Radiolab - This is Your Brain On Love

Episode Date: August 28, 2007

Radiolab is given the charge to put on a Singles Night. That's right. 'Jad,' they said, 'stand on a stage and make strangers fall in love! Or, at least, you know, exchange a few phone numbers with each other.' So obviously, we turned to science. Jad consults a few experts on the chemistry of a 'brain on love.'   For more information about this episode go here.

I should quite You're listening to Radio Lab. The podcast from New York Public Radio. Public Radio, WNYC. And NPR. Hey everyone, Jad here from Radio Lab. This summer, WNYC, the station that I work for, asked me to host a singles event.

And kid you not. The singles event, I mean, the idea they had, and this didn't start with me, people love public radio and they could find love through public radio. An interesting idea. And it made for an interesting event. The Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was kind enough to loan us their space. It was an amazing space. About 250 people showed up, ready to mingle. And it was great to meet fans of the show, people who love public radio and also gave us a chance to explore the biochemistry of love in typical radio lab fashion we thought for this podcast,

perhaps we would play you a bit of that event. Hello, hello, hello. I salute you all for coming tonight. I cheers to everyone for making it out. It's not an easy thing to come and put yourself in a room full of attractive strangers. And you're all very brave for doing this. and we are so, so excited that you've turned out. Let me just take a quick poll of the audience

to see who we've got here. How many people in this room have never done anything like this ever in their lives? Thank God. I'm so glad to know I'm not alone there. And how many people know Radio Lab have heard the show? All right, my people! Yes. Okay, so what we generally do on Radio Lab,

lab is we take a big idea, sort of a basic fact of the human condition, like sleep. And we ask, you know, what should be a stupid question about it? Like, why do we sleep? Turns out no one knows. And so we go and we investigate that idea in the most unusual ways we can think of. That's kind of what we do, interviews, theater, whatever. So the thought was, how can we radiolabify this situation right here? Given that it's not about us, it's about you guys, meeting people, getting to know one another,

we are your humble servants in that endeavor. But we thought, well, how could we sort of explore the issue that has brought us all together, which is love? What is love? Okay? That's a question that's been... No, don't freak out when I say love, by the way. Okay, there's no pressure.

No pressure at all. Love is the thing that happens way downstream. many, many nights from now. You'll... This is just about getting to know and another. I had a fear about this. I was like, going to say love, and everyone's going to go. But no, so we call up a bunch of people and ask them the question,

what is love? And it turns out love is a many-sided chemical situation. And as I was moving through, everyone was like, why the hell is dopamine on my name tag? What is that? Well, what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to play some tape that explains your name tags. I call up a guy, Neely Tucker, who is going to help us understand what is love. So are you guys ready to hear some tape?

All right. My name is Neely Tucker, and I'm a general assignment writer in the style section of the Washington Post. Okay, so I want you to introduce me to the posse, chemical posse. And let's start with dopamine. Tell me about dopamine. Dopamine is essentially the chemical that makes you feel good in your brain. When you're really truly madly in love, you get a great big surge of dopamine,

which to your brain just lights up as something that feels really terrific. What does that mean, though, when you see that special someone's face and you think, ah, on the inside, is that just dopamine searching and sloshing around? That is dopamine just bouncing like, you know, like a ball thing. through a pinball machine. What we're talking about here is the truly passionate form of love, that real euphoria, God's great free gift that's available to everybody, regardless of class, income, race,

religion, that's more of the feeling that we're talking about. Dopamine. Who here is dopamine? Dopamine. Now, you are the reason we are all here tonight. Dopamine. you are the reason for all the sugary pop songs on the radio you are no no I don't mean that in a bad way you are the reason for all the overheated love poetry that's ever been written dopamine is is the quintessential love chemical it's a very powerful substance and if you don't believe me

just to underline the point about the power of dopamine I want to play the next clip from a scientist Helen Fisher whose research Neely Tucker was just drawing upon when he described dopamine. She talks about her methodology to a conference that we recorded recently. I'll play you just this clip, just to make you clear out how powerful dopamine is. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people who were madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted.

And 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. So we scanned their brains looking at a photograph of their sweetheart. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. So, when you do cocaine, which I know you all do, I can see it on your faces. And when you are in love, the same little gang of neurons in your head get excited and squirt out dopamine. So when people say love is a drug, it is literally true. So dopamine, raise your hands again.

more time? You are the engine of love and you carry a particular importance in tonight's proceedings. However, and this brings us to our second chemical, dopamine on its own is useless, okay? Why else would we have brought you all together and divided you up? Chemical number two, who here is norephenephrine? Nor epinephrine. Let me introduce you, introduce you to nor epinephrine. All right, so introduce me to nor epinephrine. Noropreneffron is a neurotransmitter. It goes between neurons in your brain, which is a tiny little gap,

and it's what communicates good feelings back and forth. And the faster it goes, the better you're going to feel. It's another tiny little surge that goes through and really leads to very focused thought, attention. And how exactly is that different than dopamine? Dopamine is a good time part. Dopamine sets up the party and gets you to having a good time. is the thing that makes you ask the good-looking blonde over there should, you know,

want to drop by your place later, listen to a little Van Mars and have a glass of wine. So that experience that you might have, let's say, like a bar or a singles event, let's say, where you're in a room full of people and you're primed and you're excited and you want to meet someone and then you lock eyes with that person and the whole world just kind of drifts away. Yeah. The last part of that sentence is noraphyne. part might be dopamine. Yeah, more or less of coming at, really focusing in on one particular thing, true passion and almost the physical sense of something that you want to take care of

right now. It was related to me that northerneferrin was more like infatuation. All right, so nor epinephrine, I don't know if you guys heard that. It's a subtle distinction between noraphenephyran and dopamine, but dopamine puts you in the mood. But it's a generalized feeling. It's a kind of diffuse mood. Norophenephyran is the thing that focuses that mood on one person, in one place. It's the thing that

literally makes your heart pound. It makes your skin sweat. Your hands get clammy. Your knees get weak. It is the thing that actually is the physical aspect of attraction. Without which, dopamine would be useless. So, nor epinephrine, raise your hands again?

When you lock eyes with that special dopamine, someone realize that you you are working together to get the conversation started. Chemically, one cannot exist without the other. However, and this brings us to our third and perhaps most important chemical, it turns out that you, you, it turns out that there is a fatal flaw with dopamine and noraphernephrine. in that dopamine and norephenephrine come on strong, and they fade quickly. I know. I know. I know. However, there is a third chemical that comes online that carries you through into that relationship and into kids and all that.

I know, no, no, no, no pressure, no pressure. No pressure. So let me play you an introduction to that third chemical. who's oxytocin in here? All right. Oxytocin, listen up. All right, so we got dopamine, we got noraphenephrin, both of which are good for quick highs.

But then there's the thing that we all know happens after you've been with a person for six months, maybe longer. It doesn't always have to be so cynical. But you just, you know, the fire in your loins ebbs a little bit and you feel something else. What is that chemical that is that comes online?

That's oxytocin. Oxytocin. It's a long-lasting chemical in your brain that can continue to flow without frying your brain. If you constantly had surges of dopamine and noroprenephrine, it would drive you nuts. What kicks in is oxytocin, which doesn't have the same highs, but it's a much more sustainable way to live. And what emotion or state of mind? mind would you associate with oxytocin? I don't think more of peace and stability

and a less intense form of happiness. Content. There we go. Could we call it companionship or something like that? The long term, our lifelong commitment that two people share that they care for each other and good times are in bad

and they are really there from one another which encompasses friendship, companionship and at the end of things love. That's sort of what sustains us all. All right, so to do a quick recap, we have dopamine, which goes by its street name of romantic love. Dopamine. That's dopamine.

And then we have noraphenephyran, which can be called different things. Infatuation, perhaps. It's the physical aspects of attraction. Noraphenephyr. Or lust, as some people in the front said. And then we have the last chemical to come online, which will call attachment. In order to have a lasting, true love, you need all three chemicals, people, all three. A chemical manajat-wa is what's in order.

So that brings us to our game today, or activity, as it's called. Your task right now is to go and find people of different chemical persuasion. Okay, check their name tag. You want one of each, one oxytocin, one dopamine, one norepinephrine. You've got some conversation starters on the card. Go with it if it works, or don't. It doesn't matter. And then the mingling started.

And it did not stop, so we ended up cutting out the rest of our program because everyone was having such a good time. But we do have it for you here. A story told by Helen Fisher about what can happen when you can happen when you, try to take the chemicals of love into your own hands. She told the story of the TED conference in 2006. I want to tell you a story about the culture of love, the magic of it. It was a graduate student, and this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him.

And they were all at a conference in Beijing, and he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love. So he decided he'd put science to work, and he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And sure enough, I've never been in one of them, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks,

and it's crazy, and it's noisy, and it's exciting, and he figured this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love of them. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw and she throws her hands up and she says, wasn't that wonderful and wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome? All right. Now we'll leave you with the following story.

one of the most romantic stories that I know of. We aired it a few years back for a program that we produced on space. Carl Sagan, as in the Carl Sagan of billions and billions, that Carl Sagan, in 1977 was asked by NASA to compile

essentially a mixtape of the human experience. They asked him to basically go out into the world, record all of the sounds that reflect human life on this planet, put it on to a gold record, put the record into a capsule, shoot the capsule into space, so that many millions of years from now, perhaps some alien will run across the capsule, somehow play the record,

and learn about us. That was the idea. And so Carl Sagan appointed Annie Druyan as the leader of the team that would choose those sounds. And I spoke with Annie many years ago about the process that she went through to choose those sounds. I visited her upstate at her home, and we sat in the backyard near a waterfall. That's the sound that you will hear. And she described how she chose those sounds. My name is Annie Drianne, and I was honored to be the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which began in early 1977. Now, how does this come about? I think about the project now, and it's so exciting to think about. I mean, it's such a romantic idea. It's Did you know that at the time?

Absolutely. We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred trust, that here we were, half a dozen very flawed human beings, with huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects, building a cultural Noah's arc. It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like, two beings of perhaps a thousand million years from now, because the Voyager engineers were saying,

this record will have a shelf life of a billion years. If that didn't raise goosebumps, then you'd have to be made of wood. It was also the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other. And here we were taking on this mythic challenge and knowing that before it was done, two spacecraft would lift off from the planet Earth, moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles an hour for the next thousand million years, and on it would be a kiss of mother's first words to her newborn baby. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, greetings in the 59 most populous human languages,

Shalom. Hello from the children of planet Earth. As well as one non-human language, the readings of the humpback whales. And it was a sacred undertaking because it was saying, we want to be citizens of the cosmos. They want you to know about us. Tell me about the moment you fell in love with Carl Sagan. You said it was during the Voyager compilation.

Yes, it was. It was on June 1, 1977. I had been looking for some time for that piece of Chinese music that we could put on the Voyager record and not feel like idiots for having done so. And I was very excited because I'd finally found a ethnomusicologist, composer at Columbia University, who told me without a moment's hesitation that this piece flowing streams, which was represented to me as one of the oldest pieces of Chinese music,

2,500 years old was the piece we should put on the record. So I called Carl, who was traveling. He was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a talk. And we had been alone many times during the making of the record and as friends for three years. And neither of us had ever said anything to the other. We were both involved with the people. We'd had these wonderful soaring conversations.

but we had both been completely just professional about everything and his friends. And he wasn't there, left a message. Hour later, phone rings, pick up the phone. And I hear this wonderful voice. And he said, I get back to my hotel room and I find this message and it says, Annie called. And I say to myself, why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago? and my heart completely skipped a beat.

I can still remember it so perfectly. And I said, for keeps? And he said, you mean get married? And I said, yes. And we had never kissed. We had never, you know, even had any kind of personal discussion before. We both hung up the phone, and I just screamed out loud. I remember it so well, because it was this great eureka.

moment. It was just like a scientific discovery. And then the phone rang and I was thinking, oh shit, you know, like, and the phone rang and it was Carl and he said, I just want to make sure that really happened. We're getting married, right? And I said, yeah, we're getting married. He said, okay, just wanted to make sure. And spacecraft lifted off on August 20th and August 22nd. We told everyone involved and we were together from that moment, until we were together from that moment, his death in 1996 in December. Wow. Talk about romantic.

My God. It was so romantic. And part of my feeling about Voyager, obviously, and part of what I was feeling in the recording of my brain waves, my heart, my eyes, everything, in that meditation on the record, I had asked Carl whether or not it would be possible to compress the impulses in one's brain a nervous system into sound and then put that sound on the record and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought.

And he looked at me in a beautiful May Day in New York City and said, well, you know, a thousand million years is a long time, you know, why don't you go do it? Because who knows? You know, who knows what's possible in a thousand million years? And so my brainwaves and REM, every little sound that my body was making was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York. This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other. And so what I often think is that maybe 100 million years from now, you know, somebody flags that record down. And I always wonder, because part of what I was thinking in this meditation was about the way.

wonder of love and of being in love and to know it's on those two spacecraft. Even now, whenever I'm down, I'm thinking, and still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great, wide-open sea of interstellar space. Annie Druyan. Thank you for listening to the Radio Lab podcast. This is Your Brain on Love. The event at the Brooklyn Bury was produced by Ellen Horn, Lulu Miller, and myself, Chad Abumrod. Special thanks to the Brooklyn Brewery, Neely Tucker of the Washington Post,

Helen Fisher, Annie Druyan, Michael McManus, and the entire WNYC event staff. Those molecular stings that you heard during the event, dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytose. We're created by I Am Jen, and you can find more of her music at her MySpace page, MySpace.com slash I. am Jen. That's I. A. A.m. J-E-N. She's got a new CD out. Great music. Check her out. And of course, super special thanks to everyone who came out to the event. We hope you found what you're looking for. And also, lastly, thank you to Sarah Pellegrini, who edited and produced this podcast. I'm Jad I boomrod. Thanks for listening.