Love at First Sight

bit as we explored. But today we're gonna we're gonna really tackle the final piece of the puzzle and and one of the big tropes about romantic love, love at first sight. Yes, I saw him from across the room. He looked at me. I looked at him. Sparks flew were married just hours later. Is that your story? But you know that's a big Hollywood trope, you know, like the you're in a bar, you're somewhere across the room and uh, you know you lock eyes. Time stands still, Yes, yes,

you're outside of time all of a sudden. Um. And that's not to say that love at first sight couldn't exist. I suppose there's a possibility, but in some ways, today's episode is a bit of a trojan horse, like we're saying, hey,

just love it, first sight exists. But really, what's inside that trojan horse is this idea that when you do walk eyes, there's a kind of autobiography of things going on to that leading up to that moment that are influencing the way that you're even locking eyes with that person and assessing them, and that there's probably a lot more going on than just this instant, palpable chemistry. Indeed, now I think it's probably a good good point in the podcast to just sort of establish our own take

on this. Going into it, I definitely thought might take changed a bit and exploring the information. But where where were you on the idea of love at first sight prior to this research? Well, I always feel like this is just a case of semantics like love, lust, intrigue, interest, you know, these are all sorts of things that come up when you're in a room and there are strangers, and there's always an excitement when you do lock eyes with someone that you feel like you have a connection with.

So for me, I've never thought of it as like this sort of you know, you just got swept off your feet and you locked eyes thing. Okay, Yeah, I feel like for my part, it's definitely a trope that I always kind of looked down on a bit. And maybe even if I was feeling a bit hot on the topic, I would say that the idea of love at first sight cheapens love and and and yeah, just kind of cheapens that the real sustained love that one

has that you build over time. You know. It's kind of like saying, hey took me ten years to paint. Look at this painting I did, and then someone said, hey, yeah I just learned to paint and I made a masterpiece. You know, No, you didn't make a masterpiece like the thing that I've been building all this time. Like this is surely more substantial to than this, you know, brief look at a bar and yeah, there there's some things to that. It is. Yeah, that's the thing about it.

Like now, having looked at the research which we're going to discuss in earnest here, Uh, you know, I I have to give a little more credence to the idea or at least the experience of love at first sight. I'm not saying I'm at this point, I'm no longer going to say you were not feeling love at first sight. All right, you were feeling something. And if you want to classify his love at first sight, it could have been something and it bloomed into love. Is that what

I'm getting from you? Yeah? Yeah, okay, all right, Well, before we kind of go into the different aspects of this, I just wanted to roll out some statistics. There's a two thousand Gallop poll that found that while so many Americans believe that there is such a thing as the one true love, overall, only of people think love could occur at first glance. And here's the interesting thing about this. Um, if you break this down by gendercent of men think

that there's love at first sight compared to women. It's a slight uptick, but it's an uptick. Nonetheless, it seems significant. I mean especially you know, if you're standing outside of the figures, one might one might be tempted to expect the female percentage to be higher. You know, well, I

think that would be the stereotype. Women just can't help love and love, right, But um, maybe it's a situation of the stereotype exists, and men are more likely to buy into the stereotype, and women of course know that, having the brain of women know that it's not quite so cut and dry. I don't know. I just don't

even know now, A Lea Malik Pines. A psychologist Ben Gearing on your university in Israel, found in a survey that a small fraction eleven percent of people in long term relationships said that they began their courtships with love at first sight. So that's that is pretty small, and that's just that area. And and particularly there's a sort of cultural lens to you that we're looking at things when we talk about love at first sight. But still there are some people who say that's that's how my

relationship began and begun. Is key here because as we're going to discuss a lot of this falls into the into an exploration of the timeline of romantic attachment, the timeline of say, any successful or doomed relationship, however you want to look at it and how it transpires and then how we look back at it. Yeah, and timeline is important. I'm glad that you brought that up to you, because, um,

when we talk about love at first sight. Again, it's a case of semantics, because if you look at someone's work, like biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, she might say, Okay, that could be of at first sight a couple of seconds up to maybe three minutes, depending on what's going on in the brain and how primed the brain is. And this, this is where we really need to turn to you know, some good old m r Eyes and take a look

into the brain to figure out what's going on. Indeed, so let's go back to that sort of the bar trope, right, Like what's happening when person a in person be suddenly locked glances and there's that magical moment and the music starts up. It could be it could be some music, but essentially what's happening is your your your eyes are locking on, but your brain is locking on to a target. It's like it's like a scene in Top Gun right where the you're you're trying to lock the missiles before

you fire the heat seeking missile at the enemy. MiG right, um, Except when our brains do this, we're sucking away from other faculties. Were sucking away Environmental stimuli are processing of time. We're using some of the same parts of the brain that are also involved in time and perception. So it begins to it feels like time is standing still. It feels like everything else is sort of fading, uh into the periphery, because it sort of is from from just

a computational side of things. Yeah, especially if you consider what is going on with the chemistry in the brain. Because as I had mentioned before, you're in the room full of people who are strangers, there's already an element of intrigue. You lock those eyes, and maybe when you do that, that triggers the release of dopamine in the brain's reward system, which in turn may motivate you to

approach that person. Because if we've learned anything about dopamine in the reward system, we know that, um, there's kind of bread crumb trail being made here, and the more you can revisit it and get more things of that dopamine, well, the happier your reward system is. So hey, why not go and then talk to that person and see if

you can increase the dopamine in your brain. Yeah, all under the dress of elation, passion and this and this cultural idea of romantic love, right, Yeah, and that's kind of what is setting the stage for your brain for this idea of love. Because if you look at this meta analysis study, it's called the Neuroimaging of Love and

it was conducted by Syracuse University's professor Stephanie Ortiga. It found that when people are engaged in this sense of love, um, that there are twelve areas of the brain that work together to release euphoria inducing chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, and that's oppressing and then that's what is culminating to express that feeling of love. And according to this meta analysis, this can happen as early as point two seconds of

visual contact. All right, so you're locking in on target and you can can even think of the dopamine kicking in the various other alk hormones were mentioning. It's kind of the the ignition behind the heat seeking missile, like go out there, go to the next stage, right. Um. And it's also interesting in this study they pointed out that these euphoria inducing drugs that are suggesting love, Um, it's akin to using cocaine. Yeah, And uh, that's what's

interesting about this. There's, uh, this idea that newly found love sparks in areas of the brain that are associated with euphoria inducing drugs. So that's that's that feeling of cocaine. And also, just as a side note, this is why when new love crashes like you know and and burns, um and you are with drawing from that person, withdrawing from you, you feel that sense like you're withdrawing from a drug because no longer is that source available to you.

You're coming off of your fix and you're gonna need another fix. It also draws back to our previous episode that we did I Believe on the Dark Side of sarahtonin um. So, any of these chemicals, you know, even though we talk about like the love hormone and the fuel good neurotransmitter, etcetera, like these are that the brain is a complex system. In various parts of the brain, various neuro transmitters are are pulling at least a double duty.

And so there even though there's there is a positive spin on any of these interactions, there's also a potential negative one. Indeed, um No, again, you just have to kind of look at it as this again, this idea of you know, split second love or love at first sight is perhaps more like there's some chemistry going on in the brain that is setting this stage for love. And Helen Fisher again, she is that biological anthropologist, and

her ted talk called the brain and love. She says, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction in either the same brain region, this reward system or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. In fact, she says, I think animal attraction can be instant. You can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant. And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call love at

first sight. Yeah, we're talking about animal favoritism here. Um mate choice, female choice, sexual choice instantly. What comes to my mind is just like two beatles dancing around each other on a tree limb. And then ultimately you can say that any human interaction, with its levels of human complexity, is essentially the same thing. It's that little dance to see if these two pieces are gonna lock up. Yeah, in some ways it's kind of thin slicing, right, assessing

the situation. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're gonna talk about imprinting. But we're not going to talk about Twilight, the movie and imprinting. We promise. Alright, we're back. I know you just promised we weren't going to talk about Twilight. But of course you're referring to the the imprinting that occurs when a werewolf sees a half vampire baby also love

with it. Just to clarify for anyone out there, it was like, I don't know what they're talking about Twilight, but and the same thing happens in humans. Well, no, it's a little bit more complicated. Um in Printing refers to a really critical period of early time in an animal life when it forms an attachment and develops a concept of its own identity. So birds and mammals are born with the pre programmed drive to imprint on their mother.

And this sort of imprinting provides animals with information about, hey, this is my mom, or this person or thing or animal is really important to me, And later on this can determine who they will find attractive when they reach adulthood or who they pair up with. And there are a couple of studies that actually support this in humans and in other animals. Yeah. I mean we're ultimately talking about a predisposition to fixate on particular types of people.

You know, the exact parameters are obviously going to vary a lot. It might relate to race, like you said, hair color, um, But ultimately it's kind of aiding a rough template of what you're supposed to look for. Yeah, And just so you have an idea of how easy it is to imprint in the animal world. Um. I wanted to bring up the example of Austrian naturalists Conrad Lawrenz, who became the first to sort of um codify this

right and established the science behind imprinting. And he found that when baby birds emerged from their eggs, they'd imprint on whatever animated thing was in front of them. And so he tested this out. He himself became the thing that they imprinted upon, and they followed him around and um, he became the object of their affection. And then he

also would put in other mother's substitutes. And he found that those birds would just as easily attached to inanimate objects and oddities such as a pair of gum boots. Oh yes, this is the guy you would you see the images even treking around in the boots, Yes, a white ball and even an electric train. I Again, this is if it was presented at the right time when they were emerging and trying to figure out something to focus on into again, harness their energy into figuring out

what was important, who was important, and who they were. Yeah, I mean from a biological standpoint, like life is essentially a matter of scaling this mountainous survival to fulfill your genetic mission, you have to reach the top of it, and imprinting is sort of a way of finding those first hand and footholds as you make the ascent. Yeah. Now in humans, it's, uh, it's perhaps not as clear cut,

but there are a couple of studies. There's a two thousand three study called sexual imprinting and Human mate choice. In this uh that the abstract actually says, quote, we report that homogammy in humans is attained partly bi sexual

imprinting on the opposite sex part parent during childhood. We hypothesize that children's fashion a mental model of their opposite sex parents phenotype that is used as a template for acquiring mates to phenotype meaning like the physical characteristics, and that it goes on in this abstract to say, to disentangle the effects of phenotypic matching and sexual imprinting, adopted daughters in their rearing families were examined. Judges found significant

resemblance on facial traits between daughters husbands and their adopted fathers. Furthermore, this effect may be modified by the quality of the father daughter relationship during childhood. Daughters who received more emotional support from their adoptive father were more likely to choose mates similar to the father than those whose father provided

a less positive emotional atmosphere. And this, to me feels like one of those adoy moments because you see this alive classic Oh I married my mother, I married my father, and also just the myth of the of Oedipus marrying your mother murdering your father. It's it's kind of funny because as we'll look at the next section here on gene um compatibility or genetic compatibility, it's a fine line here.

You want someone who's similar enough and the traits that you admire and a parent, because hey, your parent was attracted to that parent and had successful offspring, the same thing could happen for you, right, But you want enough genetic diversity to strengthen any offspring that you might have. Yes, And if I can just return to the Top Gun analogy, it's it's identifying the any plane, there's a certain type of plane you need to shoot down. Yeah, poor Goose.

I have theories about Goose. I really wanted to see a sequel to Top Gun where Goose lived and was reprogrammed by the Soviets the Battle matter that that would have been a movie that I really could have wanted to have seen. Uh oh, well, you never know. Maybe there'll be some sort of reboot, maybe maybe by Robert liam Alright, But in terms of genetic compatibility, again, we

can look at the animal world. There's a study from April two thou and nine, the issue of the journal Genetic, in which researchers from Cornell University found that female fruit flies are biologically primed to sense which males are more genetically compatible with them and to make more eggs after mating with good matches than they do with less compatible matches. And so these findings suggest that the females can somehow judge a potential mate upon their first meeting and then

biologically react to boost the chances of producing against successful offsprings. So, and we bring this up because we want to kind of say that whole love at first sight thing isn't just okay, you locked eyes and um, this person kind of has these traits that you admire. There's other stuff going on to Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going

on underneath the surface. Um. And with the fruit fly situation, like a lot of that is also related to avoiding hooking up with a close relative, which obviously is genetically speaking, not a wise move for for any organism. Uh. But then the human crossover for this is is pretty spectacular. Now with the fruit flies, I mean a lot of this is as simple as programming to keep one fruit fly from mating with a close relative and you know,

and stirring up the genetic ramifications of that. But then when we when we look at how this plays out in the human sphere, we see, uh, we see a lot more complexity. Um, depending how complex you want to to to make sniffing one another person's sweat or you know, engaging in a makeout session with them. Yeah, again, that's just it's complex biochemistry and the fruit flies are exhibiting the us and humans we have seen in studies exhibit this when they sniff the sweaty armpits of T shirts

worn by the opposite sex. Again, this is like sort of gender normed studies that we're talking about here. But the idea is that women were more uh more likely to select a mate with someone who had a far different genetic expression than their own, because again, you need genetic diversity that's going to uh, that's going to result in stronger offspring, and that again as part of the

whole genetic mission of of any organism. Um. So, so we begin to have this picture emerging of it's it's like multiple scans are going on, you know, kind of rowbody computer re star trek scans almost if you want to use that analogy, and and then you almost have different departments that are reporting back on how things are matching up, like all right, does she look like our mother? Yep, it looks like our mother. Right, we're gonna go on that.

And then you have the other the other department, and they're like, all right, well, we're making some sense of the genetic combatibility here. Um, we're taking in the smells, we may have to take in some of the saliva as well. And we're gonna see what the test results there are. So so they're they're they're kind of these different it's almost like trying to get legislation passed or something. Yeah, you're right in if you think about it that way,

that locking eyes across the room. Alright, dopamine all right, now, go inch forward and meet the person to get more dopamine. Now, further assess and then yes, at the end of the night, there might be the swapping of the spit to further assess whether or not you're compatible. And in our mind it's all playing out like like like like a French romance movie, but but under the surface, it's it's a

lot more complex, weating outgoing. Yeah, and there's another element here that is pushing the needle a bit when we talk about this love at first sight, and it's called a sort of mating. And we already know that people tend to gravitate towards each other based on their shared

socio economic and education backgrounds. Right, So if you ever heard the phrase, uh, birds of a feather fly together, Yes, Yeah, it's sort of like this, like you're seeking out someone who is like you, and we know that we're doing this even when we're not trying to go after some sort of relationship, we just tend to do, you know, with each other. When when we're connecting with one another. Yeah, I mean people you can have conversations with about the

things that matter to you. Do you end up engaging with people that are kind of from the same background or have similar interests. Well, it turns out that there may even be a body fat component to a sort

of mating. There's a two thousand and seven study in which the researchers, who are based at Rout Research Institute in the University of Aberdeen, measured the body composition of forty two couples using a sophisticated technique called dual energy X ray absorbed geometry, and the results show that the amount of body fat in one person was proportionately very

similar to that of their partners. And so there's this idea that not only do we try to find similarities and our you know, socio economic backgrounds and what our taste and music are, but maybe even the shapes of our bodies. Yeah. Now that the study point out that it's it's unclear though, exactly how these associations come about.

I mean, do the social activities of of overweight and obese people just merely conside to the you know that the social activities of active runners, they just happened to concide. You met this person while you were engaging in similar activities that have an impact on your physical fitness or you know, or vice versa. So we're just more likely to meet people that have a similar body index. Yeah, and I kind of feel like across the board, obviously

you don't see this. I mean, you see plenty of examples of couples who don't match up in terms of body type or body fat. Yeah, I mean I think it was Paula Abduel that that pointed out that opposites attract, right, that was the big track. Yes, it was Paula Abduel. But as we've discussed before, opposite they do attract. But can you still have to have enough there in common in order to make that whole dynamic work. So again, it kind of comes back to this idea of multiple

m committees weighing in. And so one committee might say they're a lot shorter than we are, I'm not sure this is gonna match up, And they'll say, well, but look at the stats on the genetic compatibility, look at the stats on whether she looks like our mother. All these things are looking good. So we're gonna we're gonna maybe pass on worrying about high her body mass index

in this case. Yeah. A lot of this dates back to nine seventy study from social psychotist K. Reuben where to a college student couples gave him me to each of them a survey asking questions about the relationship, and then put them in a room measured their gaze uh and uh. And what he found was you saw stronger connections of love or at least reported love on the questionnaires, matching up with more prolonged eye contact. So the more and again this is another one of those that sounds

pretty obvious. It seems like an overstatement of the obvious when we we spell it out like this, But the idea that if you're making more eye contact between these couples, there's more love present, stronger connection. I also wanted to mention that just the bear gaze, when you're you're looking out across the room at someone, um, if you're giving a really direct gaze, um, and that person is perceiving

that already. The fact that you're like, you're trying to get that person's attention, is going to ratchet up your attractiveness one notch. It's kind of like this mutual admiration society, right, So if you both are kind of like baseline attracted to each other and you notice that you're looking at each other, there's that oh you're looking at me, I must be attractive to you, and so on and so forth. Now,

this is again one of those adoin moments. But if you smile, that's going to give even more, you know, the confirmation that, yes, you should pursue this. If you do not smile, of course, this is going to tell the person that you're not interested unless you look away

and don't smile. There's something to this, like you maybe catch eyes, you look away and you're not smiling, you're being a little bit mysterious about loose and this was This was actually proven out in a two thousand six study from the Institute of Neuroscience Psychology at the University of Glasgow in case anyone just really wanted some some hard science to back up back that up. You know. It also reminds me of a story that a friend of mine told me, and that maybe some people can

relate to. So, my wife a couple of friends. They were traveling on a subway in New York and one of the friends in this group has this, uh like

when she feels nervous, she smiles. And so they were leaving like a restaurant or something, and like some guy was interested and she wasn't interested, but she was kind of like nervous, so she made eye contact and smiled, and like the dude ended up following them on the train for like a long portion of their leg back to where they were staying, to the point where they had to like stop him and say, look, we just need to go on because she's just just a nervous

tick with her. Well, also there is um, I'm sure that simint arts stuff Mom never told you has probably covered this before too. There's a cultural expectation that women should smile back. Yeah. I was thinking about that, um, because there's the whole the word one of the one of the worst, well, one of the many bad things you can say to a female say hey, honey, why

don't you smile more? Right? Right? Coming from maybe like older gentlemen at a fruit stand or something, right, yeah, or you get stuff like you'd look a lot prettier if you're smiling, and then you just want to punch the person. Yeah, because its matching up with the state. It's kind of like they're saying, I would want to mate with you more if you would smile for me. Now that's horrible, right, do my bidding right now. I

don't know you, but right now I want you to smile. Uh. But yeah, So that again as part of those those unconscious um communications that were throwing at each other all

the time. Now, Cheryl Murphy, writing for Scientific American, looks at the gaze and smiling in a little bit more deaf and she reports that in one study, Kellerman at All took seventy two unacquainted undergraduate students and they split them into male female pairs and then studied the effects that two minutes of uninterrupted mutual eye contact had on

their feelings towards one another. And in their study they found that if the two strangers gazed into each other's eyes for those two minutes, they later reported that they had increased feelings a passionate love and affection towards the other person. And then another phase of the experiment had the pairs of students interact in other ways, like looking at the partner's hands or counting blinks of their partner, but it was mutual eye contact that best fanned the

flames of attraction. I feel like we've discussed this in terms of working and collaborating in our modern age as well, like just at a very basic level, and I think most people can relate to this, like having that eye contact with the people you work with or even you know, family, etcetera. Like that makes all the difference in your in your ability to sort of rain in how you're supposed to be feeling about any given situation. Well, it's very powerful.

And I think we talked about this before. We were talking about performance artists and Maria Abramovich. Yes, maybe that's where this came out. Yeah, she she had um the uh performance. I think it was at MoMA in New York. So the artist is president, the artist is present. There's a great documentary on it, and people would just sit across from her, I think for about eight minutes uninterrupted, just gazing at each other. And people were going bananas

over this. They were crying, I mean they were it was almost like they were having these mystical or even ecstatic experiences just by being looked at by someone. Indeed, because you wonder, like you know, I mean if you just self the valuate like how much time in our day goes by without any significant eye contact going on. And this is kind of an artificial environment for us to be discussing this because we have to make a lot of eye contact during the recording of the podcast,

and yeah, we look away. I mean, like you and I don't like just pull on like staring each other the entire times. That would just be so weird if I was doing that, you know, that would be very intense. I feel like there's a timer in my head. So it's like I make eye contact with with anybody, not just shoot, um, we'll basically anybody except like you know, my wife or my child, um or maybe a cat. I don't know. Uh, there's like a tim or going off.

It's like, all right, that's enough eye contact. You have to look away because if you don't, too much sustained eye contact is maybe sending too much of a crazy vibe or something. I actually have an egg timer icon that I said, Yeah, well that's a good that's a good method. I need. I need a more solid method than sort of trying to figure out how much time has passed in my head. You can borrow mine. All right,

we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we're going to talk about the gaze a bit more and the difference between the love and lust gaze. Continuing to explore the question does love at first sight exist or more to the point, what is the thing that exists that we tend to classify as love at first sight? Yeah, And Helen Fisher gives I think an interesting um answer

to why this might exist in the first place. And of course she's coming at it from an evolutionary angle, and she's co author of the study reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with early stage intense romantic love. And then she again again looks at these, uh, this sort of constellation of neural systems involved with the feeling of love, and her idea is that we're marshaling these resources really quickly and efficiently because it could be a mating shortcut.

She says, quote, even love at first sight is a basic mammalian response that developed and other animals and our ancestors inherited this in order to speed up the mating process. So if you think about it, our ancestors did not have much dot com at their disposal, and they only had you know, maybe thirty or forty years of a lifespan in the first place, So there wasn't a lot of like this is gonna be my my first marriage

sort of talk. Yeah. So, as as as Fisher and Uh and her co researchers pointed out in that study, Um, we're talking about early stage, intense romantic love, and we're associating that with sub quartal reward regions, all this rich with dopamine, as we discussed, and we see that romantic love engaged his brain systems associated with the motivation to

acquire a reward. Yeah. She says about romantic love, it enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual. And she said, I think of all the poetry that I've read about romantic love. What sums it up us is something that is said by Plato over two thousand years ago. He said, the

god of Love lives in a state of need. It is a need, it is an urge, It is a homeo state static imbalance, like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out. Yeah, I mean we call it love sickness for a reason. You feel love sick it's I mean you begin to almost really bodily suffer out of this longing. Yeah. And if anyone who's ever been a teenager and had any sort of love interest knows what that feels like, right, you can kind of feel

that in the pit of your stomach right now. Um. Now, there are some who, may you know, say, look, this is all very well, and perhaps we are neurally put together to quickly identify feelings of love. However, maybe this framing of it has more to do with the fallacy of memory. Yes, as we've discussed in a few different podcast episodes, our memories are not these solid, fixed items. They're not little stone sculpture stored away in a drawer.

If anything, they are clay sculptures stored away in a drawer. And every time we get a memory out of that drawer, it's susceptible to change. We we put our we we project our present onto these little fragments of our past, and then reform our past and reform our present. In doing so yeah, and when you do that, you're strengthening

those neural connections, right. So that's why, Um, sometimes people feel very like, yes, I know this happened exactly the way I think it happened, because they've taken that memory out over and over again and revisited it, and so they can quickly get to it and there's this certainty that they feel because of these neural connections, when in fact, there is a lot of fallacy and memory. And we've

talked about this before. Uh. Donna Joe Bridge, a postdoctoral fellow and Medical Social Sciences and a co author of the study on how the brain refrains the past to fit the present, says quote, when you think back to when you met your current partner, you may recall this feeling of love and euphoria, but you may be projecting your current feelings back to the original encounter with this person. Yeah. I mean, our lives are experienced in a in a

sort of storytelling way. We we create a story, we are the center of our story, and uh, and and we are constantly tweaking the narrative even though we don't realize it. Yeah, And that's what I think is interesting about that moment that across the room you lock eyes, and there's this idea that all these disparate elements of

your autobio biographical past may coalesce in this person. In other words, this sort of spreadsheet of what you find interesting in another person, this person might check off some of those boxes and it might feel like, ah, this is the one. And if that is successful, if you see that relationship through then through the power of narrative and the way that we reef framar experiences, then all of a sudden that becomes yes, it was love at first sight, even though maybe it was just intrigue. Yeah.

I mean, for the most part, you're you're probably going to be more likely to to skew positive on your reframing of your personal story. I mean, for the most part, we want to live a happy narrative life. So you're gonna you're gonna tweak at your I mean, we all experienced this every every day. I feel like I do.

It's like I'll think back on something in the past, past experience, past something I did, maybe something I miss but don't get to do anymore, and then I have to questions like, well that I really was it really all positive? Or were there some negatives in there that I'm kind of omitting in my in my current narrative.

You know, there was, um recently a study that came out, and my apologies because I don't have the name of the study in front of me, but basically it was a study of ten different languages from twenty four different types of media like literature and Twitter and so on and so forth, and they had hundreds of billions of war words and they went through this painstaking process of trying to figure out this sort of qualitative narrative here is there a sort of more positive words or less

positive words that we use? And there does seem to be this positive skew to language. No matter what language they were looking at, people were using more positive terms. And so the idea there is that you're you're trying to survive, and storytelling a narrative is like a very basic way in which we do survive. And so overwhelmingly the message becomes it's going to be okay, you know,

like you're gonna survive, You're gonna get through this. And so it's no wonder that when we revisit our past histories we do the same thing unconsciously we're shaping them in a more positive light. Yeah, and indeed, I don't think there's any anything wrong with that. I mean, I guess sometimes I maybe if I'm going to engage with the idea of something like love at first, not on a scientific level, but onlike I just sort of a

loftier level. Yeah, I can think of it maybe in terms of the present reaching back through the past, you know, because because ultimately our experience of time is more or less an illusion. If you look at everything as a constant, you can say, well, there's not really a timeline of my relationship with the person I love. It's a constant.

And so there's ultimately nothing wrong with applying the emotions and the and the importance that builds up over time, applying that back to the beginning, because ultimately it's you know, we're not talking about a timeline, We're talking about a a constant, singular thing. Hey, this is this is personal history, right, So we already know that rescuing stuff in terms of what's realistic and what's sort of made up, fairland fun

stuff that we like to throw in our personal narratives. Now, when we get back to though, that that idea of the gays and how this all first coalesced and happen to all these things unconsciously bubbling beneath um. There is a way that we can kind of do some eye tracking to figure out whether or not that first moment has more to do with love or lust. Yes, and and again this is another one of those studies that might seem like an outrageous overstatement of the obvious fact

up by by science. But uh, but yeah, there's there's the lustful gaze, and there is a more or less loving gaze, and we probably have some pretty firm ideas in our mind about what those gazes look like like. The lustful gaze is a cartoon coyote with bulging out and its tongue lolling, and maybe it's it's going like that's the one. Yeah, So there's that, And then there's the more loving lost in your your your potential lover's eye just kind of look, I'm lost in love and

I don't know. I don't know that one. I don't know either. That's in my head, but I do not know the artist, all right, So of course there's a report All the Loves and the Gaze published in psychological science male and female students from the University of Geneva. They viewed a series of black and white photographs of people they had never met. And in the first experiment, participants looked at photos of young heterosexual couples interacting with

each other. Now and the second experiment, participants looked at photos of the opposite sex. Then they were asked too quickly identify the photos as either eliciting a feeling of romantic love or sexual desire. Now the whole time, of course, there was eye tracking software looking at what was happening,

and for both men and women. The software reveal that when participants reported feelings of a romantic love, they tended to dwell upon the face, which makes sense right then eyes and but when they felt lusty, well their their their gaze went south, and that makes sense, right. But I also can't help but pick it this, especially with all the information we've just gone through, and say, is there really that much difference between the two if you really start looking under the hood of of all that's

going on. When when these two when individual a and individual be lock eyes for the first time, or you know, or one looks at the other ones. But what however it ends up going down. I mean, ultimately, is there is there that much difference between the two, Like there's just an exchange of stimuli, there's a there's an initial gazing and uh and scanning of the other organism to see if there's compatibility. I agree, I think there's a

whole like tail wagging the dog element. Yeah, I mean, because you can just boil it down to this person is feeling lovey and giving the love gaze because they're genetically inclined to mate and produce offspring and then die

and uh. And meanwhile, the lusty individual is is, you know, fantasizing about getting this person back to their apartment because their genetic programming says that they need to mate with somebody, produce offspring and then die, right, And then you know, eventually that works out or it doesn't, you know, it turns into love or I mean, you know it does

It sort of doesn't matter, right. But to me this is interesting because it once again unpacks this idea that are unconscious and our experiences, our autobiography, every moment is influencing the decisions that we make and our perceptions. So it's lovely to say that you know. Ah, yes, I saw him and it was love at first sight, but there's so much more going on underneath that. Also, I wanted to mention in terms of really obvious studies and information that I think all of us probably know on

some level. There was recently one about the best way to caress someone's cheek, like there their face. Apparently it's moderate pressure moving at one per second up or down. I don't recall with knuckles or fingers, I know, I think fingers, knuckles, I don't know, I don't know. Kind of like that, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, well that's kind of nice too. I was just striking my face with my knuckles in case you guys are wondering what the heck is going on? All right, So there you

have it now. If you want to check out more about this topic, be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I'll make sure that the landing page for this episode includes links to related contents and just some of that other Valentine's Day Lovey Debbie stuff about Laingderie, wearing rats and uh and the microbiology

of a kiss um. All of that will be on there, so as well as some links out to some of these outside sources we've talked about, such as that that Ted Talk and you can also check out our videos are blog post and uh you know links out to our very social media accounts so you can follow us wherever you tend to hang out, and we would love to hear from you. Guys. Does this information change your ideas of your experiences of love and perhaps even love it first sight? Let us know. You can email us

below the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuff works dot com