Gender Differences in the Brain by Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

good water enough thank you well I'm delighted to be here and I'm delighted that you're here I study love one of the most powerful brain systems that's ever evolved people live for love they kill for love they die for love they pine for love around the world people have songs myths legends poems ballets operas everywhere in the world people love it's an exceedingly powerful brain system and I and my colleagues have now put over a hundred people who were madly in love into a brain scanner the first seventeen were people who were happily in love the next group were fifteen people who were rejected in love and the third group were people who were in love long term we've actually proven that if you picked the right person you can remain in love long term for many many years and so it's possible to do it but it's it's difficult to do we got to pick the right person so why am Y her I was had written my fourth book on romantic love it was 2005 and it was a couple days before Christmas I live in New York City and I got a telephone call from match.com and they asked me to come in two days after Christmas and that's pretty weird to New York nobody does any work two days before Christmas in New York City and I came in and I sat down and about 11 people filed into the room and I couldn't figure out who was who or whether this was a think-tank whether they were other academics as it turned out it was the President on down and in the middle of the morning he asked me why do you fall in love with one person rather than another and I said I don't know I've been studying this brain circuitry for a long time but why does that circuitry become triggered by one person rather than another and so by the end of the day they interested in talking to me more for some reason and they asked me to start a new dating site for them and it became a dating site called chemistry comm and the issue was if I could come up with some sort of new thing about why you fall in love with one person rather than another in fact I first did not take the job because I am a scientist and I don't want to do something that isn't new and I went home for Christmas and I began to think why is it that we fall in love with one person rather than another I mean you know psychologists know that you tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socio-economic background same general level of intelligence same general level of good looks same religious and social values and certainly saying some your childhood experiences are going to play a role in who you love but you can walk into a room where everybody is from your background same level of intelligence same level of good looks and you don't fall in love with all of them there's got to be more to it and so I began to think to myself maybe there's basic body chemistry could play a role here maybe there's something that naturally pulls us towards some people rather than others and so I began to look at the biology of behavior there's two basic parts of of personality there's your nurture everything you have to believe and do to believe and do and say and think and then there's your nature it's your temperament your biology your predispositions and of course now with epigenetics as a huge play between the two this the most exciting thing that's happened in my life is an epic genetics but the bottom line is I wanted to know if your temperament could pull you naturally towards some people rather than others and so I decided I would go through all of the biological literature and see what traits were linked with any biological system and in fact there's a great many of them for example if you take l-dopa for Parkinson's disease creativity will go up if you take LSD people tend to have a religious experience on LSD so I'm told and and the reason is because you're driving up the serotonin in the brain and that is linked with religiosity there's actually genes in the serotonin system that are linked with religiosity so by going through all of the academic literature I came to see that there are four basic biological systems each one of them linked with a whole constellation of personality traits now if I had found six systems there would be six here if I'd found 10 there would be 10 there for basic brain systems that are linked with personality traits there's a lot of other systems in the brain you know that but most of them keep the eyes blinking or the heart beating etcetera they don't aren't linked with personality traits so I decided what I would do is make a questionnaire that studied examine the degree to which you express the traits linked with each one of these four systems and then put it on this new dating site called chemistry comm and see who was naturally drawn to home and because I was working with the dating service I had to name these people their terrible names actually I could love to dump them but 13 million people have now taken my questionnaire so I'm really stuck with them people who are very expressive of the estrogen and oxytocin system estrogen makes oxytocin they're very closely linked I called the negotiator those who are expressed a lot of testosterone I call the director the builder for serotonin and the Explorer for the dopamine system we are all a combination of all of them in fact I recently gave a geneticist that I'm working with from Princeton University at least over a hundred thousand people to study 30 thousand people take this questionnaire every week so I'm sort of you know swimming in data and in fact no two people took my questionnaire the same way I'm not at all surprised at this I've never met two people who I thought were alike I'm an identical twin and we are not alike but the same mathematical patterns played out people are these four broad basic brain systems that of personality traits linked with each continue to be mathematically viable so I created the questionnaire I'm not going to go through it for example I find unpredictable situations exhilarating I figured that my high dopamine people who are novelty seeking and risk-taking would be more agreeable to that etc so I created the questionnaire I put it on chemistry comm and then I watched whose naturally drawn to whom so I'm going to go through first I'm going to go through talking about the estrogen system and the testosterone system because this was billed as a discussion of gender differences and then I'm going to go on to talk about these two other systems and then go on to say who's naturally drawn to home and why I think so ok so I'm going to start out with the theme for the evening and it's much larger than these particular pictures but this is the theme and you'll get the point it's an issue about a gender difference in intimacy women tend to get intimacy from face-to-face talking we swivel until we're face-to-face we focus on each other it's called the anchoring gaze and we talk it probably comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face controlling it reprimanding it educating it with words intimacy is talking for women men tend to get intimacy from side by side doing as soon as he looks up he'll look away it's like a Sunday football team you know it's a football game when they're sitting next to each other for hours never saying really anything and get a great deal of intimacy out of it the problem of course is this the sexes don't really understand each other so I want to start out by talking about gender differences in the brain and then move on to these two other personality styles and remember forever please that we are a mix of all of them people who are very expressive of the oxytocin and estrogen system tend to do what I call web thinking I think of all of the gender differences the most important and most stunning to me is how men and women think Plato once said when the mind is thinking it's talking to itself indeed were always accumulating information and assembling it into patterns and relationships we've got a committee meeting going on in our head as we're thinking but psychologists report that when women think they gather more data they integrate these details faster and they put the data into more complex patterns when they make decisions they weigh more variables consider more outcomes and see more ways to proceed women tend to generalize they synthesize they take a more holistic contextual perspective than most men men tend to focus they pay attention to one thing at a time they compartmentalize them the brain and they tend to get rid of any kind of extraneous data and proceed in a more linear causal forward pathway what I call step thinking there's a great many examples of this I will give you only one and this is all I'm going to say about sex now I'll start off with another you know when you ask a man or a woman to describe their business a man will view the company as a set of tasks or machines or jobs or payments woman tends to see an organization as an integrated multi-layered whole comprised of patterns of relationships women screenwriters we write much more complex narratives where it was multiple endings sometimes you can interfere with the ending is men's plots are much more linear much more goal-oriented even in the bedroom there seems to be these gender differences you know they begin to make love and you know suddenly the woman thinks about something somebody said at work or class she had or something and she'll go straight down back to back to Ground Zero and she's got to start again man just focus they can just keep on focusing on on what they're doing Robert Frost once said all thought is a feat of association we now know where this gender difference in web thinking and step thinking is this is the prefrontal cortex the part of the brain with which we assemble data and put it into parts where we do our sequential thinking where we do our web thinking and indeed they've now found one gene and they're going to find a lot of other genes that are linked with web thinking and this particular gene is silenced in all men and active in 50% of women we also know that the two hemispheres are better connected in women the factories in the back of the brain are better connected to long distance factories in women the male brain is more compartmentalized it's built that way in the womb men are just as good at thinking as women they think somewhat differently in fact as many more male geniuses in the world and as many more male idiots in the world women women have a have a have a sturdier mind in fact that has left women with a very special characteristic which is some and is their imagination in fact they've got a there's a lot of things that stem from this one is women are able to tolerate ambiguity better they're better at intuition we now know what intuition is it comes from the a Nobel laureate called herb Simon it's called chunking and what chunking is is as you a person analyzes the stock market learns about the history of Europe tracks a political issue you begin to recognize patterns and then you see regularities in those patterns and then you organize these patterns into blocks of knowledge known as chunking and then with time more patterns are chunked and these clusters of knowledge are stored in long term membrane and then when you see a tiny little detail of the much larger pattern boom you see the entire pattern more rapidly than somebody who's doing step by step sequential thought and in fact women seem to be better at this most likely I think because they are have so many connections in different parts of the brain they tend to do much more long-term planning than men do this is one of the problems on match.com and chemistry comas you know people will go out for their first date and they started on the meal and you know the man picks up his fork wrong and the first thing going through her mind is oh no he's not going to be good with the kids he doesn't have to pick up a fork it means you know there's already thinking way down the road and in fact sometimes with these women I I try to write a blog in which I say stop thinking you know just focus on dessert and not years down the road women tend to be more mentally flexible in fact they live in a world of it depends you know where do you want to go for dinner well at the Bennis we go here we could go there we go well make up your mind I'm making up I might it depends they are inter-process whereas men are much more goal-oriented and I think that that is in large part because of this web sinking and last because women are very imaginative and what is imagination but simply the ability to reach into the depths of your stored knowledge assemble these reams of data in new ways examine these myriad combinations and then suppose how those combinations would play out there all I think aspects of this web thinking there's other traits that have been studied many times and are based in biology that are grounded in brain physiology and Anatomy and evolved millions of years ago one is meant how men and women view power women tend to view power as a group of connections man to group a tenth of you power as rank you know women it starts in a small child and little girls will play in what Deborah Tannen calls flat packs then you know there's no leader and there's no hierarchy when you're playing dolls or jump rope these are leaderless groups in which everybody is sensitive to one another's needs girls take turns they offer suggestions they try to repeal the reason they try to persuade and if there's some sort of problem and the girl starts crying they stop the game somebody's feelings are at stake girls want harmony grows out any nicer than boys but they live in a world of cliques of in and out instead of up and down and they want they want to be liked they live in a world of win-win men tend to live in a world of win or lose as boys they sort themselves in large hierarchical packs they interrupt they give orders they take or men are much better at giving orders than women and much better at taking orders than when the women don't take orders very well they teased a barter status and the point is to win boys focus on the score their games have clear winners and losers they would never stop the game because one boy was crying they go when it's over and you see this gender difference of men interested in rank and women interested in connections into great many cultures around the world it comes from what anthropologists call the male male dominance hierarchy you see throughout mammals males are much busier jockeying for position than women are as a matter of fact when characteristic of men is what they call dominance matching and men will match the dominance for the rank and I really learned this the hard way one night in New York City I was a black-tie event and I was standing there with four men and one of them was a guy from the Wall Street Journal and what men will do not all of them of course when they attack is they expect you to attack back and if you don't attack back they think you're weak so there's two great postural messages in the animal community that's looking little and looking big and so he was attacking me and it was a nightmare and the other three were watching and all of a sudden I turned around to this guy and I said to him says something to him that was vicious that was vicious I don't remember what it was but it was also funny and as moment I said it all of us went like this we did Lee it's called the barred toothed display chimpanzees do it too when you're nervous and I said to myself ie if he thinks like a woman he'll never forgive me if he thinks like a man he might respect me so after this long moment he turned around said hello and he put up his hand and he's like me ever since is one of the things that I say to people in the business community is attacked back it's it's hard for women to do but it's a very good example of a profound gender difference there's other characteristics women tend to be more socially skilled a better at reading body language tone of voice they're more empathetic trusting trusting is a very interesting one anthropologists have long wondered what was the value of trusting if you trust the wrong person you are up the creek but if you trust the right person and you're good at reading social skills it was a good article on this a couple years ago you save a lot of metabolic energy so it's very interesting how these traits will go together you really can't be trusting if you can't read body language if you can't be tolerated if you can't see the large picture and it's a good example of how these various traits probably evolved together as a constellation of personality traits and women are socially smart little girls will smile harder at a an infant girl will smile harder to blinking light a little infant boy will smile I mean sorry an infant boy innocent girl will smile harder at a human face a little boy an infant boy will smile just as hard at a blinking light girls pay more attention to faces and everywhere in the world women are the nurturers of the sick of the elderly and children the last basic trait real gender differences in is in verbal skills Mark Twain once said the difference between one word the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug and indeed as exactly the truth at basic articulation women don't have any better vocabulary than men do but they call it up fast you can watch this on television anywhere in the world really they've got wonderful verbal skills last but not least women's seek harmony they don't hit you in the face they've stabbed you in the back and they're not going to hit you in the face they seek harmony they're emotionally expressive by a large much more so than men and they have what I call diplomatic intelligence a good example as Oprah Winfrey lives at one quote the only time I have ever made a bad decision is when I didn't follow my instincts very few men I think would say that an educator emotionally expressive really fine verbal skills etc a good example of a very high estrogen individual Bill Clinton I think is another high estrogen individual you know you can be high on estrogen and testosterone low on Juan low on the other etc they're not always necessarily opposed you know people have often said well you know when are we going to have our first woman president I think we've had our first woman president it is Booker what so easy oh well I think it's important to have a synthesizing mind I read that in his book which was something like 963 pages whole world knows he can't stop talking about highly estrogen related skill he's the one that cried at their daughter's wedding not his wife and everybody knows he feels your pain he also has got a lot of the traits of highest Rajan you'll see in another slide coming up but the very round face the soft face the lack of of heavy brow ridges is all built they this the shorter forehead is all built by estrogen so testosterone the second of these four broad styles of thinking and behaving these people tend to be analytical it's called their code and academia rule-based systems it's a mechanics music computers engineering math etc men little boys an infant boy is better at tracking a blinking light across the TV screen they excel at predicting the path of a moving object little boys like toys and cars and blocks and trains since that they can build and move they packed the video arcades whereas women don't they can predict much better the patterns in a paper folding test and as testosterone piles into the brain with teenage boys tend to excel at geometry mechanical drawing science math and engineering a million years ago these men use the spatial skills to track animals and you didn't you know if you couldn't find your way back home a million years ago you were hardly going to have children and pass on your DNA so it was certainly selected for and of course today it's many more men who design our cell phones and our our computers and our bridges and our hospitals there's other traits that men have inventive exacting irreverent on my chemistry comm site there the the least religious ranked or competitive dominance matching emotionally contained it's a very high testosterone trait a perfect example for me was a girlfriend some time ago who who said to her husband she said you know sweetie you you haven't said you love me in a month and he said to her I said well I said that last month and nothing's changed as emotionally contained decisive Bowl these are the ones that scream get to the point and direct deep focus not a contextual focus but it deep more narrow focus bill uh Steve Jobs is the perfect example you can see in the face that very strong jaw the high zygomatic Archer and the heavy brow ridges and the high forehead or are all built by testosterone and sure enough van gali of the digital world fiercely demanding brutally honest honesty's is is if part of seems to be part of the testosterone exacting impatient self-discipline just you know had nothing to do with authority very good example of a high testosterone man a good example of a high testosterone woman I think is Hillary Clinton when asked why bill was a why she was attracted to Bill she said he wasn't afraid of me and you can see now the various different traits of the testosterone and the estrogen system how different these the narrow focus the contextual the decisive forthright as opposed to indirect tender-hearted tough-minded etc you wonder what kind of relationship these people are going to have or whether they will even be attracted to each other so I'm going to tell you our results after going through the four broad styles of thinking and behaving but my guess is that these are the ones that fall madly in love trigger this brain circuitry for romantic love but frankly never really understand who it is that they've been married to for about thirty years so there's other types going back to the estrogen and testosterone these others in these 13 million people in 40 countries who have taken this questionnaire we saw real gender difference many more women expressed the estrogen system and many more men expressed the test testosterone system but when the expression of the serotonin and the dopamine system seemed to have no gender difference I particularly like that because a lot of people don't think that women are it's for us they're very much explorers but ball going to them so anyway we're all a combination of all of them as I said I'm now working to really refine I mean let's say you're you're high on estrogen green I call it tree hugger green but you could be high on part of it like being very imaginative but not high on another part of it being very empathetic and so I want to I'm building now a way to have a personality signature put a little like a foot like a fingerprint so that you can see the full details of which parts of each of these systems you most express so the third of the four types are those expressive of the serotonin system they observe social norms they follow the rules they enjoy familiarity they like to go to the same place on Saturday night and see the same people they're not scared and not scared but they're cautious this cautious the calm self controlled is why you take prozac or paxil that drives up the serotonin system it makes you calm er tend to be stoic and frugal they're also somewhat control lean they like plans schedules routines they're orderly they like order as a matter of fact I have a friend who about 10 years ago he and is every every year he and his wife go to an accountant and about 10 years ago by he was they were all talking the three of a minute he leaned on the accountants desk and by just chance he moved the guy's pencil sharpener and immediately the guy moved it back and so now every single year that he goes back he leans on this guy's desk and it was a pencil sharpener and every year the guy moves it back they liked plans schedules and routines concrete literal thinking I made a terrible mistake myself in Washington state of Washington I was talking about these various styles of thinking and behaving with the journalist my book on this had just come out and I she didn't like me I could tell she didn't like me and when you get nervous you become more of who you are and I became more more flamboyant trying to win her over and she disliked me more and more and more and the following day I was right I saw what she wrote in the newspaper and I had gotten that right but what I should have done instead of turned around to her and showered her with details the comb backs alpha eigen analysis the nucleus accumbens such a showered her with details and I think I could have could have won her over they tend to be good with very good with numbers creative more close friends you take Prozac or paxil or any of these SSRIs you're going to acquire more close friends they want to belong a respect authority they follow the rules they tend to be more religious and they tend to be loyal of all the questions in the questionnaire that one in many respects mathematically was the most dramatic one of the question was something like and I don't quite remember what it is but it was something like would you rather have loyal friends or interesting friends now we all want loyal friends and we all want interesting friends but these people cannot tolerate unloyal friends and the other three types cannot tolerate uninteresting friends this is dramatic mathematical difference linked somehow with the serotonin system I think meg Whitman is a very good example I've gotten really interested in biography and within the first 25 pages of her autobiography she used that word values more than 50 times everywhere the right thing to do values frugal etc very expressive of the serotonin system another example is MIT Romney orderly this guy's orderly his barber was a wonderful article the New York Times about his barber and and the way he cuts his hair detail-oriented frugal the another article the New York Times said that he used to wash his shirts in the sink and iron them himself when he traveled kind of managers doing that still but bottom line is a tremendous sense of duty follows the rules really respects Authority very expressive I think of the serotonin system and the testosterone system very has the the face built by high testosterone is a good example of of testosterone and serotonin the fourth of the four broad styles of thinking and behaving are dopamine and its close relative norepinephrine these people are sensation seekers that's the academic term sensation-seeking they're the most curious they're most of they're they're most likely to have gotten a college education they make the most money and they lose the most money have a tremendous number of interests they're explorers physical and mental it's not just people who are jumping off mountains it's people who might like the theater and the Opera and read a lot of books and almost never leave the house but in fact are tremendously curious about the optimistic enthusiastic independent self-reliant impulsive these are the ones that walk into the bar and impulsively buy everybody a drink mental flexibility very open-minded in fact they can be really Machiavellian and last but most important I don't know if you can see that is idea generation I think probably this is one of the reasons that people will take Ritalin or adderall for example I'm not I'm not advocating it but it'll drive up the dopamine system and enable and it will give this focus and idea generation Richard Branson is a perfect example I've always thought rules were made to be broken now this is a high dopamine guy I've always had a urge to live life to its fullest very much of the high dopamine style and in fact I would guess that almost all of our entertainers are the high dopamine type she has a tattoo of a window on her arm let me out let me be free a very I think expressive of the dopamine system so having done all this and you know max calm was interested in these personality types but what they wanted to know was why you why your why him why her why you're drawn to one person rather than another so I did this study with 40,000 people over and over it's all just mathematical numbers I never look at somebody's name or where they come from or their photograph that's not allowed in the company but you can watch on chemistry not calm people take the questionnaire and then I watch who they click to go out with and indeed I had a hypothesis that opposites attract that high dopamine a high novelty seeking risk-taking would go for the stability of the serotonin type and that the and vice versa and that the high testosterone tough-minded would need the empathy and the verbal skills of the highest region type that opposites would attract I was half right and half wrong as it turns out high dopamine wants high dopamine they want somebody who you come home at 7:30 at night you think let's go to the Opera or let's go nude swimming in Central Park let's go to zan you want somebody who's going to go with you and do it indeed they're drawn to people like themselves the same thing with the traditional conventional builder the high serotonin type they're drawn to people like themselves they want some equally conventional traditional follow the rules respects Authority and a place plays the way they play in that case similarity attracts the opposite attracts when it's male and female that high testosterone goes for high estrogen and high estrogen goes for high testosterone and I think a good example a very good example is Hillary and Bill Clinton and I choose that example largely because it's built that's expressing the high estrogen traits and Hillary that is expressing the high testosterone traits so in this case opposites attract it's amazing how many psychologists are so convinced as similarity attracts and others are so convinced that opposites attract if you were to come to my house you would see two piles of academic papers those papers absolutely utterly convinced that similarity attracts and the others that opposites attract but they haven't looked at the full range of personality traits and taken a clearer look at at at the global perspective so I'll come on to a couple things and then I will finish the future I am really interested in personality I think that we can in fact I would like to I would like it if everybody here took the personality questionnaire and then we matched college roommates even professors and students my guess is that people are going to learn in certain ways and will learn better from certain kinds of professors I would like to see a corporate board put together not only by gender diversity but by intellectual diversity you know you can hire somebody who's a different gender but they still may think exactly the way you think and so I'm sort of interested in this intellectual diversity but what I'm this is the most important slide probably of my life so far as one other but what we've done is what we we have now had 45 people take my questionnaire and then put them into a brain scanner to find out what is going on in the brain of these people is there biology to what I'm saying there's biology too and sure enough people who are very expressive who score very high on my dopamine questionnaire show more activity in the whole pathway of the dopamine system those who were more traditional alignment questionnaire show a more activity in a brain region linked with social norm conformity those expressive of the testosterone system shall more activity in a brain region linked with analytical thinking and those expressive of the test my questionnaire of the estrogen system show more activity in the mirror neurons brain region linked with empathy so we're beginning to map the biology of personality we are then going to go on to study some of the genetics of it these are 64 genes that I hope that we're going to be able to study and assemble some of the real genetics of personality so I'm going to conclude with a couple things for millions of years we lived in little hunting and gathering groups anthropologists think that they were probably about 25 individuals to a little band they also think that about 10 or 12 of these individuals were adolescents and children that leaves about 10 or 12 grown-ups they're all walking over a hill and they suddenly see some mushrooms you can't have all explorers say now let's try the mushrooms you got to have some traditional builders they say we've never tried these mushrooms it's not in our tradition to try these mushrooms we need some the directors the high testosterone type who say well let's have an experiment let's feed the mushrooms to the dog see what happens and you need some of the negotiator type the highest region type who's a listed on and pool our data about these mushrooms and figure this out the bottom line is we were really built to put our heads together I think men and women are like two feet they need each other to get ahead and in fact I've written a lot of books about where we going as society I think we're moving towards what I would call a collaborative society in which we are coming to see and value the skills the aptitudes of both men and women in many respects were moving forward to the kinds of culture that we had a million years ago and million years ago women were just about as powerful as men they commuted to work together their fruits and vegetables they came home with 60 to 80 percent of the meal the double income family was the rule and women expressed their sexuality and they were socially powerful and just about as economically powerful as men in many respects we're moving forward to what I call a collaborative society in which both men and women are valued so I think I will part with this concept we are taught I think from childhood the Golden Rule to treat others as you want to be treated and in fact the Platinum rule you need to treat others as they need to be treated and then you'll win thank what we did is we had people tweet and post on Facebook all different kinds of questions questions during your talk and so here they comment you ready I'm ready okay question number one is do you believe in love at first sight I not only believe in love at first sight but I can explain it I you know this is a brain system that we have been able to track it's a it is way below the cortex it's way below the thinking parts of the brain is way below the emotional parts of the brain it's part of primitive brain regions linked with drive with wanting with craving with focus with energy with motivation and that brain system can be triggered in an instant this is the wanting system you know I study poetry because I think it's a great artifact a lot of anthropologists will study all kinds of different artifacts but poetry I think is a great artifact of the human mind and I think the best description of love was written by Plato in the symposium in which he said the god of love lives in a state of need it is a need it's a wand it's a homeostatic imbalance and it can be triggered instantly men are more experienced that much more than women don't hold on hold on are you saying that men are more likely to experience love at first sight yes I've got a great deal of data for three years in a row match.com and I have done what they call a national survey called singles in America I just finished doing it and in that survey we didn't survey the match.com population we serve we surveyed the it was based on the US Census so we had the right number of blacks whites Asians Latinos gay-straight rural suburban urban every age group and said I'm asked a lot of questions year after year and one of the questions do you believe in love at first sight men much more than women about 60% have you ever had the experience of love at first sight men much more than one men are more visual than women for good Darwinian reasons you know that to look at that woman inside the rub you know to see if she could bear him healthy baby so they responded sley that's why we spend our lives trying to look good I said trigger that brain system in the boy one of the questions is there are a lot of different dating sites that are out there match.com chemistry com OkCupid if it looks like that I've heard these things exist what are the differences among the different sites it seems like you were trying to do something very different when you created this is that really kind of a repudiation of some of these other sites are they less like effective what do you think about it well I think that mankind has been falling in love for a long long time without any dating Saints so you know but I think in our modern age where we're no longer marrying the girl we met in high school were no longer marrying the blame we went out with in college we're not even married in our early 20s and with a very high divorce rate a lot of people are back out on the marriage market you know in their 50s 60s 70s and 80s and by then they're certainly not going to stand in a bar and have the perfect person walk by so I honestly think that these dating services all of them play a very important role in a society where you know it by your by the time you're in your 30s or 40s you you know everybody at work you you know everybody in your social circle how are you going to meet people so I think that if every single one of these dating services were to fall into the Atlantic Ocean tomorrow they would be reinvented it's I think it's part of our modern world but you asked a different question about chemistry calm and it is a different sight and the reason it's a different sight when match.com well the difference between match and chemistry is on match.com you do the shopping yourself you go out there and you you thumb through things and they try to give you some people also but basically you you thumb through and look yourself whereas on chemistry comm we give you five people a day and so it's all anonymous you nobody can some thumb through looking at everybody but all of that said what's important about my questionnaire as its seems a little egotistical but it's the only one in humankind that is based basically on biology there's a lot of good questionnaires out there but they start with psychology they start with they come out of linguistics actually and they will assume that okay let's study neuroticism let's study being open let's study conscientiousness and and and they study them from the psychological whereas I started with the biology and I built the questionnaire not out of linguistic or psychological processes but out of by and so when I go back to the biology to study it it's falsifiable it I can I can prove it that it's measuring what it's measuring there's no other questionnaire out there that it can prove that it's actually measuring what it's measuring now whether that's going to help people fall in love I don't know but I think the big the big issue that I want is just if I get it so that you can kiss fewer frogs on your way to paradise that works for me well you know and what I what I what I hear you're saying is that you're beginning to provide a different kind of language for the kinds of conversations that people have about love all the time that are so unsatisfying you know where people you've seen the movies all the time you know soar like you the hard ones with the heart ones I don't know why you know why this faded you know those sort of things you're sort of saying well yeah maybe we maybe we can figure out why maybe there's some physiological elements that we can look at well you mentioned the divorce rape do you have one of the questions here is do you have an opinion about why the divorce rate is so high these days is that do you think about about that I've studied divorced for many years I wrote a book about it I've looked at divorce in 58 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations there's many many reasons for divorce many many reasons but I want to know this cultural reasons there's social reasons there's psychological reasons there's economic reasons there's reasons of the community there's many many many reasons but I wanted to know if there were in biological reasons so I looked at the Deveaux of the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations and I found around the world if you're going to divorce you tend to divorce during and around the fourth year of marriage at first I thought on rats I hoped it was 7 you know so but it was 4 and so then I looked at pair bonding when are pair bonding in birds and mammals and as it turns out take a Robin in the part a Robin pairs up with another Robin in the spring and they stick together until the babies fly away they have to stick together if one is sitting on that eggs it will starve to death so monogamy evolves when the female cannot raise her babies by herself but in birds and mammals the pair bond breaks up after the baby robins fly away their pair bond breaks up so it began to occur to me in hunting and gathering societies women tend to bear their children every four years and maybe this human out of ISM this human habit of serial monogamy a series of pair bond relationships is an ancient practice that evolved millions of years ago to stay together at least long enough to raise the children through infancy now you know hunting and gathering society a child by age four or five is not equipped to feed itself but they end up joining multi age play groups so they can now be cared for by a ten year old and a 15 year old and aunts and uncles and cousins so for millions of years it may even have been adaptive to break up so you could then form a new pair of bond with somebody else and create more genetic variety in your young leaving the human animal with a tremendous desire to fall in love form a pair bond and and and and stay together at least long enough to raise the child from infancy a tendency to break up tendency to be adulterous on the side that's a different issue and pair again and when you look at hunting and gathering societies they tend to have a woman tends to have two or three husbands during the course of her life serial monogamy and the reason is I've looked in twenty cultures on this everywhere in the world where women are economically powerful they can leave bad marriages in order to make better ones people don't walk out of good marriages what kind of bad marriages and in fact what we're looking at now is a society I think in which women have the economic power and to leave a bad marriage and men no longer have to abandon a woman who's totally dependent on him leaving us to leave a bad marriages in order to make better ones and in this singles in America study we found a piece one piece of data that fascinated me this year we study not only 5,000 singles but we studied a thousand married people and I asked the married people would you remarry the same person 80% said yes and so what I think is going on is with women's rising economic power growing economic equality between the sexes later marriage which actually creates stability in relationships people can leave unhappy marriages for better ones and in fact today 80% of people are happy in their marriage this is uh this is a really different kind of question but when I think a lot of people wonder God do you think it's possible for a person to a lot of two people at the same time I think yes first of all let's define love I think that we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems from mating and reproduction one is the sex drive craving for sexual gratification the second is romantic love the elation getting is euphoria possessiveness obsessive thinking craving motivation to win this person and then I could go on all night and the third brain system is attachment that sense of common security you can feel with a long-term partner I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a whole range of partners you can have sex with somebody you're not in love with I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time and I think this third brain system of attachment evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team and so can you love two people that is at the same time you can clearly be attached to two people at the same time you can clearly have sex with two three whatever it is number of people in the time I do not think that you can be madly in love with two people at the same time because it is a it is a human brain system that is focused central to it is that it's focused on one person rather than another and when you take a look at world poetry I think it's best summed up by an Indian poet called Kabir and he basically said the lane of love is narrow there's room for only one so my guess is that when somebody says they're in love with two people they're not in Louisville either or it's just the beginning of the relationship they love one for a while than another for a while and another for a while and then something happens times change and then that all that focus is on one it's really interesting I mean I think breaking it into three systems I think really provides a different way of to think to think about it I mean it could be that you're feeling attachment and commitment but you're not really romantic love so so you're saying the romantic look piece is so obsessive and kind of yes and you know what's interesting about what you just said you know you can lie in bed at night and feel deep attachment to one person and then swinging in the feelings of wild romantic love for somebody else and then swinging into feelings of a sexual desire when you read a book or something so it's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head you know as these these these things swing and that's one of the problems of adultery you feel deep attachment to one person madly in love with another we were yes we're not a stable animal we don't have a sufficient vocabulary for thinking about love graves if we think it's all those things at once and there's in fact those that conversation going on your problem so what question is have you studied biological traction in same-sex couples does that song is that on their agenda or is it chemistry Commons in chemistry Icahn is very interested in it and the reason they're interested in it is because as I've told them and they agree with me it doesn't make any difference you know I wanted to start putting same-sex you know gays and lesbians into my brain scanner when we were first beginning but because we were the first in the world to scan the brains of people we we had to stick to some of the basic rules and because we really had hammered by academics but since then a guy called Samir's ecchi in London has put lesbians gays and heterosexuals into the brain scanner doing pretty much what we're doing and they found exactly the same thing so the brain system is like the fear system you can be feared as scared at any age you can be scared if you're gay or straight you can be scared under any circumstances in the same way you can be in love the feeling of being in love is is the standard feeling for the human animal who you fall in love with that will vary but how you feel when you love will be the same whether you're gay or straight well I want to ask you the kind of question that I think most academic researchers would ask about this which is you know now that you're reaching wider audience I kind of want to say how have you been misunderstood because it seems to me that one of risks of the kind of presentation you just gave that someone would say well using biology to sort of centralized men or this way women are this way and I know by putting milk there you kind of working against that so is that a problem for you do you find that people try to take the work and use it in ways that maybe ignore some of the nuances of what you're trying to put forward ahead how are you dealing with that I don't deal with it very well hurts my feelings because they haven't listened I don't know how many times I said you know we're all a combination of all of them no two people are alike these broad styles of thinking of you know and I in every one of my cases I did a man and a woman but you know people are going to listen to what they listen to there's two things that I do one of the thing I do is I don't read anything about me I've never googled myself I've never almost never watched one of my own speeches I'll read something if it's in the New York Times because I got to do that or The Economist but other than that I don't read it I don't think I'd be able to go on doing what I do if I were to be constantly you know feeling so misunderstood I just go on with my work well listen I really want to thank you many members dr. Fisher is going to be right at the top of the stairs signing some books if you'd like to purchase a book and do that see the next talk lovely

Channel: USF College of Arts and Sciences

Views: 66,597

Rating: 4.5764704 out of 5

Keywords: love, brain in love, helen fisher, online dating, match.com, chemistry.com, university of south florida, frontier forum, tampa, florida

Id: qSGd6Ojuw0Q

Length: 56min 34sec (3394 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2013