Ep91 "What is love?"

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. And today's episode, in honor of Valentine's Day, is about love and neurobiology. What unseen sparks in the skull set the heart ablaze whenever that person is nearby.

Love is one of the main fuels behind the painting of masterpieces, the writing of poetry, the composition of symphonies. Love has inspired a large fraction of the stories in our literature, whether we're talking about Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice, or every rom com that follows the same formula, and somehow we never get tired of it. And love also drives real, concrete actions. It's the reason a mother will throw herself in front of danger to

protect her child. It's the reason, at least in some cases, why when thousand ships can be launched for war. Love is a powerful force in the human story. But the question that a biologist might ask is what is love? Is it an emotion like anger or sadness? Is it something deeper? Is it a biological drive like hunger or thirst? Is it a trick played on us by evolution to keep us reproducing. So that's what we're going to unpack today.

But here's the starting point. Love is biological. It's a symphony of neural circuits firing in just the right patterns and a well timed dance of neurotransmitters and hormones. So the first question we're going to ask is, as we come to tie the experience of love to biology and words like limbic system and dopamine and oxytocin, does that

make love less meaningful or does it make it more profound? So, before we get into the meat of today's episode, I want to tackle that question head on by reading a very short story called Blueprints from my book Some we look forward to finding out answers in the afterlife, where in luck. In the afterlife, we are granted the ultimate gift of revelation, an opportunity to view the underlying code.

At first, we may be shocked to watch ourselves represented as a giant collection of numbers as we go about our normal business in the afterlife. In our mind's eye, we can see the massive landscape of numbers stretching to site's limit. In all directions. This set of numbers represents every aspect of our lives. Across its vast plane, we spot islands of sevens, jungles of threes, branching rivers of zeros.

The size and richness are breathtaking as you interact with a lover, you can see her numbers as well, and her interactions with yours. She endearingly sticks out her bottom lip for attention, and your numbers cascade into acrobatics. Digits flip their values like waterfalls. As a result, your eyes lock onto hers, and amorous words form on your lips and travel from your throat.

Such a scene is typical in the afterlife and illustrates how much both parties have overestimated us. This game always ends in disappointment for both sides, who are freshly distraught to learn that being let into the secrets behind the

scenes has little effect on our experience. The secret codes of life, whether presented as a gift or a burden, go totally unappreciated, and once again the rewarder and the punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue. Why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting. Why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its

intoxicating appeal. That was the story Blueprints from my book sum and that was my way of arguing that it's possible for us to deeply study the biological codes that underlie love, and no amount of knowledge about the biology the codes will ever touch direct experience of love. In fact, as science has taught us for centuries, deeper insight generally only enhances the splendor. You may know the story about

the physicist Richard Feinman. He was talking with an artist friend of his who held up a flower and said, look how beautiful this flower is, and Feineman agreed. And then his friend said, I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart, and it becomes a dull thing. First of all, Feineman pointed out quote, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too. Although I may not be as refined aesthetically as he is,

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension at one centimeters, there's also beauty and smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.

science of love. What happens in the brain when we fall in love? Why does attraction feel so intense? What does heartbreak have in common with physical pain? And what makes long term love last? So let's begin inside the brain. When we look at the circuitry and chemicals in the brain, we find that love correlates with particular patterns, they carefully balanced mixture of different areas and molecules. So how can

this be studied? Well, I'll give you an example. In two thousand and five, Helen Fisher and her colleagues published a new kind of study. They were thinking about how scientists have long described the things that animals do to attract mates, but there was almost nothing known about the brain mechanisms by which the mate becomes attracted. So they set up a study with brain imaging fMRI, and they scanned a bunch of college kids who were in the

throes of romantic love. The participants viewed pictures of that special someone, and they also looked at pictures of acquaintances, and the photos of the people they were romantically involved with caused the participant's brain to become active in regions that traffic in dopamine, like the caudate nucleus, which is associated with reward detection and expectation, and the ventral tegmental area, which spits out dopamine all over the brain and is

associated with pleasure and focused attention and the motivation to pursue and acquire rewards, and is by the way, a very evolutionarily old circuit. So this is what's thought to make love euphoric, like cocaine or alcohol. You've certainly heard of dopamine as a molecule that drives addiction and craving, whether we're talking about sugar or gambling or social media.

I don't want to oversimplify the story of dopamine, but presumably this is why new love feels so exhilarating, and why time spent with that person feels so rewarding, and why being away from them feels like withdrawal. Now These dopamine systems link with other brain areas, for example, the nucleus ccumbins, the amignala, the hippocampus pre federal cortex, and these areas all collaborate to keep chasing pleasurable behavior. And this is the same circuitry we see getting juiced up

in sex and food and drugs. So when we're falling in love, chemicals associated with the reward circuits flood our brains and this gives us a number of things that we recognize in love. The faster heart, the sweatier palms, the flush cheeks, the feelings of passion and anxiety. When people talk about love being like a drug, this is what they have in common. But dopamine is only part

of this equation. During this initial phase of romantic love, you also get more of the stress hormone cortisol, which essentially tells your body there's a crisis you have to deal with. And this is presumably why the person of your attraction can take up so much mental real estate. This is the object to be attended. And there's more. During that first swell of passion, there's a neuromodulator slash

hormone called oxytocin that starts playing a big role. This gets released when we hug, while we cuddle, when we make eye contact. Oxytocin is released during sex and it's heightened by skinned skin contact, and it deepens these feelings of attachment and it makes couples feel closer to one another after having sex. And there are lots of other players, like testosterone in men and women that seems to be

heightened during this initial attraction. It's possibly associated with what makes desire feel urgent and what intensifies the physical attraction in early relationships. High testosterone levels correlate with this intense attraction and with risk taking behavior. Now we put all this together, and it gives us a little bit of insight into the old expression that love is blind. And that's because romance seems to also tamp down the neural

pathways involved in fear and social judgment. In other words, when your heart's on fire, smoke gets into the neural machinery that's normally making critical assessments of the other.

awareness of any of it. You just find yourself attracted to some people more than others. The first blushes of love feel like magic, But underneath the poetry, underneath the longing glances and racing heartbeat, attraction is a neural algorithm. Now, we generally like to believe that we consciously choose our partners, but a closer study tells us that our brains are making calculations we're not even aware of pulling the strings

behind the scenes. So let's start with something visual. Facial symmetry. A number of studies show that people across different cultures are more attracted to symmetrical faces.

signal fertility. Curvy bar body, high cheek, bones, full lips, all things that young girls and older women don't have. Women tend to be attracted to different features, but the same idea. It's signals of fertility. In the male, things like strong jawlines or prominent browridges. More rugged features are associated with higher testosterone, and its signs that young boys and old men don't generally have. It indicates fertility. But

attraction isn't only about appearance. It's also about familiarity. People often end up dating someone who looks just a bit like them. There's a reason for that. We are wired to find comfort in the familiar. In some cases, this means we unconsciously seek out people who resemble our parents because their faces are imprinted in our early neural development as safe and trustworthy. This is called positive assortative mating, which just captures the idea that we are often attracted

people who share our own physical or genetic traits. If you examine married couples, you'll find that they're more likely than chance to have similar eye colors, hair textures, levels of attractiveness. There are many reasons for this, things like implicit egotism, and there's individual differences in how much people want a mate to look like them, But on average this is true. So while we think we're making independent choices in love, our brains are actually navigating us in

patterns even when we don't recognize them. But attraction is about far more than what we see. It also involves what we smell. As I talked about in episode eighty nine, humans, like all our animal cousins, communicate through pheromones, which are chemical signals that influence social and sexual behaviors. So while we have no conscious awareness of them, they play a role in determining who we find attractive. So one experiment on this was the Sweaty T Shirt Study, which was

conducted by Klaus Wedekind and his colleague. Women were asked to smell t shirts worn by different men and rate which ones smelled the most attractive. The result was that the women preferred the scent of men whose immune system genes what are called their MHC genes, were somewhat different from their own. In other words, the ladies were attracted to the guys who were not genetically similar to them.

Why does this matter well, Evolutionarily, choosing a partner with a different immune system means a greater variety of immune defenses for potential offspring. It's nature's way of preventing inbreeding and ensuring genetic diversity. Now, interestingly, birth control pills disrupt

this natural process. There were experiments by Craig Roberts and colleagues that found that women who are on the pill are more likely to choose partners whose immune profiles are similar to their own, and that can be problematic because when they go off the pill, their attraction to their partner can sometimes change. So all this raises a question to what extent is the attraction we feel out of

our hands. If something as small as a birth control pill can alter our romantic preferences, what else is shaping our choices without us realizing it. While psychologists have long noticed that attraction isn't just shaped by these immediate biological factors, it's also shaped by our past. So Researchers talk about three primary attachment styles that are formed in early childhood

and this influences how we approach relationships. So first there's people with secure attachment, where they feel comfortable with intimacy. They tend to have stable, healthy relationships. But there's also anxious attachment and people here crave closeness but have a major fear of abandonment. They typically need a lot more reassurance in relationships. And then there's avoidant attachment, and here people value independence to the point of pushing others away.

They struggle with commitment. So when you see these different types, you start to see patterns when they combine in couples. For example, one of the most common and toxic relationship patterns is called the anxious avoidant trap. This happens when someone with an anxious attachment who craves closeness falls for someone with an avoidant attachment who fears closeness, and the result is this constant push and pull dynamic, or one

person chases while the other withdraws. Now, researchers have studied this kind of thing in brain scanning, and what they find is that people with secure attachment have more regulated activity in their pre federal cortex, which presumably allows them to process emotions in a balanced way. But people with anxious attachment show a lot more activity in regions associated with fear and threat detection, so their brains are strongly wired up to detect potential rejection. And it's the same

with people with avoidant attachment styles. They also have cranked up threat detection, but in this case it has to do with being exposed to cues that trigger feelings of closeness, and they also tend to have less activity in reward centers for positive social stimuli. So sometimes the paths we take aren't about choices in the moment, but patterns set down in our brains long before we even enter the dating world. And attraction isn't just about biological signals and personality compatibility.

own life. Sometimes, when you start seeing someone new, everything about them is fascinating, the way they laugh, the stories they tell, even the way they twitch their nose when they laugh. Every moment with them feels electric. But over time, this novelty fades. Your brain adapts. What was once thrilling becomes familiar, and this is where attraction starts to shift. Some people chase that initial high, moving from one relationship to the next in search of that early stage rush.

Others transition into long term love. But this raises a question can love last forever? We often think about love is something that fades over time. The passion cools, the excitement diminishes, and eventually that person who once made your heart race becomes just another part of your daily routine. But is that inevitable? Does love have a neural expiration date?

Some people argue that monogamy is not natural. After all, as we just said, your reward systems thrive on novelty, and there are arguments that humans evolved for serial pair bonding, meaning we're wired to stay with a partner for a certain number of years, often just long enough to raise young children before moving on, and there's some evidence for this. In many cultures, divorce rates spike around the four year mark, so that leads some researchers to suggest that romantic love

does have a built in expiration date. The brain is wired for change, and that long term monogamy requires conscious effort rather than biological instinct. And indeed, it's inevitable that there's a change in neural activity over time because the high energy drug addiction of early romance can't keep going forever. But that doesn't mean the spark of passion has to get extinguished. There was a study in twenty eleven and they performed brain imaging on couples that had been married

an average of over two decades. So they showed them their partner's face, and they also showed control images of other faces, like a friend or someone they didn't know well. And what they found in response to the loved one was the same kind of reward related activity as new lovers had, for example in the ventral tegmental area and dorsal stratum. In other words, the reward systems involved in

romantic love can stay sparking along for decades. And what they found in the study was that Several other areas were active, depending on the kind of relationship the people had developed. Some people had a more friendship based love, and these folks they saw more activity in the same kinds of regions we see in maternal.

of romance can stick around. Maybe it mellows a bit, but the key is that it's accompanied by more rational cognition rather than the emotional roller coaster. In other words, reward centers are still cranking along as loving relationships proceed, but the relentless itch of desire subsides. Your cortisol and

other stress hormones gradually return to equilibrium. You get the closeness without the overwhelm As a result of these brain changes, the connection with your partner deepens into something less obsessive in consuming, into something where your partner becomes deeply ingrained into your internal model. They work their way into your neural circuitry. They literally become a part of you. In this way, there's a drift from passionate love into what's

called compassionate love. Euphoria is slowly replaced with depth. And let's return to the neuromodulators. Oxytocin isn't just involved in the early throes of romantic love. It also helps transform attraction into attachment. I mentioned oxytocin earlier as a cuddle hormone, but it's also known as a bonding hormone. It gives feelings of contentment and calmness and security, all of which

are elements of mate bonding. By the way, you also find oxytocin underlying the bonds between parents and children, or between close friends, or between humans and their pets. And it's not just oxytocin. There's another other hormone called vasopressin that plays a key role in commitment and loyalty. I'll take a second here to tell you about prairie voles, which are these very cute mouselike rodents. And the thing about prairie voles is that one of the few monogamous

species in the animal kingdom. They pick a partner and they stick together. Now, not surprisingly, there's some individual differences among these voles, and it turns out that voles with higher vasopressin levels are more likely to stay with their partners for life. But if you block vasopressin receptors in these voles, they lose interest and start behaving like polygamists. And it's generally thought that vasopressin works this same way in humans. So long term love is not just about emotion,

it's about chemistry. In the dark of the skull, the obsessive, dopamine driven intensity of early love can transform into something deeper. In other words, while early stage romance is driven by novelty and excitement, long term love is governed by a slightly different set of neural circuits, ones that promote attachment and stability. So while passion might naturally fade, deep emotional attachment can last a lifetime if the right conditions are met.

So while a lot of relationships fail, long term love is possible and here's what we want to consider on Valentine's Day. What do successful long term couples do differently. The research shows that it boils down to five things. First, successful couples keep novelty alive. As we saw, dopamine correlates with novelty, which is why new relationships feel so exciting. But over time, the brain adapts, so the challenge is

to introduce new experiences into the relationship. Traveling, learning new skills, trying a new restaurant. These sorts of things can juice up the brain's reward pathways, So while the brain naturally adapts to familiarity, novelty can bring back some of that magic. Second, couples maintain physical touch, which triggers oxytocin. Couples who continue to hug and kiss and cuddle maintain stronger bonds. Third,

they figure out how to reframe conflict. There's no relationship that's free from conflict, but how couples handle it determines whether their love survives. Research from John and Julie Gatman suggests that the key to long term success is the ratio of positive to negative interactions. So couples who maintain at least a five to one ratio of positive interactions to negative ones are more likely to stay together. In other words, it's not about avoiding conflict, which is impossible.

It's about balancing negativity with emotional repair. Fourth, it's important to cultivate gratitude. One of the simplest ways to sustain love is by expressing appreciation. Couples who actively express gratitude towards each other have increased activity in the brain's reward system. Finally, good couples grow together, and this may be the biggest

factor in long term love is shared growth. Couples who support each other's personal development are more likely to stay together, whether that's pursuing career goals, or learning new things, or evolving emotionally. Again, the brain thrives on change, and relationships that allow for mutual growth tend to be the ones that last.

immune system differences to childhood attachment patterns. And it's a very real feeling. And part of the way we can appreciate the reality of it is by looking at how and why it is so deeply painful to the brain to lose love. Okay, so we've seen so far that falling in love can be exhilarating, coming with a neurochemistry cocktail that makes us feel euphoric and obsessed and connected. But what happens when that love is taken away? What happens when the person who once felt like the center

of our universe suddenly disappears. So in twenty eleven, a team at the University of Michigan did a study that helps explain the neuroscience of heartbreak. They placed heartbroken participants people who had gone through a breakup inside an fMRI scanner and showed them pictures of their exes, and when people looked at photos of their lost love, the same brain regions that process physical pain lit up, for example, the anterior singulate cortex and the insulin. So heartbreak isn't

just something you imagine you're going through. It is physical. Your brain register's romantic rejection like an injury. That's why heartbreak isn't something you can just shake off and ignore it. It's a real biological issue going on now. I argued in my book Live Wire that this is because we form an internal model of the person that we're with, and your brain expects that person to be there, and when that person is no longer there. It is like

drug withdrawal. If you use a drug, your brain expresses more receptors for that chemical, and then it finds itself in a bad situation when the drug is no longer present, when its expectations go unmet. If you're interested in more about this equivalence, check out episode twenty four of Inner Cosmos, which is called what does drug withdrawal have in common with heartbreak? Anyway? This is why heartbreak feels so consuming.

This is why people who go through a breakup often find themselves obsessing over their ex or replaying conversations in their mind, or scrolling through old texts, or feeling physically unable to focus on anything else. They've been thrown into a state of deprivation. Their brain is craving the relationship that they've lost, just like craving a drug that's been

taken away. In heartbreak, as in drug addiction, people have similar responses insomnia, loss of appetite, obsessive thoughts, mood swings, sometimes physical pain like tightness in the chest. Essentially, your nervous system is in panic mode. It's screaming, where is that thing I expected? Bring it back. This is why people can struggle to let go of an ax even

when they know the relationship was bad. Their rational brain may understand that the relationship is over, but their brain's emotional core, like the limbic system, hasn't yet caught up. This is particularly true for people who were deeply in love. Helen Fisher's research showed that the deeper the romantic attachment, the stronger the withdrawal symptoms. Some people even experience broken

heart syndrome, which is a real medical condition. It's technically called taco subo cardiomyopathy, where intense emotional distress temporarily weakens the heart muscle, which mimics the symptoms of a heart attack. So heartbreak can almost literally break your heart. Now, the good news is that, because of plasticity, the brain has resilience. Over time, the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in logic

and self regulation, begins to gain control again. It begins to reframe the loss, helping you make sense of what happened. If you've recently suffered a breakup this Valentine's Day, I'll just remind you that the things that help our exercise and social connection and novel experiences to replace old associations over time, as you get over an x, new pathways form. This means that one day thoughts of your ex won't trigger pain anymore. Instead, they'll feel more distant, like an

old memory. As painful as heartbreak is, the thing we might keep in mind about it is that it is proof that love existed in the first place. The fact that the brain is capable of experiencing this kind of pain is a testament to how profoundly it is wired for a connection. Okay, so what we've been talking about in this episode is love, and now that you're imagining sitting on a beautiful mountaintop, gazing at the long road ahead with your loved one.

accepted as organic, unpredictable, deeply human. We see people fall for the wrong person, people stay in toxic relationships, people find themselves hopelessly drawn to someone who doesn't love them back. Love is messy, but what if it didn't have to be? As we continue to unravel the neuroscience of love, we're faced with a fascinating and unsettling possibility. Could we manipulate love, could we create it, could we enhance it? Or could

we even erase it entirely? If love is just neurochemistry in circuits, then in theory, we should be able to hack it, And the truth is we are already doing that. Scientists have long been studying drugs that enhance attachment and romantic bonding. The most promising one is oxytocin, which I mentioned earlier as.

less interested in attractive strangers. They kept a greater physical distance from the strangers. In other words, a simple squirt of oxytocin up the nose strengthened their commitment to their partner and made them less interested in others. Now, imagine a world where oxytocin therapy is a routine part of couples counseling. Could we use brain chemistry to keep love alive in struggling marriages, Could we artificially restore the feelings

of early romance in long term relationships? And if we can, should we? Because while the idea of a love drug might sound promising, it also raises ethical questions. If love can be chemically induced. Is it's real If we use a drug to feel connected to our partner, are we experiencing genuine emotion or just a biological illusion? And then there's the opposite question, what if we didn't want to love as much? Is there a science to suppressing love?

Anyone who has suffered from heartbreak knows the unbearable ache of longing for someone who has gone the sleepless nights, the obsessive thoughts, the emotional pain that lingers for weeks. Wouldn't it just be easier if you could turn it off? Well, some scientists have been exploring the possibility of erasing romantic attachment, of altering brain chemistry to dull or even eliminate the pain of lost love, and it turns out this might

be possible. In twenty ten, researchers we're looking at beta blockers, which is the type of drug used for high blood pressure and chest pain and irregular heartbeat, and they discover that beta blockers can also interfere with emotional memory formation. In other words, if you give beta blockers to someone right after a traumatic event, that weakens the emotional intensity of that memory. So some people argue this could be

used to soften the pain of a heartbreak. Imagine taking a pill after a breakup and it reduces your brain's ability to attach strong emotions to memories of your ex. The memories would still be there, but the pain associated with them would be less and would fade faster. Okay, so this is one approach to using pharmaceuticals to change our experience with love. But what if we took this

even further? In animal studies, it turns out that blocking certain proteins in the brain can erase emotional memories entirely, and that's led to a speculation. Could we develop a drug that erases love. Imagine a future where you walk into a clinic and you have all memories of an ex emotionally neutralized. Would you do it? And if we had the ability to erase love, what would that do

to us? Would we fall in love more recklessly knowing that we could erase the pain later, would relationships become more disposable? Or would we lose something profoundly human the ability to grow from heartbreak, to learn from our emotional wounds. It's worth noting that heartbreak, as painful as it is, is a part of our story that makes us who we are. It shapes our future preferences and our boundaries and our understanding of what we need in a partner.

If we erased love, would we lose all the wisdom? And there's one more issue about the future of love, and that has to do with the impact of artificial intelligence on relationships. Would you actually fall in love with a machine one that listens to everything you say and has a perfect memory and never gets angry, and never stops paying attention and always has a lovely and engaged

response to everything that you say. We currently understand love as a human to human experience, but in the age of artificial intelligence, I think it's possible this might change. AI and virtual companions these are on the rise, so consider apps like Replica, which give you a virtual companion that you can talk with anytime, in the middle of

the night or whenever you're feeling lonely. Hundreds of thousands of people are making emotional bonds with digital entities, and it's no surprise that some fraction of these users have reported falling in love with their AI companions. From a neuroscience perspective, this of course makes sense. Love is at its core about connection and emotional responsiveness, and if an AI can mimic human behavior well enough, if it can listen and respond with empathy and engage in meaningful conversation,

our brains might not make a meaningful distinction. I'm reminded of the scene from the first episode of Westworld where the young William is talking to the woman who's outfitting him for his adventure, and she's giving him a hat and a gun and so on, and he's not quite sure if she's a human or a robot, so he hesitantly asks. He says, I hope you don't mind if I ask you this question, But are you real? And she says to him, if you can't tell, does it matter?

And I think this is going to increasingly be a key question for us with AI relationships. In Japan, apparently there are already virtual spouses AI partners that lonely individuals interact with daily. People hold ceremonies to marry their AI companions, and some claim to feel a deeper emotional fulfillment from

AI than they ever did with human partners. Could AI partners be the answer for people who struggle with social connection or anxiety or past trauma, or would a world filled with AI companions erode human intimacy, making real relationships feel too difficult in comparison. If you're interested in this, please listen to my episode thirty nine to hear a

much fuller argument on the pros and cons. But for now, I'll just pose some questions about love and the future of our technology, because with the advancements that we're in the middle of right now, we're definitely going to be confronting these. If we could enhance love, should we? If we could erase love, should we? If AI can simulate love, is it real? I think there aren't necessarily easy answers here. On the one hand, technology could help people struggling with

loneliness or heartbreak or commitment issues. Imagine a world where struggling couples could rekindle their passion with neurochemical therapy, Where people suffering from unbearable grief over lost love could ease their pain with a pill. Where those who fear rejection or who have social anxiety could experience deep, fulfilling companionship through artificial intelligence. On the other hand, there's something unsettling

about the idea of manipulating love. Would we lose something essential and what do we conclude when love is no longer something that happens to us, but something we can turn on and off at will, would we still cherish it? So to wrap today's episode, today we explore the neuroscience of love, how attraction and romance and long term bonds

emerge from neural circuits and chemical cocktails. Explored evolutionary factors in what we find attractive, as well as why heartbreak feels like physical pain and how attachment styles influence our relationships. And finally, we looked ahead to the future. Could we enhance love or erase it or even fall in love with ai?

For millennia, we viewed love as something spiritual and mysterious, but as neuroscience advances, we're framing the experience as a biological process governed by circuits and chemistry and evolution and that leads us with the major question that I began with. As science unlocks the mechanics of love, does it become less magical or even more profound? So I want to return to the short story Blueprints that I read at

the beginning. What I find so amazing in science is that it's possible for us to study the neural mechanisms of love, and that no amount of knowledge diminishes our experience of it. In fact, it will only enhance our ability to appreciate it and perhaps understand what's happening well enough to optimally navigate through its choppy waters. Love is written in the language of biology, but that makes it

no less wondrous. If anything, the neural symphony behind love deepens the awe because even with all our scientific insights, love still shapes us. It surprises us, it drives our best life stories. And as we stand at the edge of new technology neural interventions, AI, companionship, love enhancing drugs, the question isn't just what love is, but what we might want it to be. Will we engineer love or

let it remain unpredictable. The only thing that remains certain is that love, in all of its forms, will continue to be a defining force in our lives. Happy Valentine's Day. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Helen Fisher, a colleague and friend and biological anthropologist who dedicated her life to studying love and to helping millions of others discover it and understand it. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.

Send me an email at podcasts at egleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is in our Cosmos.