Tainted Love Hormone

like what's what's making us tick? And oxytocin often comes up in terms of trust, in terms of love, in terms of emotional connections. So it was probably a bit too much for us to think, or for anyone to to get the idea that this is just a purely positive thing, that there's something in the human body and our in all of our the machinery that under lies who we are, that there's one substance that's just nothing but feel good in a jar. It's not the platonic ideal.

And if anything, this, this idea that oxytocin could have a dark side, is just more evidence of dud the duality of things right, And we've talked about oxytocin really in terms of cuddling and hugging. Um, that whole idea that if you wrap someone in an embrace for twenty seconds or more, that you're giving them just the right amount of pressure that your body will actually begin to produce oxytocin. Now, I want anybody like that idea, and

I think it's great. Totally in favor of twenty second hugs all right, But between consending adults, we yes, we will this sort of like hug pile up hug club thing. I'm not behind by the way, um, but we will revisit this idea later as we talk about the dark side of oxytocin. So where do we get this, this idea that's that oxytocin is the super feel good a drug. The thing is, we can kind of we can kind of lay this at one individual's feet for the most part.

One uh one one doctor love one love doctor uh an individual who you've seen on TED talks up there with his microphone preaching the word of oxytocin and making a very compelling argument. As individuals who give TED talks, at least the more recent ones, often do you totally buy into it? And you're like, yes, the feel good hormone, the mother hormone, the hug hormone, the kiss hormone. Let me have some of that. Yeah, and we'll talk about Dr Paul Zack ak the love doctor, in a moment.

But I wanted just to mention the oxytocin is an extract from the human posterior pituitary gland, and it was discovered in nineteen o nine when the British pharmacologists or Henry H. Dale, found that it could contract the uterus of a pregnant cat. And of course that's another way in which oxytocin shows up right, not just in cuddling or um, you know, acts of love making, but also experiments,

cat experimentation and basically mammalian birth right um. According to Ed Young, though, we have taken oxytocin as as the sort of panacea for all ills, and we'll talk more about that with regards to Paul Zack. But I didn't want to say that the hormone is found in everything from octopuses to sheep, and it's evolutionary roots stretched back a half a billion years, and for decades, animal studies

have shown the oxytocin is important for social interactions. So for example, if you block the hormone UM, monogamous vowles will actually become more promiscuous and use neglect their newborn lambs if they don't have access to that oxytocin. So you could see how it would be informing our ideas of UM connection, bonding, love, and and even in the whole sort of birth and death cycle that we have

these notions about how we go along here in society. Yeah, all these social animal interactions that we in evitably have, all of these additional emotional layers that we wrap up in as humans. Uh. At the scene of each crime, oxytocin so like that's the thread that runs through all of them. So of course we end up focusing on that, and then as it's reported and championed it uh, it increasingly becomes seen as this magical feel good elixir that

it flows through us. You're right, because there are accounts of being released when you tweet something UM and you dance. Yes, you know, It's just it shows up everywhere. And I think that is what some researchers will say is the problem is that people are looking more at the results and not necessarily looking at the chemical and why it

is produced. Um. So again, let's let's talk about Paul Zack though, because he kind of is the guy that you have to point to who at least brought this idea of oxytocin as this utopian chemical to a lot of people's imaginations. Yeah, he's an American neuro economist and

he even refers to himself as doctor Love. So he really presses this idea that that that not only is it at the root of all these uh uh, these positive social interactions, but that it can or at least has the potential to change the world, that it can be used almost offensively for the social betterment of the human race. Now, he actually even calls it the morality chemical because of some of his studies that he did.

Many different variations on, by the way, but the basic premises that there's something called the trust game, and this is when a person player one, is given some money and told to send a portion of it to the second person who is player too. Now player two has a one off choice to either accept or reject the proposal, and if Player to rejects, then neither one of them get any money whatsoever. But if player to accepts, the

money is split according to the proposal. So again, here's this idea that you know, there's some sort of morality in in um generosity at play here, and typically a low offer less than a third of the player's initial endowment UM is rejected as stingy, ensuring that both players

getting are getting nothing. And that's where that sort of morality comes into, because even though someone is offering another person in a certain amount of money, if you if I offer you ten cents, you might be like, what, in no way, that's not enough. I'm not even gonna take it, and then neither one of us get anything. So when Zach tested the blood of players who had demonstrated trustworthy behavior, he found that their oxytocin levels had

increased in proportion to the monetary transfer. And he did this again and again um, as I said, just with different scenarios, getting more and more philanthropic. Right, So, sometimes sometimes players would give to UM a third party and they would begin to see these spikes again an oxytocin and the act of their generosity. And so he's sitting there making this case that perhaps just the presence of oxytocin could be enough to change the way that we

operate in the world. Right, and as no surprise, as though we're looking at some links yesterday, you can go on Amazon and you can buy oxytocin. You can buy there's one called liquid Trust that that doesn't sound creepy at all. It's in a spray canister, um, so that you can make people trust you supposedly. UM. I don't know. I haven't tried the product, but my guess is that it doesn't work. The reviews seem to think it didn't work.

Now I have it just being piped into the air dex Here no evidence that anybody is getting any more generous with their sandwiches. So one one of the things that we're gonna get into the particulars of this. But I think that the route here is that that it's that that oxytocin ends up being presented as this, uh, this positive hormone, as this emotional hormone, is this morality hormone when it's in a sense it is. It is a social hormone, and it is it definitely isn'tvolved in

different social interactions. But are all social interactions positive? No, not, not in the animal world, not in the human world. And even the emotional responses in the human world that we see as positive. When you strip them away and you start looking at how they work as an organism, you see just how much human bs is involved there. You know, you can easily make the make the the the argument that this whole hormonal rush and the attachment

been in the bond between between parent and child. I mean, that's just about the organism surviving just gets down to the root genetic mission that in and of itself is completely devoid of love and understanding. All right, we're gonna get to the bottom of this of the much more nuanced versioning understanding that we are having of oxytocin in a moment. But let's take a quick break. All right, we're back. Let's talk about C twoson and how actually has been showing up in studies is taking on a

far different role um talking about envy and schaden freud. Yes, now in they of course we've discussed in detail. We did a whole episode about it during our exploration of the Seven Deadly sin in the is is when you you see something that you want, or you see something in another person and you maybe you don't even want it, but you just sort of detest that. It's there you might even just want to destroy it. But but you have this intense negative response to something in somebody else

or off somebody else, And then there's schaden freud. But that's when something unfortunate happens to another person inside you sort of celebrate when you see or hear about it, right, yes, which is it's not a great emotion, right, but all of this at some point or another have probably experienced it. Who doesn't like to see their friends fail every now

and then, just just to feel a little better. But it could be in front of me, right, Yes, yeah, I think, and that's probably I bet, I bet that if you had some sort of widespread study on this, you'd probably see it's more in front of me than enemy, right, yeah, because your enemy, you know, that's because it's I feel like part of the schaden freud a situation is that you feel good about it, but you also feel bad

about it, like you know, you're not supposed to feel it. Well, you don't only feel schaden freud about you know, a bitter enemy, uh, you know, falling in defeat. That's more just you know, the pure victory of overcoming your adversaries. Well, that might be a clue as to why oxytocin plays a part in shane freud, because if you think about it,

as you said, oxytocin is really the social hormone. If you feel closer to someone that you know, then perhaps you're not going to dwell in that arena of emotions. So I wanted to point out that Simone Chamai to Sourcie at the University of Haifa and Israel showed that as well as promoting trust and generosity, oxytocin can heighten feelings of envy and shaden freud. This is in the

journal Biological Psychiatry. When volunteers played a gambling game, those who inhaled the hormone gloated more when they beat other players. They also reported more acute stubs of jealousy and when the tables were turned. Okay, now that gets us into more of this again social construct here, and you think about how we treat one another and how we are sometimes biased when we make decisions because of the relationships

we have with people. Yeah, I mean everywhere you go in human culture, obviously they're all these divisions, their divisions of race, their divisions of of economic status, of show social status, of of your status in a working environment, all these these barriers come into play, and in many cases artificial barriers that are just purely social inform but you end up with all these different packs or tribes.

And we've seen this again and again that even if two people are in a room and they have something in common is say, the same shut on or the same color, they tend to just subconsciously feel more connected to that person. So the link can be so tenuous, and yet we make that connection Oh I have that shirt or oh you like that band as well, Yeah, because on some level we want to we want to project our own feelings onto that person and believe that

they're like us. That's all. We have icebreakers. So I know everyone hates icebreakers, but if if one stupid game of ice breaking trust falls or passing notes around, if that can prevent one office X murder, then I say go for it absolutely. And actually, as an aside, since we just did an episode on vulnerability, that's a good example of when you show your vulnerability, you show yourself

and there's more of a commonality there. But Caroline, the clerk of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, she found that people under the hormones influence became more cooperative with one another only if they have some information about their partner. That when they were paired with an anonymous stranger, they became less cooperative. Now that was some real insight, because again, oxytocin has been touted as this this bonding agent. Yeah,

like something that's just breaking down barriers. You pump it into a room and uh and two bitter enemies are just gonna embrace in a hug. Not so, because our social interactions are also about divisions. It's I mean from a just an evolutionary standpoint. I mean, think to that scene in two thousand and one, uh, Space Odyssey where you know, it's tribes of monkeys beating each other up with with bones and that social interaction, and and no doubt there was there was a little oxytocin involved in

that situation. Not that that actually happened. I'm not I'm not of the mind that that seemed involved actual apes killing each other. Well, I think the problem too is that people when they looked at Paul's acts work, and he was a big proponent of oxytosin and basically saying like, oh, well, they're there in the London riots. If only, you know, people weren't high on their testos room and they were high on oxytocin, that wouldn't have happened. People said, no,

that's that's a cultural thing that that went on. It had to do with economics, that had to do with um education. There were there's so many different factors involved there. And Paul Za kept saying, well, no, I don't think so, because because our results are coming from the chemicals which are measurable in the blood, and that's far more accurate than say, fuzzy images from a brain scan, we think

that there's more hard evidence. But he, you know, I don't think that he or some of the researchers at that time really took into account the cultural aspects. And I wanted to mention that he's young. Kim of the University of California and Santa Barbara found that in South Korea, where it's usually a faux pas to sort of burden your friends with any of your problems, he found that people who were certain carriers of this gene um how

to to explain this, We've talked about this before. Actually, there are some people who have an a variant of this gene and some people have a G variant and basically it helps doc the oxytocin. So you you know the receptors. You're gonna have much more oxytocin flowing through you if you have this G variant. Okay, So this is where we get into the people who are genetically huggers. Us. We're talking about this hug acts. People are hugging all the time. They might be needing a fix because there

they really like that oxytocin. Well, what this researcher found is that, um, the people who are the hug junkies, or who should be the hug junkies, actually solace far less than they're they're non caring variants, and that at the end of the day, it's it's the social trait, it's the social sensitivity, and it's not you know, this idea that you're responding to oxytocin is not determined by

biology but by culture. And here's a good example of people who are acting in a certain way even though biologically you should say, ah, yeah, those are the people

who are going to seek solace most often. Now, of course, mindset plays a huge role here as well, and we look at the research from Jennifer Bart's from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, if you found several responses that depend on a person's minds, that showed that socially secure people remember mothers in a more positive light after inhaling oxytocin, while anxious ones remember their mothers as less caring and

more distant. So in that brief example, you can see how the oxytocin YES is having it's having effect on the individual, but it kind of depends on the mindset, the existing wiring or the existing plumbing when you when you pump this stuff in, YES actually show the oxytocin hinders hinders trust and cooperation among people with borderline personality disorder. So again it cannot be at this reductionist like you just give someone some oxytocin and they're going to cooperate.

You can't just get that bottle of liquid trust and just start hosing people down thinking that it's going to universally have this positive effect on the right because you have the cultural aspect to it, and then you just have the mindsets um So some people actually may act in ways that are counter intuitive to the whole social bonding situation, and that brings up this question of why why would oxytocin act in those various ways, And much of that is still a miss free but there are

a couple of theories. So back to Bart's now, she would say that the key to understanding what the hormone does is really in talking about its function rather how and where it shows up. And there are a couple

of theories out there. Oxytocin could help reduce anxiety and fear, or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections, which would account for a rise and trust and cooperation in some people, but also explain why oxytocin sniffers gravitate towards others resembling themselves, and why people who fear social rejection are not necessarily better off with more of the hormone.

So if you have anxiety in someone and uh, they get a dose of oxytocin and they they're they're fear arousal is heightened, then that's just sort of playing to what they're already experiencing right now and helping them to what they think battle is. You know, these these uh threats, We're gonna take one more quick break and when we come back more on this exciting topic. So what is this this all pointing towards towards pointies work The obvious

that oxytocin is not a magic bullet. It's not something that you can put in a can spraying somebody's face and it's going to fix whatever is ailing them. But and as we're saying that it's there are plenty of studies going on right now. I think what forty different clinical studies are currently ongoing about oxytocin, and and they're exploring it with a more nuanced understanding for the most

part of what oxytocin is. So we're hoping to to get to get a better understanding of how it works and how and how it is engaging in all these these show social interactions and there's the possibility that we will learn how to better treat certain conditions with oxytopes right Like, a lot of these clinical trials are looking at autism and schizophrenia because the idea is if you if you give a child who is autistic a dose of this, that perhaps he or she will heighten their

ability to connect to bond, which is one of the things that when you look at the autism spectrum. There's there's sometimes a lack of that um. But researchers are saying, don't go online and get the spray. First of all, the concentrations aren't going to be enough to to really

do anything. And second of all, if you look at these other findings that say that it can unheighten um, you know, this, this envy, this schiden freud um, these other sort of antisocial aspects of it, were not certain how that's going to play out with people who might have autism or schizophrenia. So, you know, let the let the research continue on that so that they can get

a better picture of it. Yeah, because it is a large extent the each individual's wiring, each individual's plumbing is a little different and sometimes dramatically different depending on what's going on there neurologically. So spraying one person down with oxytose and spring another one down potentially vastly different effects. So yeah, and you know, and I say, do you

not try at home? And I do understand how in one level sort of disappointing because of its associations with all the sort of kitten and rainbows um existence, you know, childbirth, breast milk production, cuddling, but you know, it's a chemical and it's it's far more complex, and we, above everything, we want science to give us these silver bullets they want to We want science to say, here's the vaccine for this, here is the treatment that fixes this, Here

is a is another way that we can address something that is wrong with an individual or even with us as a species. Well, yeah, I was gonna say, I wasn't actually gonna bring this up, but you and I

have talked about this before. Ted. The conference has come under fire sometimes because it it does deliver these big ideas and sort of silver bullets, you know, solutions, and some people have said that it can be sort of reductionist in that way, and Paul Zacks Ted talk is really great and it is really uplifting, but at the end of the day, it's it's you know, humanity is much messier than that. So there you have it. Oxytocin.

We've covered it before. Now we've covered a little more, and at this time we've we've we've added a little darkness to our discussions of it. So so take that with you as you as you observe yourself either engaging in a twenty second hug or feeling the seething envy as you look at your friends in your Facebook feed. You know what I'm going as for Halloween? What are you going in? An aggressive oxytocin hugger. See doesn't that

totally recast your idea of hugging? Now? Yeah? Yeah, like a like a junkie, like I just name a fix and a fix and I am the everybody else who gets the hugs and I don't. There was a reason we hugged. There's a recent skit on Key and Peel where it's where there's a baseball player that truly into slapping other baseball players butts and uh and he ends at the end of the other baseball players on the team tell him, no, we just we don't want you

to slapper butts anymore. Um, you just do it way too much and you're just way too into it and uh. And at the end of the episode, he's like a he's he's like a junkie with withdrawals, just asking you know, for one more slap, to one more butt uh and and and you know it's silly and goofy, but but really, I mean a social interaction like slapping a teammates, but there's invariably oxytocin involved there, and if one is a type but slapper, then then the situation is very akin

to an addict. So so I think I'm gonna create these sort of blow up arms that really create a vice gript around people for they can't escape, and maybe a little countdown clock so after twenty seconds they can escape, Yeah, or you can just shout the countdown like right in their years. If you I'm going to be the most popular person at the party. Yeah, all right, So there you have it, the darkness of oxytocin. We'll let us know how this information incorporates in your understanding of your

own life or the lives of those around you. We're always game to hear those, and hey, in future episodes, we're gonna try to fit in more loosener mail that we're kind of running fast and ragged at the moment, or at least I am. So how do you find us? How do you get in touch with us? How do you find the podcast? You got to stuff to blow your mind? Dot com? That's what you do, because that's where we put everything. And then if you want to

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