TEDxMidwest - Helen Fisher - Biology of the Mind

the ancient Greeks call dramatic love the madness of the gods people live for love they kill for love they die for love is one of the most powerful brain systems on earth so many years ago I decided that I would try to start putting people into a brain scanner and understand what happens in the brain when you fall madly in love so with my colleagues dr. Lucy Brown dr. art Aaron and dr. Bianchi Acevedo we have now put over 75 men and women into a brain scanner 17 were people who had just fallen happily in love 15 it were people who had just been rejected in love and 15 were people who were reported that they were still in love after an average of 21 years of marriage I talked a lot about this in other places so I'll just say a very few things now and then go on to what I really want to talk about which is why you fall in love with one person rather than another for most the things that I've learned most important perhaps is that love is a drive it comes from very primitive parts of the brain way below the cortex as a matter of fact parts of the cortex actually begin to shut down when you fall in love with somebody you can't notice anymore that they've got three heads because you're madly in love in fact this brain region that becomes active the entire brain system that becomes active is linked with focus with energy with craving and with motivation and indeed it is a motivation to find life's most greatest prize which is a mating partner indeed I think that romantic love is one of three basically different drives that evolved from mating and reproduction I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a whole range of partners I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time and I think that third brain system of attachment evolves so that you can tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise your children together as a team and of course these three brain systems operate in many different ways there's only one new thing that I've discovered very recently that I want to share with you before I go on and that is about hooking up having sex with somebody indeed when you have these three brain systems are connected when you have sex with somebody you can actually trigger the brain system and trigger feelings of intense romantic love so recently with match.com the internet dating site we did the first actually a very large national study of singles in America based on the US Census and one of the questions that I asked in the study is did you ever go into having a one-night stand with somebody and then find that it turned into a long-term partnership and indeed one-third of the people who went into a one-night stand ended up in a long-term partnership it's actually from a Darwinian perspective not a bad way to do it I mean either you can spend three years talking about the guy's college plans or you can get them into bed tonight and trigger the brain circuitry for romantic love so I'm not surprised that that people do it I'm just simply saying that casual sex is not casual unless you're so drunk that you've forgotten who the person is something happens in the brain it's one of the most powerful systems on earth so I had written my fourth book on this and I was between things and two days before Christmas match.com gave me a call and asked me to come in after Christmas and talk with them for the day so I went in in the middle of the morning they said to me why do we fall in love with one person rather than another and I said I don't know nobody knows psychologists know that timings got to be right we tend to fall in love with people from the same socio-economic and an ethnic background people are the same degree of intelligence and good looks and education people with the same social and economic and religious values the same social goals your childhood definitely plays a role but you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background and same general level of intelligence and education and you don't fall in love with all of them so they invited me to start a new dating site with them called chemistry calm and at the time I said you know I don't know if you got the right person I mean I study why we're all alike and you want to know why we're all different so they said to go home think about it and and see if I wanted to do this with them so anyway I went home and it began to think okay there's two basic parts of personality there's your character which is everything you grow up to believe and do and say and think and there's your temperament all of those traits that come out of your biology now I do know from epigenetically tremendous new field of epigenetics that these are never torn apart bottom line is though at least 50% of who you are originates from various biological processes so I decided I would go through all of the academic literature took me a couple years to see what traits are linked with what's brain systems and indeed after doing that I began to see there's a lot of brain systems but they're not all linked with personality traits some of them just keep the heart beating or the eyes blinking only for brain systems seem to be regularly linked each one of them with a constellation of personality traits so I had these four sheets of paper the dopamine system the serotonin system the testosterone system and the estrogen and oxytocin system in front of me and I thought to myself maybe I could create a questionnaire to see the degree to which you express each one of these categories of personality traits and then put them on this dating site and then watch who's naturally drawn to whom people will say well we had chemistry or we didn't have chemistry and I thought maybe there's something to that so I created the questionnaire and began to watch who's drawn to whom so what I really want to talk to you about today and thank you for inviting me is is what I found 10 million people have now taken this questionnaire in 40 countries 30,000 people take it every week so I can continually ask questions about why you fall in love with the people that you do so first I'm going to go through the four broad very styles of thinking and behaving and then go on to what I think some of this means but first of all we are all combination of all four of these things these are not cubby holes they're not types they're brain systems and of course each one of them were going to express each one of them to some extent but in fact I just looked at a hundred thousand people on chemistry calm and no two people took that question near the same way I'm an identical twin even my twin sister and I are not exactly like but there's patterns to nature and there's patterns to personality and over and over again I saw these four cornerstones of personality expressed in these various people so I'm now actually working on the genetics of this with a with a geneticist from Princeton University dr. lee silver and in fact the first academic articles were going to do on this are going to be in math journals because he's hooked on the math of these patterns and the different kinds of patterns there was there is no case in which it's not random personality is not random it does fall into in fact we found 25 very dramatic patterns of thinking and behaving so these are the four cornerstones of it I'm going to whiz through them by the way I have to because I was working with a dating site I had to name these people so I called people who are very expressive of aspects of the dopamine and norepinephrine system explorers not a great term I'm stuck with it now anyway these are some of the characteristics of the of this kind of person they're not really seeking risk-taking very curious the academic term is sensation seekers energetic Restless exploring physical exploration or mental it's not just people who jump off cliffs it's people who can sit in a room like this and listen all afternoon and collect a lot of interesting ideas and then talk about it enthusiasm optimism are both in the dopamine system as a matter of fact right after obama was elected president you may have seen the the header headline of the humor magazine the onion said black man given worst job in the world and indeed he was optimistic about it I doubt he's so optimistic about it today but independence and self-reliant seems to be in the dopamine system impulsive spontaneously generous mentally flexible open-minded and one of the most characteristic traits in the dopamine system is what they call idea generation and creativity these people are very creative as a matter of fact if you give l-dopa to a Parkinson's patients very often their creativity goes way up they'll turn into very good poets very good painters also addict addiction is in the in the dopamine system on the downside of this there's a dark side of every moon they can be susceptible to boredom reckless unreflective I'm a very much of the Explorer type as I would Express expect most of you are also and most of these people don't really care who they are they look out not in and as a matter of fact I was making a speech to a group of therapists about 600 therapists in California some time ago and I heard myself say but you know I don't really care who I am and somebody from the back of the room shouted you want to talk about it I didn't really they tend to be manic they can be insincere opportunistic and very unpredictable I did a study of 178 thousand people it's called the lexical hypothesis it comes out of the 1930s people do use words that express who they are I want to know if there was biology to that word usage so I looked at one hundred and seventy eight thousand people these are the top ten words that the people who are very expressive of the dopamine system use adventure new fun travel outgoing passion and active all due to these chemical systems perfect example is Richard Branson I have always thought the rules were made to be broken I would imagine a lot of people in this room think so too I found out the rules of the road don't want to die but bottom line is I don't follow the rule just to follow the rule not the different type of explorer we're not measuring intelligence we're measuring temperament I'm sure she's extremely bright but a different sort of bright than probably Richard Branson she's got a tattoo of a window on her arm let me out only the Explorer I think would would do that they tend to live in the big city certainly in Chicago is among them yellow is the color I chose for all of the explorers and not in Dallas in Houston and not in Phoenix and all Las Vegas but there in most of the big cities where the action is those who are called the builders they're expressive of the serotonin system in the brain they tend to be they conform they follow social rules they like familiarity their harm avoidant self control they've in control is very important to them frugal they tend to be managerial they follow plans and routines and schedules they're orderly I've got a friend who annually he and his wife go off to a I think it's some sort of money manager and they were sitting at their table together and with the money manager and he just by chance leaned over on the desk and moved the guy's pencil sharpener and the guy immediately moved it back and now every single year he goes and he does that it every year he moves it back there fact oriented more close friends they're calmer is why you take something like Prozac of paxil they tend to be more religious they're interested in loyalty we all want loyal I one of my favorite questions on the questionnaire is do you want to have loyal friends or interesting friends but we all want loyal friends and we all want interesting friends but they have got to have loyal friends loyalty is very important to them on the downside they tend to be close-minded controlling rigid sub stubborn and moralistic cop word they uses family also have trust loyal respect loving values where values is very important to them ben bernanke I think is a very good example of one I think George Washington I've very gotten very interested in history he was the right man in the right time and in American history I think was very expressive of the serotonin system in the brain testosterone system these people are analytical logical they've got very good spatial skills they're very good at music which is actually a spatial spatial task I think Beethoven was very much of this type experimental exacting a rank oriented emotionally contained you know I made a speech at Davos and I I saw that they're moving to things in Davos moving their thumbs on their blackberries and moving their mouths that's about it they're very self controlled high tide high testosterone time decisive bold and direct these are the ones that say get to the point on the downside they can be uncompromising impatient demanding mind blindness is an academic term the inability to climb into somebody's head and see what's going on less empathetic and aloof intelligence is one of their top would there's lots of different kinds of intelligence but it's very important to them politics driven challenge Larry Ellison is a good example Hillary Clinton I think is another very good example when asked why she was attracted to Bill she said he wasn't afraid of me last type very broad style of thinking and behaving these are the big picture seers expressive of estrogen and oxytocin very imaginative it's actually because of the way the estrogen affects the brain in the womb people skills social skills very intuitive able to climb into your head empathetic what we call pro-social introspective these are the ones that care who they are and who you are on a very genuine level seek harmony stab you in the back never hit you in the face emotionally expressive and diplomatic intelligence on the downside they're scattered there indecisive they all say well where do you want to go for dinner where we go here we go there we go make up your mind make in my mind they're going through all of the alternatives while they while they do it placating ruminating gullible hypersensitive backstabbing unforgiving effusive now we don't have all these traits of course but these are the traits that have been linked with the estrogen system top thing word they use is passion learn random they like the word random no good high testosterone likes the word random nor does any good serotonin type I think Bill Clinton actually may have been our first female president he whole world knows he can't stop talking highly emotionally expressive he was the one that cried at his daughter's wedding his wife didn't crying he did and of course he's well-known for saying I feel your pain dark Charles Darwin the the grandest synthesizing mind I think that's ever come into this planet this is a god of course ten million of these things so I got everybody's zip code all of the conventional traditional high serotonin types are in the Midwest and the south high testosterone is all around Washington where they're trying to run the world and are out in Las Vegas whether all the spatial skills of gambling or in Alaska where they're shooting the animals they're all spatial skills everything that's loose rolls into California that's a high dopamine type and of course the tree huggers tree hugger green I call that for the very liberal highest region touchy-feely big reading the type of person so as it turns out the high dopamine type is goes for people like themselves people who are energetic curious and creative want people like themselves and so do the high those expressive of serotonin they also want somebody like themselves traditional ones to additional but opposites attract when it comes to the highest region in the high testosterone so I'm we're now studying our genetics of this we need some funding down the road but we've isolated 63 genes we want to begin to understand these patterns of personality I've also done with the Lucy Brown and Bianca Acevedo put 34 people into the brain scanner and beginning to find some of the brain circuitry of these cornerstones of personality so I would just close with two things number one I think that that these four broad styles of thinking and behaving evolved when for millions of years lived in little hunting and gathering bands there were maybe about 25 individuals to a group ten or twelve or children that left ten or twelve grown-ups you got them all walking over the hill and suddenly you see a pile of mushrooms well you can't have twelve explorers saying oh let's try the mushrooms you need some builders serotonin ties to say we've never tried the mushrooms it's not in our tradition you need some high testosterone tripe or experimental and say well let's feed them to the dog and see what happens not my dog with some dog and we need some high estrogen types who were going to say listen down and talk about these mushrooms in other words I'm a group selection estanque that these broad styles of thinking and behaving evolved together and I think that hopefully that can be very useful in understanding business putting together corporate boards hiring advertising selling reaching people where they live as a matter of fact my editor when he first read a rough draft of the book he called me up and there was a long pause and then he said how long I finally understand my son and indeed I think that we can so now I want to really close with a story matcom came to me one day and said would your questionnaire work in other countries and I said if it doesn't I have failed because I'm not studying the American mind I'm studying the human mind I'm studying human nature so it's been went in a lot of other countries and it's worked out so anyway we we went to Japan and to want to sight in Japan and the week went by I've talked a lot of journalists etc and then came the final night and on the final night I showed up at this huge wedding palace I mean the giant thing quite look like the White House with mannequins with wedding dresses and balloons and flowers etc so I was sitting in the green room and I said well what am I supposed to do tonight they said well we're going to have everybody take your questionnaire and then put a band around their hand so that we know whether they tend to be expressive of dopamine serotonin testosterone or estrogen and what you're going to do is we're going to wheel out two-foot-wide a bottom of wedding cakes and all of the Explorers are going to decorate one wedding cake and all the negotiators another etc sitter and you are going to judge the wedding cakes like that oh yeah the nadir of my scientifical experience what do I know about wedding cakes so anyway I I the dud that came along and there were least 400 people in the room that they they were all wheeled out the cakes were wheeled out and and there was all this commotion and there was all the decorating and all the negotiators were here and the builders there and the Explorers here and the directors there so my moment came and I had to go over the first wedding cake and judge it I go over this wedding cake in the crowd parts I couldn't see it and this was the negotiator cake the high estrogen cake the cake was smiling at me it was a trying to like me and it had even role of on the wedding cake so then I go over to the Builder cake these people are formal by nature traditional and sure enough this was the it's a nice cake it's probably the kind of cake that most people have it's formal it's lush we got one Kiwi twenty REE when Kiwi when cherry on Kiwi when cherry it's an orderly cake so then I go over to the directors cake the high testosterone cake and the crowd parts and I take a look at this cake there is no emotion in cake it is the most contained cake I've ever seen but these people are invited and they decorated around the cake so then I go over to the Explorer cake and the crowd parts and the first thing I see are three men Harleen fruit at the cake they take one look at me and one of them a fourth one grabs a bunch of flowers in a vase having nothing to do with the decorations of this cake and plunged it in the middle of that cake how's the cake thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 66,764

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Keywords: ted talks, Helen Fisher, tedx talk, ted x, ted talk, tedx talks, ted, tedx

Id: qv-Jja40ND0

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2012