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.

In order to illustrate just how powerfully our biology can shape our perception of the attractiveness of other people, I want to share with you the results of a couple of studies.

Both studies explore how people rate other people's attractiveness, and in both studies, the major variable is that women are at different stages of their menstrual cycle.

Now, in the first study, men are rating the attractiveness of women according to the smell of those women. Now, they're not smelling them directly, they're smelling clothing that women wore for a couple of days at different phases of their menstrual cycle.

And what they find is that men will rate the odors of women as most attractive if those women wore those shirts that clothing in the pre-avulatory phase of their cycle.

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