Love is a very sophisticated derivative of sex, says Miguel Pita. This doctor in genetics and cellular biology rolled up his sleeves to try to explain in a book one of the greatest and most beautiful mysteries of the human mind: how and why we fall in and out of love, and why we focus, in particular, on that person who becomes the object of our obsessive thoughts throughout the process. The brain in love (In English, The Brain in Love) is not a self-help book, nor does it pretend to be. It reads like a novel that tells the story of Raquel and Íñigo, the fictional couple that Pita uses to illustrate the brain and hormonal changes they experience and the joys and sorrows they endure, from their instant attraction to their eventual separation.
Pita, 49 years old, is a researcher and professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, as well as the author of two other books: The dictator’s DNA (The Dictator’s DNA) e A day in the life of a virus (A day in the life of a virus), on the Covid-19 pandemic, which he also wrote about for this newspaper.
Request. You start the book in a curious way; you don’t say who it is for, but for who it is not: “If you are desperate because your partner left you or if you want to conquer someone you are obsessed with, this is not your book.” Why?
Answer. I wanted to make it clear that this is a book based on scientific knowledge, very different from those written based on opinions or feelings, and from self-help or personal growth books. I don’t mean to offer self-help; I don’t include tricks to get over a breakup, but you can understand what happened to you after your breakup and you will also realize that you are not alone in the world. It’s normal; It doesn’t just happen to you, it happens to everyone, even voles. In that sense, I think it helps.
Q. Your goal is to explain what scientific knowledge says about love, but you also recognize that science still has much to learn. Why is love so difficult to study?
TO. Because there is a part of the phenomenon that is exclusively human, and this makes it very difficult. We share with other species the mechanisms and neural circuits on which love is based. But those species produce emotional bonds with their partners, not a crazy infatuation like ours; this is exclusively human.
Q. You say that being in love is a bit like turning the other person into a drug that you become addicted to. What happens in the brain of a person in love?
TO. Recreational drugs exploit brain mechanisms that have other functions, one of which is falling in love. Simply put, they generate an obsession with the object of desire because many receptors are produced in the reward centers to obtain pleasure. Furthermore, the neurons that produce these receptors undergo changes. These molecules punish you in the absence of your object of desire. This is very typical of both love and drugs. The difference is that these changes linked to falling in love can be reversed, while with drugs the consequences are many and long-lasting. The body has been put to the test of falling in and out of love over the many years of our species’ history.
Q. Are there neurological differences between a one-night stand and love between a couple who have been together for 20 years?
TO. Yes, it’s very different. One night stand may not turn into romantic love. But if, after that night, you fall madly in love, this triggers the onset of those mental changes in the production of dopamine receptors, and subsequently oxytocin, which will eventually decrease and rebalance. 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 the first week, but they are no less in love; they are in love in a different way. What vanishes is the madness, which is associated with the greatest peaks of well-being, but also of anguish.
Q. Some people fall in love easily, while others have never fallen in love. If all human beings have this predisposition to love, why is this so?
TO. Because we are not identical. We all have the ability to fall in love, but the number of receptors and neurotransmitters we produce, probably due to genetic and epigenetic factors, varies. And although the exact answer to your question isn’t entirely clear, I assume that some people are more dopaminergic and others are more oxytocinergic. More dopaminergic individuals need anticipatory pleasure to be constantly active – that pleasure of anticipating something even greater to come, and when that “something greater” arrives, they don’t enjoy it as much. However, there are other people who are more oxytocinergic and probably also have a greater ability to produce serotonin, which makes them more capable of enjoying the present. Some people, when a relationship ceases to be completely euphoric, need to find a new source of euphoria and are unable to make the transition to mature love.
Q. In the book you say that raising children is the cornerstone of love – the moment when two separate brains come together for that purpose. But what about couples who can stay in love for years without wanting children? What happens in their brain?
TO. They work exactly the same way. Thanks to science, the human species can understand why it does certain things. And we are taught some things from an early age, such as that the purpose of sexual intercourse is to have children. However, none of us think about it when we intend to have sex; it is completely domesticated. 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 relations of those who have sex for pleasure and the sexual relations of those who have sex to have children are neither better nor worse; they are the same.
Q. Monogamy in humans is also strange, from an evolutionary point of view…
TO. In reality, monogamy is very rare in mammals, but in those where it is present it is not a choice. In our species everything is a choice. 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. Some people will argue this, but when you are in love with someone, 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? It’s also a brain process, do hormones play a role?
TO. Yes of course. The suffering resulting from falling in love is purely biological and, in this sense, I believe that understanding it can be useful. One of the parts that most fascinated me in writing the book was explaining that, when you fall in love, some mechanisms are activated that were already predisposed to make you suffer when you fall out of love. It’s not a bad idea; your brain has designed it in such a way that when you are not with your partner, you will return to him. When you stop being with them, a series of hormones and neurotransmitters are released that activate receptors that increase in number during the period when you are completely happy, insidiously.
Love plays 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 subside. And this always happens in the brain: that discomfort pathway is activated during the breakup, and constantly knocks on the door of those neurons that make you suffer and that were predisposed for this moment, when you were looking away. And until they’ve knocked on that door thousands of times, those neurons don’t say, “Come on, let’s start packing now, this journey is getting 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: dismantling all that architecture built during the infatuation phase. And this is a very interesting phenomenon that was not understood until recently. It’s kind of a self-inflicted blow that wouldn’t serve your immediate interests, but it serves nature’s purpose, which is to think, “Don’t lose that partner with whom you will produce offspring that will keep the species alive. Go back to her.” And when they tell you 100,000 times, he finally says, “Okay, fine, then don’t go back.” And that’s when you regain some of your clarity.
Q. When you’re heartbroken, you try to learn to fall in love less or better. Is it possible to train the brain to do this?
TO. It can be trained very subtly. It’s like thinking you can train to run 100 meters as fast as Usain Bolt. If you don’t possess certain innate qualities, there are some things you will never achieve. We all come with a very powerful ability to fall in love, and with our conscious mind, we can tame it to some extent. But our strongest, most 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, decrease and probably do so at the same rate as you teach yourself to control them. You have to accept that there are things that happen 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 so hard to control, do dating apps work? Can an algorithm determine who you will fall in love with?
TO. 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 you have a mental image of in that black box of your brain. That person has a set of characteristics that tend to repeat themselves, so a machine working with the accumulated information can predict them.
Q. How will artificial intelligence change all this? There are already people who are falling in love with artificial intelligence chatbots…
TO. It’s very interesting. On the one hand, love is such a strong instinct in our species that social changes have little impact. The way we fall in love is very similar to how it happened in the Middle Ages. Love is such a powerful and profound feeling 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 you answer in your book? What do you have left to learn?
TO. I would like to know exactly what the physiology of love at first sight is; to 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 in the black box. Since then we have known well what falling in love and falling out of love consist of. But love at first sight is still the part that intrigues me the most.
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