Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are going to talk about the psychology and the biology of desire, love, and attachment.

Today happens to be Valentine's Day 2022.

However, the themes we are going to discuss pertain to desire, love, and attachment on any given day.

And indeed, the mechanisms we are going to discuss almost certainly were at play thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, and no doubt will still be at play in our minds and in our bodies and in our psychologies for the decade centuries and thousands of years to come.

Indeed, today I want to focus on core mechanisms that lead individuals to seek out other individuals with whom to mate with, with whom to have children with or not, with whom to enter short or long-term relationships with, and perhaps to end those relationships or to seek relationships on the side, so-called infidelity.

I'm certainly not going to encourage or discourage any of these behaviors. I'm simply going to cover the peer-reviewed scientific data on all these aspects of desire, love, and attachment.

I'm going to discuss how our childhood attachment styles, as they're called, influence our adult attachment styles.

Yes, you heard that right.

How we attached or did not attach to primary caregivers in our childhood has much to do with how we attach or fail to attach to romantic partners as adults.

Because the same neural circuits, the neurons and their connections in the brain and body, the underlying attachment between infant and caregiver, between toddler and parent or other caregiver, and during adolescence in our teenage years,

are repurposed for adult romantic attachments. I know there might be a little eerie to think about, but indeed that is true.

Now, the fortunate thing is that regardless of our childhood attachment styles and experiences, the neural circuits for desire, love, and attachment are quite plastic.

They are amenable to change in response to both what we think and what we feel, as well as what we do.

However, all three aspects that we're discussing today, desire, love, and attachment, are also strongly biologically driven.

We're going to talk about biological mechanisms such as hormones, biological mechanisms such as neurochemicals, things like dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin,

and neural circuits, brain areas, and indeed areas of the body that interact with the brain, that control whether or not we desire somebody or not, whether or not we lose or increase our desire for somebody over time, whether or not we fall in love, what love means, and whether or not the relationships we form, continue to include the elements of desire and love over time or not.

I'm pleased to announce that the Hubertman Lab podcast is now partnered with Momentus Supplements. We partnered with Momentus for several important reasons.

First of all, they ship internationally because we know that many of you are located outside of the United States. Second of all, perhaps most important, the quality of their supplements is second to none, both in terms of purity and precision of the amounts of the ingredients.

Third, we've really emphasized supplements that are single ingredient supplements, and that are supplied in dosages that allow you to build a supplementation protocol that's optimized for cost, that's optimized for effectiveness, and that you can add things and remove things from your protocol in a way that's really systematic and scientific.

If you'd like to see the supplements that we partner with Momentus on, you can go to livemomentus.com slash Hubertman. There you'll see those supplements, and just keep in mind that we are constantly expanding the library of supplements available through Momentus on a regular basis.

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