Is Love an Addiction?

Why are we so hooked on love? Jorge and neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin take a deep dive into the loving brain.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production
of iHeartRadio Hoorheit Cham And today we're answering the question
is love and addiction? What's going on inside of our
brains when we think of our loved ones, our spouses,

(00:21):
our kids, our friends. We're going to dig into the
signs of love, looking at how psychologists and neuroscientists have
tried to understand it and measure it, and we're going
to ask the question, if love is addicting, can you
manipulate it with drugs? So get ready to fall in
love with the signs of love as we might as

(00:41):
well face it. Are we addicted to love? Hey? Everyone,
Today we have a different kind of episode. It's thanksgeping
Weak and I'm spending time with my family, So I'm
going to play for you a chapter from the audiobook
of my latest nonfiction book, Out of Your Mind, which
I wrote with neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin. You know doctor Godwin.

(01:05):
He's been on the show several times. And in this chapter,
we ask the question why do we love? And we
look at the evidence that says that love is basically
an addiction. It's one of my favorite chapters in the
book because it goes into the whole history of how
scientists have tried to get a handle on this lovely topic.
And hey, if you like the chapter, be sure to

(01:26):
check out the rest of the book. You can find
Out of Your Mind in stores everywhere. Okay, the chapter
starts with a quote from William Shakespeare, and the first
question we tackle is whether humans are the only animals
dad love. Here's Professor Dwayne Godwin reading from Out of Your.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Mind, Chapter two, Why do we love? Love looks not
with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is
winged Cupid painted blind? William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream.
William Shakespeare may not have been a neuroscientist, but he
certainly knew a lot about human emotion. His plays tell

(02:05):
stories of human love in its many forms, Young irrational love,
Omeo and Juliet, the love between parents and their children, Kinglear,
and even the love of country Julius Caesar. To many,
love may seem like the quintessential human emotion, but actually
humans are not alone in showing signs of love. In

(02:26):
the case of romantic love. About four percent of mammals
pair up in lifelong monogamous couples. We share that distinction
with prairie voles and beavers, among a few others, and
up to ninety five percent of birds do. The majority
of complex animals on the planet exhibits some form of
care and devotion to their young. Palaeontologists have even found

(02:49):
fossils of dinosaur mothers that seemingly died while protecting their
nest of eggs. At the same time, the human experience
of love appears to be more vexing and complex than
mere instinct. At the very least, it seems to be
more dramatic. After all, how many beavers or birds of
written sonnets or entire operas detailing the impossible situations that

(03:13):
love puts us in. If you ask around, most people
will tell you that love is a feeling. It's what
you feel when you look at your spouse, or your child,
or your parents are the people who are close to you.
It's the urge you feel to be near them, to
care for them, and to make sure they're safe and happy. Unfortunately,

(03:34):
these days, we also use the word to describe how
we feel about a lot of things. We use it
for objects love your shoes, food, who doesn't love pie?
And even abstract concepts. I love democracy. Clearly, it's hyperbole
unless you actually feel the same way about shoes as
you do about your kids or your spouse. But what

(03:56):
is that feeling of love? How is it encoded in
the brain? Is there a trigger for falling into it?
Though love may seem like the stuff of literature or
sappy poems, psychologists and neuroscientists have been probing its mysteries
for over eighty years, and with modern technology they've started
to answer a few key questions about the loving brain,

(04:19):
including these. Is there an area in the brain devoted
to love? Does a love chemical exist? Do I really
love pie the same way I love my kids? Interestingly,
the answer to all of these questions, including the third one,
is sort of. Love is a many splendid thing. So

(04:40):
let's take a dive and fall madly into its biological complexities.
Trust us, you're going to love it. The love scales.
The history of love research starts in the nineteen forties. Psychologists,
eager to prove their metal is scientists, started to tackle

(05:01):
complex human emotions with more exacting methods The problem was
that they didn't have the technology to peer into people's brains,
and unlike basic skills like language or movement, there were
no cases, at least at the time, of people with
clear brain injuries that prevented them from loving or being lovable,

(05:22):
so they had to resort to the same method most
of us use. To figure out how anyone feels, they
had to ask. Of course, people are notoriously unreliable when
it comes to knowing their own feelings or reading the
feelings of others, so for psychologists, the first order of
business was to standardize the set of questions one would
ask to find out if someone felt love or not.

(05:45):
The goal is to be able to measure love in
a person so that you can then do scientific studies
with that information. For example, if you can figure out
that a group of people definitely loves their spouses and
that another group definitely doesn't, you might then look at
the two groups to see where that difference could be
coming from. It could be something inherent about the person

(06:08):
or something external. In psychology, the go to tools for
measuring complex emotions like love are called scales. Basically, they
are questionnaires that pose a series of statements and then
ask you to rache your response depending on how much
you agree or disagree with those statements. For example, one
questionnaire might say true love lasts forever and then ask

(06:32):
you to pick a number between one and ten. One
equals strongly disagree, ten equals strongly agree, depending on how
you feel about that. Other questionnaires might have statements like
I would rather be with my partner than anyone else,
or I would feel deep despair if I couldn't be
with this person, depending on whether you want to measure

(06:52):
a person's attitude or experience with love. In this way,
a scale could get a rough measure of how you
feel about love, whether you experience it in your life,
and how often you experience it, whether you think it's
a positive thing, whether you feel it toward a particular person, etc.
It's not that different from one of those pop quizes

(07:13):
you might find in a fashion or a romance magazine,
with the key difference of added scientific rigor. Psychologists take
great care to make sure that the scales are reliable
so the results don't depend on the person's momentary mood
or immediate circumstances, and valid so the results actually measure
what you're trying to measure. It's not a perfect assessment,

(07:35):
but short of being able to read someone's mind, it's
the best anyone can do. Over the years, lots of
psychologists proposed many different love scales with names like the
Caring Relationship's Inventory or the Romantic Acts Questionnaire, and over
the years a few have risen to the top in
terms of their popularity or perception as being the most reliable.

(08:00):
Each of them has two things in common with the others. One,
they are based on a theory that breaks down the
different kinds of love, and two, they recognize that love
is not just a feeling, but a combination of rational thoughts, emotions,
and behaviors. For example, Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love
scale assumes that love is a mix of three basic ingredients, passion, closeness,

(08:26):
and commitment. For passion, it might ask you to weigh
in on statements like I find this person to be
very personally attractive, while for closeness, it might pose to
you I share deeply personal information with this person. The
idea is to make a model that maps all of
the different kinds of love that people experience. Are you

(08:48):
committed to someone and feel close to them but are
not attracted to them, Then you are feeling companionate love
i e. Platonic or friend love. Do you have the
hots for someone but don't particularly want to be close
or committed to them, Then you are feeling good old
infatuation love. Do you feel attracted to someone and feel

(09:11):
close to them and want to commit long term to them,
Then you hit the jackpot and found consummate love. Another
well accepted scale, Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecker's Passionate Love
Scale or PLS, measures romantic love and more explicitly breaks

(09:31):
down love into rational thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For example,
if my post statements like for me, this person is
the perfect romantic partner. To see what you think of
that person, I melt when looking deeply into their eyes,
to see how you feel about them, and I can't
stop thinking about this person. To measure how it affects

(09:54):
your actions, add up your scores for all thirty of
the scale statements that should tell you how much you
love that person. If it was between one hundred and
six and one hundred and thirty five points, you're wildly,
even recklessly in love. Between eighty six and one hundred
and five points, passionate but less intense, sixty six to
eighty five points occasional burst of passion, forty five to

(10:18):
sixty five points, tepit infrequent passion, and fifteen to forty
four points the thrill is gone. Psychologists have been using
scales like this to try to get a handle on
what it means to be in love and where it
comes from. For example, in one study, researchers asked men
and women from different cultures white people in the US, Japanese,

(10:41):
and Filipinos to take the PLS Survey. The goal was
to test whether Eastern and Western cultures loved or thought
about bove in the same way. They found that the
scores of love intensity were not that different between different groups,
underscoring the idea that is indeed a universal feeling. Of course,

(11:04):
these scales only give us a view of love from
the outside looking in. They don't actually tell us what's
going on inside someone's brain. But these scales prove to
be very important when the technology to do so finally
became available.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
All right, So that is the beginning of the search
for love d least the beginning of the scientific search
for love. It's a feeling and you can learn a
lot about it and nap it by simply asking people. Now,
the question is what is actually going on inside your
brain when you feel love? Is there a love part
of your brain? When we come back, we're going to

(11:42):
get into the neuroscience of love and figure out which
areas of the brain are involved and whether any of
them are related to addiction. Stay with us, we'll be
right back. Welcome back. We're talking about the science of

(12:06):
love and whether love is an addiction. So far, we've
learned what love is and how the feeling of it
maps to different versions of the love we all experience.
Now we're going to ask what's happening in the brain
when we love. It turns out love is actually something
you can do fMRI experiments on. Here is Professor Dwaine
Godwin reading from the book we've wrote together called Out

(12:29):
of Your Mind.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Scanning for Love. In the nineteen nineties, a brain scanning
method called functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI opened a new
window into the brain the fMRI revolution. By the nineteen twenties,
doctors knew that different areas of the brain corresponded to

(12:53):
different functions Functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI. Let's just see
how these are used in real time. The machine works
by measuring the oxygen consumed by active neurons. When neurons
use oxygen, it changes the magnetic properties of the hemoglobin
in your blood. This causes distortions and how the surrounding

(13:15):
water reacts to strong magnetic fields and pulses. By measuring
how this energy fluctuates, the machine can tell which brain
areas are using more oxygen than others. But it's not
fool proof, and two thousand and nine scientists scanned dead
salmon and got what looked like a live signal. fMRI
machines are able to take a picture of your whole

(13:36):
brain and highlight the parts that are active at any
given time with millimeter precision. Up to the two thousands,
fMRI scans have been used to reliably pinpoint areas that
were mapped by electrical probes, confirming from previous studies where
the brain's areas for sensing and moving were. Now the
question was whether they could map more complicated functions, emotions,

(14:01):
and even love. Would they show that the brain has
a love area or is love too complicated to narrow
down to a particular spot. It turns out that the
answer is a little of both. To find out, neuroscientists
came up with an experiment in which test subjects were
put inside an fMRI machine and shown pictures of people

(14:21):
they loved. We know they loved these people because the
subjects rated them highly on the PLS Love Scale, which
they filled out before the experiment. As of control, the
subjects were also shown photos of friends and acquaintances who
weren't rated highly on the love scale. This way, neuroscientists
could measure their brain activity when feelings of love were triggered,

(14:45):
and they could reliably assume that it was love from
the Love scale data. As you might expect from a
complex emotion, lots of areas of the brain lit up,
but in particular, neuroscientists saw intriguing activity in three specif
as that give us clues as to how our brain
processes being in love. The first area they saw light

(15:06):
up is called the insula. The insula, which means island
in Latin, is an interesting part of what is known
as the limbic cortex. It's an area that is folded
up deep within the side of your brain. You can't
see it from the typical surface view, and it's thought
to be where emotions and empathy are processed. When this

(15:27):
area is destroyed, as happens for example, with a brain
disorder called fronto temporal dementia, people seem to have a
harder time controlling their emotions, and they seem to lose
the ability to perceive the emotions of others, otherwise known
as empathy. This makes sense because love is an emotion,

(15:47):
and because empathy is critical to love. Putting ourselves in
other people's shoes and caring for others are integral parts
of what it means to love. An area where neuroscientists
noticed interesting activity is called the amygdala. The amygdalae are
a pair of nugget like bundles of neurons deep in

(16:09):
the middle of your brain. These nuggets have a reputation
as the center for anger and fear in your brain.
People who are missing their amygdala, if, for example, they
suffer from a disease called herbach wiathy, which calcifies the amygdala,
can still function, but they seem to lose the ability
to feel fear. Tests show they have a hard time

(16:32):
telling whether something is dangerous or not, and they are
more willing to approach unfamiliar situations. The amygdala also seems
to be responsible for aggressive behavior in mice, taking out
the amygdala seems to make them less territorial. What's interesting
is that, in the case of the love experiments, activity

(16:54):
in the amygdala actually decreased when subjects looked at pictures
of loved ones. In other words, love suppresses your sense
of fear and aggression, thereby lowering your defenses. The final
area that neuroscientists took note of and the Love experiments
is one that gives us the biggest clue about the

(17:15):
mechanisms for falling and staying in love. It's an area
that helps explain why humans like to love, why we
seek it, and why we sometimes even seem to be
addicted to it. That area is the brain's rewards system.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Okay, here's where we get to. The main question is
love and addiction, and the answer is, well, I'd love
to tell you, but you're gonna have to keep listening.
But hey, one of the cool things about the audiobook
We're Out of Your Mind is that you get both
of the authors reading it to you. So this is
the part where I take over the narration of the
chapter Love has its Rewards. You shouldn't be surprising that

(17:55):
our brains reward system lights up when we think about
love or when we see are loved ones. Love is
supposed to feel good. This area rewards you for it.
It's a network of structures at the very center of
your brain that tell the rest of you when something
is good, and it motivates you to seek it out
and get more of it. That craving you have for fatty,

(18:16):
sugary foods like chocolate, and the ensuing pleasure you feel
when you finally indulge in them, that's the brain's reward
system at work. That feeling of joy when your favorite
sports team wins the championship, and the impulse you have
to buy next year's season tickets blame your reward system.
That sense of peace and calm that washes over you

(18:38):
when you're surrounded by your loved ones, and the sense
that there's something missing in your life if you haven't
seen them in a long time, well, that's also the
brain's reward system. What the brain scanning experiments found was
that this reward system is activated when we look at
pictures of our loved ones. Here's a little of how
it works. When you do or experience something else, your

(19:00):
brain is programmed to like a little cluster of neurons
called the ventral tegmental area or VTA, releases a special
chemical called dopinin This chemical travels to different parts of
the brain, essentially yelling out, hey, this is good and important,
which triggers several actions. It inactivates the amydala, your brain

(19:21):
center for fear and anger, making you more open to
pleasure and enjoyment. It turns on the hippocampus, your brain's
memory center, to record everything about this moment so you
can remember later what led to this enjoyment. It triggers
the nucleus occumbents, your brain's motivation center, making you want
more of this stimulus. And finally, it triggers the prefrontal cortex,

(19:45):
which is where your higher thinking happens, so that you
are aware of what's going on. There are two interesting
things about this reward system. Number one, you can hack it.
Number two, it can be triggered to different degrees by
your range of things. Let's dig into each of these.
One it can be hacked. It turns out that it's

(20:06):
relatively easy to hijack your brain's reward system. For example,
in one famous experiment in the nineteen fifties, experimenters put
tiny wires into the brains of rats, placing them directly
on the VTA region. The wires were programmed to send
a little jolt of electricity whenever the rats pressed the
lever it was placed in their cage. This gave the

(20:27):
rats the ability to self activate their brains reward system.
As you might imagine, it didn't take long for the
rats to become obsessed with pressing the lever. They would
press it over and over to the point where they
would ignore basic necessities like food, water, and sex. Another
way to hag their brains reward system is with drugs. Cocaine,

(20:48):
for example, is a drug derived from the coca plant
that cleverly circumvents the VTA to sound the this is
good alarm in your brain. Normally, when dopamine gets released
by the it eventually gets reabsorbed back into neurons so
that its effects don't linger. But cocaine blocks at reabsorption,

(21:08):
keeping the dopamine around so that it continually activates all
those parts of your brain that tell you something good
is happening. Number two, it can be triggered by a
range of things to different degrees. The second interesting thing
about the brain's reward system is that lots of different
things seem to activate it. Somehow, evolution has managed to

(21:30):
wire your brain so that different behaviors, from eating high
calorie foods to getting a hug from your child, trigger
this reward system. And this makes sense. In order for
you to survive and for your genes to survive to
the next generation, there has to be a way for
your brain to tell your body when you're doing something
good that will ensure the survival. In the case of love,

(21:52):
our evolution has somehow determined that being close to a
lifelong made and caring for your children, parents, and community
are good for the cuntnuation of our species. This is
why love feels good. Your brain rewarding you for behavior
that benefits future generations of humans. Of course, not everything
that triggers the reward system does, though to the same degree.

(22:13):
Most people would agree that eating a piece of cake,
as delicious as it may be, isn't quite the same
as finding the love of your life. That's the other
interesting thing about the reward system. Your brain is wired
so that different things activated to different extents. Eating a
tasty cookie that gives your reward system a small nudge mm,
that's a tasty cookie. Your boyfriend holding back tears as

(22:36):
he says yes to your marriage proposal. That one lights
up your reward system like a fireworks display on the
fourth of July. You might have noticed that the same
brain circuit that's involved in feelings of love, the reward system,
is also the same brain circuit that's involved in drug addiction.
That's because both love and drugs supercharge the reward system,

(22:58):
and neuroscientists believe that when the war system is hyperactivated,
it triggers a feedback loop that starts to change your brain.
We'll card this in more detail in the chapter about addiction,
but the basic idea is that overwhelming amounts of dopamine
burn into your brain the desire to seek the source
of that enjoyment. This is why we crave love and

(23:20):
sometimes even obsessed about love. Love is like a drug.
Do you feel like you can't live without your loved ones?
As the pop singer Robert Palmer famously sang in the
nineteen eighties, let us bull face it. You're addicted to love. Yes,
it's true. I'm old enough to remember when that song
came out on the radio. So one way that scientists

(23:41):
look at love is as a sort of addiction. It
engages the same brain circuits, presumably to make sure that
our species survives. But now the big question is what
determines who we fall in love with? If love is
an addiction, what triggers it, Because it's probably not the case.
You're Madeleine love with everybody in the whole world. So

(24:04):
when we come back, we'll answer this question, and we'll
talk about whether you can take a drug that will
cure you of love or maybe make someone fall in
love with you. And then at the end, I'm going
to talk to doctor Godwin about how writing this chapter
affected our love life, I mean, our respective love lives.
We don't love working together that much. Stay with us.

(24:25):
We'll be right back, and we're back. We're talking about
whether love is an addiction, and the answer is yes,

(24:47):
sort of. The same brain circuit that makes you feel
good when you look at your partner, or your kids
or your besties is basically the same circuit that is
hijacked during addiction. Now, the question is how do we
pick who we fall in love with? Is this something
we can choose. Here's more of my reading from my
latest nonfiction book, Out of Your Mind, The Bonds of Love.

(25:11):
One question we haven't answered yet is why do we
love the people that we do. We know that love
is a feeling, that this feeling is triggered by your
brain's reward system, and we know that your brain is
wired to activate this reward system under certain conditions. But
what is it about certain people that makes this love them.
The answer to this question is still largely a mystery

(25:32):
to neuroscientists. One way to look at it is that
your reward system gets input from lots of places in
your brain. Everything from your senses, your memories, your base instincts,
and your higher thinking areas all feed into this reward system,
chiming in with an opinion about what they think is
good for you. And it could be that certain people
just check all the boxes. Throughout your life, your brain

(25:58):
has grown and been shaped by your genes and by
your life experiences. You've developed opinions and likes, and subconscious
preferences and emotional triggers. All of this has set you
up so that when you meet certain people, they cause
multiple areas in your brain to pin your reward system
at once, sending it the clear signal that somehow this
is someone that you want to be close to. Of course,

(26:21):
those of you with kids might be wondering, well, I
didn't exactly get to choose my kid, and yet I
still love them with all my heart. And for that
we have another chemical to thank, oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone,
which means it doesn't just float around your brain. It
also goes into your blood stream and travels to the
rest of your body. In particular, it seems to be

(26:41):
important in establishing the bond between a parent and child.
Oxotocin is released after warm, positive interactions, especially those ending
in hugs. For women, oxytocin levels increase as much as
four times their normal levels. During labor, the active breastfeeding
also releases oxotocin. What does oxytocin do For one, it

(27:05):
lowers the level of stress hormones in your body. It
also turns down the amygdala, which, as we mentioned before,
is the area that makes you fearful of new situations
or other people. By suppressing your fear center, oxytocin essentially
lets your guard down and makes you more open to love.
Oxytocin also activates what it might be called the mommy

(27:26):
or daddy area of the brain. This area, called the
medial pre optic area or MPOA, is a part of
the brain that controls automatic functions like body temperature, hunger,
and sleep. We know it's important for parenting behaviors because
when it's turned off, either by drugs or by damage
to the brain, these behaviors are interrupted. In experiments, might

(27:49):
spit out the full use of the MPOA, stop nursing
their young, and in some cases, even abandon their babies.
Disturbances in this area in men or women they explain
why a small percentage of human parents have a hard
time bonding with their children, or why some don't seem
to bond at all. Lastly, oxotosin does what you might

(28:09):
expect to help parents bond with their children. It activates
the brain's reward system. It turns out that the regions
of the brains that are part of the reward system
are also sensitive to oxytocin, so when this hormone gets released,
it also causes the release of dopamine. And what about
people who don't report falling head over heels for their partner,
but grew to love them over time. It turns out

(28:31):
that oxytocin also plays a role in helping love blossom.
We know this from studying a cute little animal called
the prairie role. The prairie role is one of the
four percent of mammals dead. Like many humans, pair up
in couples for life to raise their young. Scientists have
done experiments where the brains of female prairie roles were
injected with oxytocin. Those that receive the injection were found

(28:54):
to huddle more with their partners and seem to form
stronger bonds. In other experiments, scientists blocked oxytocin and found
that it disrupted how often the wolves formed couples. In humans,
as in prairie voles, oxytocin is released by your brain
during sex. It's your body's way of encouraging you to
form a lasting bond with that person. More interestingly, it

(29:15):
points to the idea that who we fall in love
with can be manipulated. For example, increasing the amount of
oxytocin in your system might lower your guard and make
you more likely to fall in love with the person
you're with. Love potion anyone. Alternately, you might be able
to sour a relationship by somehow disrupting the oxytocin in

(29:37):
a couple's brains. In fact, recent evidence suggests a species
of animal very close to us may have taken advantage
of our oxytocin system to hack their way into our hearts.
Does your dog really love you?

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Who?

Speaker 1 (29:51):
Over fourteen thousand years ago, some of the first dogs
were domesticated. This probably happened when bold and less aggressive
wolves encountered human camps. These early dog like wolves may
have been more interested in easy snacks and human left
doors than informing emotional bonds with humans. Since then, the
traits of many modern dogs had been selected by breeding

(30:14):
to be perfect pets, docile, attentive, and affectionate. But do
they really love us? Researcher Takefumi ki Kosui noticed that
his poodle tear it up when she nurished her puppies
in a way that indicated a positive emotion. His team
wondered whether other positive events, like interacting or seeing their
owner might produce a similar result. In one set of experiments,

(30:38):
they separated dogs from their owners. After a few hours,
some of the dogs were reunited with their owners, while
others were brought to someone who was familiar to them
but who was not their owner. They found that the
dogs that reunited with their owners had more tears in
their eyes than the dogs that didn't reunite with their owners.
Were these tears of joy that the researchers found it

(31:00):
prooves that dogs really love us, Oh not so fast.
In another set of experiments, the team measured how long
dogs staring at their owners and how that affected the
owner's oxytocin levels. They found that dogs that gaze at
their owners longer produce the bigger rise in their owners
oxytocin levels, and they found that owners would higher oxytocin

(31:23):
levels were more likely to play with and pet their dogs.
It could be love, or it could be that dogs
learned to produce tears to take advantage of our weakness
for puppy eyes. But whether some dogs really do form
a bond with us or we're just bred to make
us feel that way begs the question do we really care?

(31:43):
We're still learning a lot about oxytocin. For example, one
recent study suggests that it may also be involved in
regulating how much we eat, how we process emotions, and
when our instinct to flea gets activated. Like all hormones,
oxytocin acts in a mess and imprecise way, affecting lots
of systems at the same time. Who doesn't love a

(32:05):
good ending to recap. While writers and poets have been
trying to understand love for hundreds or thousands of years,
psychologists and neuroscientists have made great progress in just the
last few decades. Studies about the scale of love have
taught us that love is universal and that to some
degree it can be measured. fMRI brain imaging experiments tell

(32:27):
us that there are many different brain areas involved in love,
but the overall picture that emerges is a relatively simple one.
Love feels good. Therefore, you want more of it. If
something feels good, especially if it's as powerful as the
feelings we have towards the people that are close to us,
your brain wants to repeat it. The reagions that form

(32:49):
your brain's reward system. Make sure that you are aware
of this, that you remember it, and it changes your
brain to want it in your life as much as possible.
Breaking it down like this may make love seem clinical
or just about pleasure, but the magic of love is
in the subtleties the mystery still remains, why do we
love certain people and not others. Nobody knows what's going

(33:12):
to make one person stand out among others for that
initial attraction, and love takes time and patience. It may
be helped along by brain chemicals and hormones, but it
requires care for bonds to form and endure, It needs
effort to grow, and that is something that neuroscience can't predict,
at least not yet. Maybe in the future, neuroscientists will

(33:35):
be able to scan your brain and predict who you
will fall in love with, or they may be able
to design drugs that can reinforce love in your relationships
or make you forget relationships that didn't work out. It's
been a love filled ride, and there's still a lot
we don't know about love in the brain. As Shakespeare
wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the course of true

(33:57):
love never did run smooth. Maybe Shake Spear was a
neuroscientist after all. Well, it was lovely of you to
join us. Hey, if you're interested in checking out the
rest of the book, look for Out of your Mind
wherever books or audiobooks are sold. Thanks for joining us.
We'd love to see you again. Next week. You've been

(34:18):
listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio, written and produced
by me or Hey Cham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive
producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Jasey Peckram.
And you can follow me on social media. Just search
for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform.
Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app,

(34:39):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please
tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
All right, Well, I would love it if people checked
out the rest of the book, how about you.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, I hope people enjoy it. And I really feel
that it's important to tell the people that you love
about the thing that you love. And I feel like
in writing this book it provided me a way to
reach out to my family and to friends and bring
them into my world just a little bit amazing.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
It's an expression of your love for what.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Of the brain. And I have a special love for
the brain because it is the essence of what we do.
It is the place where we go to understand everything.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
Well, thank you for sharing your love of the brain
with us. Brain.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, and you have a love too. You love conveying
science in a way that is understandable to people, that
brings them to a better understanding of the world that
we live in, whether it's your books and physics or
the book that you did with me, and also just
the books that you've written that bring young people into
a better understanding and to find their love in science.

(35:54):
I think that's probably true of you as well.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Oh, thank you for saying that, Quene. I love that,
I love you and I love you man. Awesome. All right,
that's pretty good. I