Love is a very sophisticated derivative of sex, says Miguel Pita. This doctor of genetics and cellular biology rolled up his sleeves to try to explain in a book one of the great and most beautiful mysteries surrounding the human mind: how and why we fall in and out of love, and why we focus, in particular, on that person who is the culprit of our worries during this process. The brain in love (Periférica) is not a self-help book, nor does it pretend to be, and reads like a novel that tells the story of Raquel and Íñigo, the fictional couple that Pita uses to tell the story of the brain and hormonal changes they enjoy and suffer from, from their crush to their separation.
Researcher and professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Pita (Madrid, 49 years old) is also the author of two other books, The dictator’s DNA (2020) e A day in the life of a virus (2020), on the covid pandemic, which he also wrote about in this newspaper.
Ask. You tear the book curiously; It doesn’t say who it’s aimed at, but who it’s not aimed at: “If you’re desperate because your partner left you or if you want to conquer someone you’re obsessed with, this is not your book.” Why?
Answer. I wanted to clarify that this is a book based on scientific knowledge, very different from those written based on opinions or sensations, and from self-help or personal growth books. I am not looking for self-help, I do not include tricks to get over a breakup, but you can understand what happened to you after the breakup and, moreover, you will understand that you are not alone in the world. It’s something normal that doesn’t just happen to you, but also happens to voles. In this sense I think it helps.
Q. You want to tell what scientific knowledge says about love, but you yourself recognize that science still has a lot to know. Why is love so difficult to study?
R. Because there is a part of the phenomenon that is exclusively human, and that makes it very difficult. We share with other species the mechanisms and neural circuits on which love is based. But these species produce emotional bonds with their partners, not a crazy infatuation like ours; This is exclusively human.
Q. He says that falling in love is something like turning the other individual into a drug to become attached to. What happens in the brain of a person in love?
R. Recreational drugs exploit brain mechanisms that have other functions, and one of these is falling in love. Very briefly, an obsession with the object of desire is generated, because many receptors are produced to obtain pleasure in the reward areas. And then, in addition, some reforms also occur in the neurons that produce these receptors. These molecules punish you in the absence of your object of desire. And this is typical of love and drugs. The difference is that these reforms of falling in love can be recovered, while with drugs the consequences are many. Over the many years of our species’ history, the body has been put to the test of falling in and out of love.
Q. And are there neurological differences between one-night love and the love of a couple who have been together for 20 years?
R. Yes, it’s very different. One night love may not become romantic love. But if you then discover that after that night you fall madly in love, the beginning of those mental reforms occurs in the production of dopamine receptors, and then oxytocin, which will then tend to attenuate and balance over time. This is the beginning of the transition to mature love. A couple who have been together for two years is not as madly in love as they were in the first week, but they are not less in love, they are in a different way. What is being lost is the madness, which is associated with the greatest peaks of well-being, but also of discomfort.
Q. There are people who are very much in love and others who have never been in love. If all human beings have this predisposition to love, why does this happen?
R. Because we are not identical. We all have the ability to fall in love, but the quantity of receptors and neurotransmitters we produce, certainly for genetic and also epigenetic reasons, is different. And although it’s not very clear what the exact answer to your question is, I assume that there are people who are more dopaminergic and others who are more oxytocinergic. The most dopaminergic people need anticipatory pleasure to be permanently active, that pleasure of enjoying something even greater that will come later and that, when it arrives, they don’t enjoy it so much. However, there are other people who are more oxytocinergic, and certainly also with a greater ability to produce serotonin, who are able to enjoy the present better. There are people who, when the relationship stops being completely euphoric, need to find a new source of euphoria and are unable to move on to mature love.
Q. In the book he states that parenthood is the foundation stone of love, that moment when two separate brains come together with that goal. But what happens to couples who can live in love for years without wanting to have children? What happens in their brain?
R. They work exactly the same way. The human species, thanks to science, can understand why it does certain things. And we are taught some things from an early age, such as that the reason sexual relationships exist is to have children. However, none of us think that when we intend to have sex, it is completely tame. We take advantage of the part that interests us from that instinct which is evolutionary based on sexual relations and, subsequently, on the rearing of offspring. The sexual relationships of those who have sex for fun and those who have sex to have children are neither better nor worse, they are the same.
Q. Monogamy in humans is also strange, from that evolutionary point of view…
R. In reality, monogamy is very rare in mammals, but in those that exist it is not an option. In our species they are all options. We are social monogamous: for a certain period, when we fall in love, we want to be only with that partner and are not interested in others. There are people who will argue this, but when you are in love with one person, you have little to no interest in others. Humans are transient social monogamists.
Q. We talked about sex and love. But what happens when you fall out of love? Is it also a brain process, do hormones also intervene?
R. Yes of course. The suffering resulting from falling in love is purely biological and, in this sense, I believe that knowing it can be useful. One of the parts that fascinated me the most in writing the book was explaining that, during falling in love, mechanisms are activated that have been set up so that you can suffer when you fall out of love. It’s not a bad idea, your brain has made it so that when you are not with your partner you come back to look for him. When you stop being with her, a series of hormones and neurotransmitters are released that activate receptors that increase in number the moment you are completely happy, in a wicked way. Love plays with two cards, the reward of pleasure and the punishment of pain. When your partner leaves and you are in love, anxiety is very high and those molecules of discomfort never diminish. And this always happens in the brain: that path of discomfort in the breakup is activated and permanently knocks on the door of those neurons that make you suffer and that have prepared themselves for this moment, in which you looked the other way. And until they have knocked on that door thousands of times, those neurons don’t say “come on, let’s start filming now, this path is already too overwhelming, let’s think about something else”. So the old saying that love heals with time is perfectly valid. We know what that time is dedicated to: removing all that architecture that was built during falling in love. And this is a very interesting phenomenon that was not known until recently. It’s a blow against yourself that would not be in your interest, but it is in nature’s interest, which is to think, “Don’t lose that partner with whom you will produce offspring that will keep the species alive. Return to it.” And when he has already told you 100,000 times he already says “come on, okay, then don’t come back”. And there you recover some of your clarity.
Q. When you suffer from heartbreak, you think about learning to fall in love less, or better. Is it possible to train the brain to do something like this?
R. It can be trained very subtly. It’s like thinking you can train to run 100 meters faster than Usain Bolt. If you don’t have certain qualities as standard, there are some things you will never achieve. A very powerful infatuation is the norm for all of us and, with our conscious part, we can tame it minimally. But our stronger instinctive parts are harder to train. In the end, what makes you fall in love the least is also biological. Your hormones, due to your progress in life, are decreasing and probably doing so at the same rate as you are teaching yourself to control yourself. We have to assume that there are things happening in the brain that we can’t control, period. Our access to the brain’s black box is minimal.
Q. And if it all depends on a black box that’s so hard to control, do it app dating? Can an algorithm determine who you fall in love with?
R. Yes, they can do it perfectly, because in the end it’s about accumulating data. They will not do this with absolute accuracy, because it is not entirely clear how you choose the person you fall in love with. However, it is believed to be someone of whom you have a mental image in that black box of your brain. That person has a series of characteristics that tend to repeat themselves, so a machine that works by accumulating information can predict this.
Q. How will AI change all this? There are already those who are falling in love with artificial intelligence…
R. It’s very interesting. On the one hand, love is such a strong instinct of our species that changes in societies matter very little. The way we fall in love is very similar to what we did in the Middle Ages. Love is a feeling so resounding and so profound that it is stronger than our conscious decisions and social changes. But, on the other hand, human beings have such an abstract ability to fall in love that they can fall in love with people they don’t know, even beings that don’t exist.
Q. What question about the brain in love can’t I answer in your book? What do you have left to know?
R. I would like to know exactly what the physiology of falling in love is; know in more detail what is happening, in which parts of the brain and with which molecules, the moment your brain realizes that there is a person who matches that list who is in the black box. Since then we have known well what falling in love and falling out of love consist of. But the crush is still the part that intrigues me the most.
