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I’ve heard you say that “casual sex” isn’t as casual as we think. Which is why romantic love is a far more powerful brain system than the sex drive. So this part of the brain fires up in people who have recently fallen in love, and it really does function like an addiction. This part of the brain is activated in all forms of behavioral addiction - whether it’s drugs or gambling or food or kleptomania. You think about them all the time you become sexually possessive you get butterflies in the stomach you can read their emails and texts over and over again.īut I say it’s an addiction because we found that, in addition to the dopamine system being activated in the brains of people in love, we also found activity in another part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. You can think of love as an intense obsession, but it’s really an addiction.
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But the dopamine hits occur even when you’re not with the person.
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So being in love is like being hooked up to a perpetual dopamine drip, and you get a little hit every time you see the person or touch them or think about them? Helen Fisherĭopamine drip - I love that phrase! I haven’t heard that before it’s a great way to put it. The sex drive motivates you to look for a whole range of partners, but romantic love is about focusing your mating energy on one person at a time.Įver wonder how your mind works? Watch The Mind, Explained, our 5-part miniseries on the workings of the brain. I see romantic love as a basic drive that evolved millions of years ago to focus your mating energy on just one individual and start the mating process. The sex drive is largely orchestrated by testosterone in both men and women, but romantic love is orchestrated by the dopamine system. Sean IllingĪnd the experience of love, at the level of the brain, is different from the experience of sex or from feelings of attachment? Helen Fisher That’s what gives you the focus, the energy, the craving, and the motivation to win life’s greatest prize: a mating partner. It turns out that this brain system makes dopamine, which is a natural stimulant, and then sends that stimulant to many other brain regions. We found that in almost all cases there was activity in a tiny little part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (or VTA). My colleagues and I put over 100 people who had recently fallen in love into the brain scanner to understand what’s going on in their brains. What happens to our brains on love? Helen Fisher I also wanted to know what distinguishes love from attachment, and why she thinks there are three simple things you can to do maintain a happy relationship.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. So I reached out to her to find out what she has learned and how it undercuts a lot of our conventional ideas about sexuality and gender. Fisher, in other words, has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of sex and love in human life. She’s written six books about human sexuality, gender differences in the brain, and how cultural trends shape our views of sex, love, and attachment. These are a few of the questions I put to Helen Fisher in a recent interview.įisher is a biological anthropologist, the chief scientific adviser to the dating site, and the author of several books including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. "There's also still a myth that women are less interested in sex than men and I think both men and women can fall victim to this.What happens to your brain on love? Is there such a thing as “casual sex”? What do we get wrong about male and female sexuality? "Men fail to pick up on a woman's cues for sex because they're simply too subtle or there's a lack of communication," says Isiah McKimmie, relationship therapist & sexologist. So are women just more in tune with men? Or, do they need to be more vocal about their sexual desires? The research found that women do not display the same sexual under-perception bias as men, but are generally good at figuring out whether their partners are turned on. "There is more work to be done to figure out exactly what men are doing that is associated with their partners feeling more satisfied, but it is possible that when men see their partner as having lower sexual desire than their partner actually reports, men do things to make their partner feel special and entice their interest, and in turn, the partner feels more satisfied with and committed to the relationship," Muise writes.