?

Quite pinched and hungry looking and it's that sort of raw rawness that was appealing.

She's got a type.

She certainly does and still has by the sounds of it.

Good omen herself.

I find it's very interesting because young men, we don't do the pop star crusher thing in quite the same way.

Or certainly it's not industrialised in the same way as it is for young women.

No, No, I agree.

But then I've always had a bit of a theory about that because I think that it's a little bit easier for young boys to lust after women.

It's sort of more socially acceptable.

I think like you kind of have to be a bit more cloak and dagger about it as a young woman.

And I sort of think that the pop star thing is like a very socially acceptable way for young girls to explore their sexuality.

Okay, grant.

I also do remember there being a specific phase where looking back, I was clearly training in how to because I would fancy someone's determining you'd have a crush you'd crush on somebody for like a discrete like three to six months and then bang stop so you'd stare moon face across the classroom at some girls when you were like 13 12 13 and then boom that's over now you're staring this direction at somebody else but clearly there's some process being trained in the in the body or the head the chemicals being released whatever that that that then became your basis then for building relationships later.

Yeah.

So there's something happening.

And there absolutely is.

I mean, not sort of silly equations and so on, but genuine actual science that we can properly talk about.

Good, but we promise we're not going to solve, we're not saying, we're not going to pin love like onto a board like a butterfly and just like that.

I mean, frankly,

I don't think I really did that either, but I was just way too overconfident.

So joining us to explore the chemistry of love, we have Dr.

Dean Burnett, neuroscientist and author of The Idiot Brain and The Happy Brain.

And Dr.

Anna Maitin, an evolutionary anthropologist and author of Why We Love.

I mean, Anna, you literally wrote the book on the subject.

Hopefully so.

So, okay, we heard from Alison and her mad crush on George Harrison from the Beatles.

Did you have any teenage crushes?

Yes, I did.

The bigger one was River Phoenix.

Right.

Which is really showing my age.

But I remember him dying

outside the nightclub in LA and just being devastated for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And I can still remember the moment when it happened.

What I had.

Actually, for weeks.

Yeah, I was absolutely bereft.

Okay, so I mean

why?

Why River Phoenix?

I don't mean specifically why River Phoenix, but like what,

how on earth can this possibly be advantageous for humans to develop these sort of almost fictional relationships in our minds and then react to them with the same emotions that we might do a real relationship?

It's really training for being an adult.

So the majority of our crushes, which we actually now call parasocial relationships, they happen when you're a teenager.

And that's because it's allowing you to explore relationships and how love feels and your sexuality and all those different things in a safe environment.

So you're unlikely to get

properly hurt by being in that relationship.

So, yeah, it's allowing you to explain.

You were hurt.

I was hurt.

I was very, but it's allowing you to explore those emotions and finding out, you know, who you fancy, who you don't fancy, what kind of person attracts you, that kind of thing.

Okay, but then is there something about the types of people that people crush on?

I mean, Harry Stiles, for example, I mean, I 100% get it.

But there are some, like, particularly crushable people.

There are.

Maybe a bad choice of words.

Yes.

Yes, there are.

And it's because, you know, we're still going to look for really attractive people.

Most famous people are above average attractive in one way or the other.

And our brains don't understand.

She's saying that to us, Darrell.

Yeah, honestly.

I looked at him directly when I said that.

And our brains don't understand screens.

If you think sort of photographs, films, tele are actually a very, very recent thing in evolutionary time.

So our brains don't discern that screen.

They think that person is standing in front of them.

Obviously, usually highly attractive, highly successful, ticks all those lovely boxes for going forward and having a relationship with this high-value person.

So we're going to fall in love with famous people because they carry all these really good indicators of being a very valuable mate, basically.

But then at the same time, that interaction is entirely one way.

And it's like,

do we not notice that we're not getting, they're not really getting anything from us?

We do, but what's really interesting, what's amazing about the human brain and what's amazing about parasocial relationships, which also goes into religious love actually, is the ability of humans to actually form complete relationships in our minds.

So without ever actually interacting with that person in person in front of you, without that person manifesting in physical form, we are capable of having a full relationship.

And actually with crushes and parasocial relationships, we know teenagers form proper psychological attachments.

to these people.

They provide that secure base from where that teenager will go out and explore the world.

And particularly for sort of LGBTQ plus kids, they're really important attachment figures.

As you're talking, do we have parasocial relationships only for teenage crushes or do you get them throughout the rest of your life?

You get them throughout the rest of your life.

So a parasocial relationship can be with an actor, with an actress, but it can be with a character in a book.

So you might have a parasocial crush on somebody in a book.

And they are throughout your life.

Now, what we used to think was if you had them as an adult, that was sort of psychopathology, something a bit odd with you.

But recent research has shown, actually, no, people who have them throughout their life, it's not like they're making up for a lacking in their social network.

Usually they're very happy, they're very psychologically strong, they've got a family, but this person is fulfilling something to them in their social network.

So a lot of people have parasocial relationships throughout their life.

And does it specifically have to be crushes, or could it be, I mean, I have lots of girl crushes, for instance.

So it could be like just an admiration thing rather than necessarily sexual.

Absolutely.

I mean, love is a massive spectrum.

And while we talk a lot about romantic love, actually, you can love these people in lots of different ways.

So it could be just a a girl crush or someone who you really, really think if you met, you would be best friends, you know.

So, yeah, it can be anybody that you admire.

Is there any particular reason we always associate the parasocial crushes with girls as opposed to boys?

Do you know what?

I just think girls talk about them more.

Girls are more likely to sort of be online fans, you know, so you're a Harry Starles fan or you're, you know, a Lady Gargoyle fan or whatever.

You're more likely to join a group and be really loud about it and make lots of fuss about it.

And I don't want to, look, these are very broad generalizations, obviously.

I'll throw another broad generalization.

We fixate on a football team.

Is that, you know, and that is, by some distance, the most long-lasting and dedicated relationship in our lives, like whatever.

And there is a definite point where we pick a team and that's it.

That's, and our mood is linked to their successes or not successes.

I mean, does that fall into this in some ways?

Some sort of, I mean, I certainly, there's dopamine rushes.

Like, I was all the chemicals we have.

You're more flustered talking about this than you were on your crushes.

Listen, I have a gift.

It defines my life.

I'm just always intrigued with the fact that this is literally, you hit the point and you stop, and you love this team and you love them forever.

Absolutely.

But humans want to be the members of groups.

That's what we love to be part of.

And so you found your group, you found your identity.

You've all congregated around this totem, which is the football team.

And that's where you're going to stick.

It's a sense of belonging.

And all the behaviours that football teams do, and when you go and watch your team and you all chant and everything, you are in a love relationship with that team and also with the crowd that are around you.

Very much so.

Very much so.

Dean, how about you?

Any crosses to report?

Football or otherwise?

No, I was what we call a late starter when it comes to the romantic field.

I've had two girlfriends in my life and spent 20 years married to the second one.

So

in school, I was very much, this girl hasn't pepper-sprayed me yet.

She must like me.

She's a low bar.

Well, my one previous girlfriend is coming on her second wife, so she's better at women than I am.

So technically, she should be here.

Me being here talking people to love is like the 55-year-old guy in the crowd yelling instructions at the Premier League footballers.

Yeah, I know the theory, but you put me on there, I'll be fettered off in seconds.

I can't help you there.

Sure.

Okay, so Alison was talking about how powerful, uncontrollable these passions can be, how real they can feel.

In terms of the drive for this, though, okay, not to be too much of a love sceptic, and I promise I am gonna

less sceptical than this question makes me appear.

But is love actually necessary?

I mean, from a sort of evolutionary perspective, really, you just want to pass on your genes, you just want, I mean,

to be able to successfully mate, right, reproduce.

Why does love matter as part of that?

It all feeds into survival as well, because

you form part of a dynamic, you form part of a team.

And if there's two of you, if you are the sort of species which does care for your young rather than strength and numbers, like fish and reptiles, like loads of eggs, okay, good luck, and just wander off.

That's, you know, they have a very different attitude to parenting.

And they obviously don't love their kids like a mammal would.

But if there's two of you, then that doubles the chances of protecting, providing.

And when you're part of that dynamic, it becomes your odds of survival increase in certain species.

So yeah, it can be very necessary, very helpful.

And what is chemically happening within the brain?

Yeah, lots of different stuff.

Especially when you first fall in love, there's a lot of chemical, neurochemical changes going on.

Obviously, dopamine, the pleasure chemical, as they say, that goes up centrally.

But it's not just about experience and reward.

It's all about motivation to find the reward and anticipation of the reward.

So you become like, I love this person.

They are my favorite thing.

I want to see them.

I expect to see them.

I will do whatever I can to see them.

Noradrenaline increases, which is involved with focus and attention and short-term memory.

So you're thinking about them all the time.

Also, it disrupts sleep.

So obviously you're losing sleep over the object of your affection.

And I think one of the particularly interesting ones is serotonin goes down.

Now, that's normally associated with the opposite, being not depressed and stuff.

But people are love sick.

They do become really sort of preoccupied and shaky and they seem unhappy a lot of the time if they can't be with the object of their affection, particularly.

And all the different hormones and neurochemicals interact to make this weird situation.

And it also does stuff like lower the activity in the amygdala and the sort of fear and threat detection mechanisms.

Because people in love, they can also be quite happy, euphoric, because their ability to detect threats has dropped.

And the brain doesn't do that so well anymore, which is why, you know, love is blind.

People can end up with the same person like two months solid.

And all their friends friends are going, why do you like this one?

They're awful.

They've got all these bad habits, all these bad traits.

You don't see it.

You don't see it because your brain's not in that mood.

Rose-tinted glasses.

Very, very thick, rose-tinted glasses.

Rose goggles, even.

Rose welding goggles.

Rose welding goggles.

So we've dipped our toes into the flood of brain activity that turns us into fools when we fall in love.

But a lot of our initial understanding of this stuff has a surprising origin studying rodents, especially voles.

I am Carmine Pariante.

I'm a professor of biological psychiatry at King's College London with romantic love if you like and especially exclusive relationships.

A lot of the research comes from voles.

The voles are small rodents.

They are really small, they're around kind of 40 to 60 grams each.

And the prairie wolves are in the prairies, so usually in grasslands in North and Central Central America, and the mountain woll are more mountainous regions.

Now, what is interesting about these two species is that although they kind of look really similar, their behavior in terms of love and relationship is completely different.

The prairie wolves, they do form long-term relationships with a partner, they look after the children of their offspring together and they have a preferred partner to which they remain regularly present with.

The mountain voles are completely unfaithful and they are unable to form long-term relationships with the same partner or to look after their offspring with their partner.

And by looking at the brain of these animals that are so similar, yes, so different, we can understand or start to understand the basis of love.

The prayer voles have much higher level of what we call a receptor for oxytocin.

So, oxytocin works by binding to a protein that then alerts the brain that oxytocin is working.

It's almost like a key and lock mechanisms.

Now,

the prayer balls have many more locks available so that when the oxytocin is produced in the brain, everywhere in the brain is activated because there's so many locks there.

However, the mountain balls, the unfaithful one, doesn't have so many of these locks.

And so the oxytocin cannot really have the same widespread effect on the brain.

And that's probably why they don't form relationships.

So insulation, prairie voles good,

mountain voles bad if you're if you're picking if you're picking a partner.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah

that's a little harsh but

yeah

but oxytocin so what we describe the prairie voles as is this too human a term monogamous biologically monogamous

the problem with the word monogamy is that actually there's no truly monogamous species.

True monogamy doesn't exist.

And even though we talk about monogamous species like swans are monogamous or gibbons are monogamous, actually, when you observe them, they will all go off and have a sneaky mating.

Because, from an evolutionary point of view, it would be very silly to restrict them.

So they tend to be what we call socially monogamous.

So they will stick together for a lesser or greater period of time to raise offspring, to make sure those offspring are raised to survival.

And the mechanism that does this is oxytocin.

In voles, it's oxytocin.

Voles were really helpful initially because we had no idea what the neurochemistry of love was at all.

And they really did open that up for us in terms of understanding.

They were the perfect model, you know, having a polygamous one and a monogamous one to show us what the differences were.

They're not great proxies for the human brain because the human brain is very, very complicated and we have very, very different,

very long-term relationships in lots of different contexts.

So whilst we can start with oxytocin and oxytocin, certainly they're in the human brain, it really is more of a background chemical for us.

And it's yeah, I mean, people try to sell oxytocin spray.

Would that work?

There used to be something which you could buy from eBay.

I don't think you can anymore.

But they claimed that if you squirted it up your nose, they called it a pheromone, which is wrong anyway.

But if you squirted it up your nose, people would flock

towards you.

Oh, you wouldn't fall in love with other nose.

No, no, no, they would fly.

I mean, it's all wrong, but I think they did quite well.

Hang it.

If you squirted up your nose.

If you squirted up your nose, actually, we use it in the lab.

If we squirt it up people's noses, it makes them more open to forming social relationships, which is what it does.

It's not a pheromone.

But they sold it as a pheromone.

Because nothing woman likes more than a man who's coughing and spluttering and pawing at his own nose.

This very attractive thing.

It increases my mate value enormously.

Amidst all the chemicals whirling around in your head, is there an addictive element to this?

There absolutely is.

So we've talked about sort of oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and those are all really important chemicals mainly at the start of a relationship.

They underpin the attraction stage of love.

But we need something that actually underpins our relationships for decades, whether we're talking about romantic love or child parent love or whatever it might be.

And those chemicals, unfortunately, aren't powerful enough to do that.

They become tolerant to them.

They don't last that long.

So actually what underpins primates long-term relationships is beta endorphin.

And beta endorphin is an opiate.

It evolved to be your body's painkiller.

And over time, we think via social rejection, it's been co-opted into the social sphere.

And it's actually what's released when primates interact with each other in long-term relationships.

And the wonderful thing about beta endorphin is it is addictive like any opiate.

It's like morphine, it's like heroin.

So it's a very simple mechanism.

You're with the person, you do an interaction that releases betrendorphin, touch, laughter, whatever it might be.

You get that wonderful opiate euphoric high.

You go away from them, you go a little bit of cold turkey and you will return to them to satiate that physiological and psychological withdrawal.

The other good thing about beta endorphin is oxytocin and things like that are only really released mainly in a powerful sense in what we call the reproductive relationship.

So between parent and child, between lovers.

So you need something else.

And betrendorphin is released by lots and lots of activities that aren't linked to reproduction.

So dancing, singing, exercise, touch, laughing, having really good conversations, having a hot curry.

All of these things release Beta Endorphin.

It's like filling up your well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Beta and Dorphin would also explain why you love your hobbies or pastimes as well, because they would also.

Absolutely.

Are we going back to football?

We are.

I'm not.

I am not.

I feel I've satiated myself there.

I'm the most important romantic relationship.

Well, well.

I don't want to say this publicly, but.

But how do you experiment on this?

I mean, do you,

look, how I would do it is I would simply invite in the students to go, I'm going to wire you up and then you're going to fall in love with me, and I'm going to measure what happens there.

Okay, yeah, that would I can I get funding?

No, okay, fine, fair enough.

Can you take a blood sample and see these chemicals?

Are they, you know, it depends on the neurochemical.

Oxytocin, absolutely.

You can get oxytocin in lots of different ways, we, saliva, blood, whatever you want.

The other ones involved in love, unfortunately, don't cross the blood-brain barrier.

So, we can't take a blood test.

Serotonin dopamine, betrandorphine don't.

So, we have to do various forms of scans.

um

the ones to really really show that we know a neurochemical has been released and we know it's been uh it's had uptake by the receptors is a pet scan which is radioactive um so you don't get a lot of people volunteering for those unless they really really want the money the other way you can do it you can use a proxy So my students who don't have quite as much money, they use proxies.

And what that means is because we know B triandorphin is a painkiller, what they will do is they will test somebody's pain threshold before they've done whatever social interaction it happens to be.

And the ways we do that sounds awful, but

we might put a blood pressure cuff on your arm and inflate it until it reaches pain tolerance.

And then you say, Ow, that really hurts, and we stop.

Or we might get you to plunge your hand into ice-cold water and see how long you can do it for, or over a hot plate, which we don't do that often because that can go wrong.

But that's what you do.

Then you get them to do whatever social interaction it might be, and then you test the pain threshold again.

And the pain threshold will have gone up because beta endorphin has been released.

But with my experiment, where why don't you just fall in love with me?

That's unethical.

Hand over a hot plate.

Not a problem.

Okay, not a problem.

We have kind of, yeah.

So if I did that initially, the cold water, taking a hand out of freezing water, then spent time with somebody I loved and then did it again, I should feel.

You should last longer.

Right.

Because your pain tolerance has gone up.

And generally we do find that.

So what we tend to do with these studies is you will start with something like that because PET scanning is very expensive.

You'll start and think, okay, I have possible proof of concept here that this is what's going on.

We will now put lots of people in the PET scanner and prove it.

I'm sorry, so we spoke earlier about the drugs that swirl through your brain when you're falling over and you're all happy in the dopamine and all that.

Is there an unhappy one?

Is there an analog

when you get dumped and you feel terrible?

Is there a bad drug?

No, what you're doing is you're going cold turkey.

So there's two things that happen when you're dumped.

You have a physiological withdrawal and you have a psychological withdrawal.

So the physiological withdrawal is the withdrawal from the neurochemistry, and particularly if you're in a long-term relationship, that's a withdrawal from an opiate.

And so, if you think, if you imagine a heroin addict withdrawing, so suddenly you've gone from a quite a high level of beta-endorphin, happy, happy, euphoric, all your little painful niggles have you know been covered up, and you suddenly go down to nothing, you go cold turkey.

So, that's why, physiologically, it's actually incredibly painful.

It can be physically painful to be dumped, and that's why it can be so hard to get over.

But actually, some people are genetically predisposed to feel worse when they're dumped than other people, unfortunately.

There is a gene that causes people who are dumped to feel much worse.

It's known as a gain of function gene.

And we think these people probably exist at a higher level of beta endorphin than everybody else.

They maybe have more beta endorphin receptors because that's what it's associated with.

And so when they're dumped, they go, their cold turkey is much,

much more horrible than it is for us.

About 2% of the population carry it.

So when we find one, we get very excited.

But you can actually, when you talk to people, you can see it coming through.

in their experiences of being dumped.

It's actually

quite a powerful gene to hold.

Wow.

Okay.

I mean, you're very excited, but I mean, you know, in the experiment where they have to fall in love with me, I didn't have to break up with you.

Well, they'll be the ones who are dribbling on the side.

That is, that is.

Okay.

You come back in two weeks and

you're not going to enjoy that part of it, but I expect it's not so bad now, is it?

Yeah.

That's a spray you've got under your desk.

It's all very well talked about this as if we're prisoners of our chemistry or genes, whatever.

We have built enormous cultural norms around these, and they differ from culture to culture as well, am right?

Oh, yeah, totally.

I mean, like, I think in the Western developed world, we all think marriage as being like, you know, you fall in love with someone, you get married, and then you go through like all the different parts of life as a married couple.

But

a good massive chunk of the human race believes in arranged marriages.

You get married first and then develop the relationship and go forward from there.

That's totally normal for them.

So, this whole idea of must fall in love, get married happily ever after, is like a cultural creation, but it's not the only way of doing things.

So, like, we have all this cultural inertia, this cultural expectation on relationships, on how they should work.

And like I talked about

the relationship escalator, the idea that, of course, you get together with someone, then within two years, you get married, and then you've got children, and then you've got to move to the countryside, and you've got to have

these all these expectations of stages, and the very concept of where's this relationship going?

Where does it have to go?

Who's going to do it?

It's not a vehicle.

It's our thing.

And I think there's been a lot of sort of, you know,

I wouldn't say harm, but I think it's been unhelpful, the cultural obsession with happily ever after because it suggests then once you do good

yeah I think that's the you know the cultural expectations do put a lot of pressure on people when they're in love and I think like perhaps we

do better without sometimes I think and we emphasize different things in different cultures we do yeah

love is actually the one really big I won't call it an emotion because it's not an emotion but the one really big phenomenon which culturally we differ on massively.

So if you think about anger, we can all kind of express anger in the same sort of way around the world.

Love, the definitions of it vary cross-culturally.

So if you look at somewhere like Russia, for example, if you ask people to define love in Russia, they actually define it as suffering.

and as self-sacrifice.

So it's actually quite a negative.

Catholic, right?

Negative experience.

Whereas

let's say we go to Senegal.

Now, in Senegal, love is seen as more of a family-based spiritual experience.

So that's what love is there.

If we go, I don't know, we go to Brazil, which is a Catholic country, a lot of it there is, again, it's based in the family, but it's all about sort of self-sacrifice and doing good for other people.

So love, and then obviously in the West, we've got romantic love, which we've spoken about, you know, with the idea of that there's the one and that you're going to skip through the days and it's all going to be wonderful and blah blah blah blah blah.

And that's what we think love is here.

It's meant to be this very positive thing.

So regard, you know, you will go around the world and you will get, you know, hundreds of different ideas about what love is.

Even actually, if I sit in a lecture theater and say to 300 people, how do you define love?

You will get 300 answers because it's highly subjective and it's highly culturally prescribed.

I really like the way that you describe that as though it's sort of the difference between romantic love and love more generally actually isn't this hard boundary.

And it depends where you go and depends who you talk to, that one can kind of melt into the other and backwards.

I really like that idea.

Well, that's what I love about the work I do is I think we have a, in the West, we have this massive obsession with romantic love, and that's because it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

But actually, what's wonderful about being human is you can experience love in myriad different ways.

And as you say, it's like a spectrum.

They all kind of merge in and out.

They have characteristics in common and then they have bits that are different.

And you can have, you know, so many different sorts of love.

You can love, you know, a god, you can love a celebrity, you can love your dog, you can love your friends.

You can love your community, you can love

God.

Stop loving me.

You can love, you know, your football team, you can love your parents, your children.

And that's what's wonderful about love.

So actually, I think when we talk about love, we need to broaden what we mean.

We don't necessarily mean romantic love.

And look, I mean, you know, we've all been in relationships that have been difficult.

I know that I strongly committed once and then they started to lose matches.

And it just was really

difficult time for us.

You've got that gene.

Literally 60,000 of us with that gene every two weeks in that stadium, weeping our eyes out.

Going, why must they do this to us?

Why?

Why?

Thank you, by the way, for all taking that seriously.

Thank you for everything.

I'm not automatically dismissing it.

I just quite like the fact that we ended on, I mean, what frankly felt more like a therapy session than

a science show.

But this idea that actually the sort of biological definition of love is much broader than we sometimes give it credit for.

Oh, massively.

Well, thank you very much to our guests, Anna Maitin, and Dean Bennett.

What a great discussion.

I loved it.

I loved it.

Well, I hope that that answers Alison's question.

Overall, crosses are a way of practicing, and no, we don't understand why you like George Harrison either.

I mean, the unanswerable question and the great randomness is, why not John or Paul?

I mean, if you're going to be out there, go for Ringo, for goodness sake.

So, yeah, so wow, it's almost we're left knowing less in some ways about the random nature of love.

Because George's grandpa John, isn't it?

It's John.

It's obviously John.

Hello, this is Marion Keys.

And this is Tara Flynn.

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