What is love?Scientists in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience have been asking this question for decades.The scientific basis of love is often sensationalized, and as with most science, we don’t know enough to draw firm conclusions about every piece of the puzzle.What we do know, however, is that much of love can be explained by chemistry.

The Science Behind Love

Think of the last time you ran into someone you find attractive. You may have stammered, you may have said something incredibly silly or foolish and tripped spectacularly. And chances are, your heart was thudding in your chest.It’s no surprise that, for centuries, people thought love (and most other emotions, for that matter) arose from the heart. As it turns out, love is all about the brain – which, in turn, makes the rest of your body go haywire.

Total Eclipse Of The Brain

According to a team of scientists led by Dr. Helen Fisher, romantic love can be broken down into three categories:<ul><li>lust - driven by testosterone and estrogen</li><li>attraction - created by dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin</li><li>attachment - mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin</li></ul>Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones stemming from the brain.

Breaking Down Love

Lust is driven by the desire for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from our need to reproduce.The hypothalamus of the brain plays a big role in stimulating the production of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. While these chemicals are often stereotyped as being male and female, respectively, both play a role in men and women.Testosterone increases libido in everyone. The effects are less pronounced with estrogen, but some women report being more sexually motivated around the time they ovulate, when estrogen levels are highest.

Let's Get Chemical 

The testes and ovaries secrete the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen, driving sexual desire.Dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin are all made in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that controls many vital functions as well as emotion.Lust and attraction shut off the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which includes rational behavior.

Chemical Breakdown

While we can certainly lust for someone we are attracted to, one can happen without the other. Attraction involves the brain pathways that control reward behavior which explains why the first few weeks or months of a relationship can be so exhilarating and even all-consuming.Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us. In this case, these things include spending time with loved ones and having sex. High levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, are released during attraction.

Love Is Its Own Reward

These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia. In fact, norepinephrine, also known as noradrenalin, which play a large role in the fight or flight response, kicks into high gear when we’re stressed and keeps us alert. Brain scans of people in love have actually shown that the primary reward centers of the brain, fire like crazy when people are shown a photo of someone they are intensely attracted to, compared to when they are shown someone they feel neutral towards.

Last but not least, attachment is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well. The two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

The Friend Zone

Oxytocin is often nicknamed “cuddle hormone” for this reason. Like dopamine, oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus and released in large quantities during sex, breastfeeding, and childbirth.The common factor here is that all of these events are precursors to bonding. It also makes it pretty clear why having separate areas for attachment, lust, and attraction is important: we are attached to our immediate family, but those other emotions have no business there.

This all paints quite the rosy picture of love: hormones are released, making us feel good, rewarded, and close to our romantic partners. Love is often accompanied by jealousy, erratic behavior, and irrationality, along with a host of other less-than-positive emotions and moods. It seems that our friendly cohort of hormones is also responsible for the downsides of love.Dopamine is the hormone responsible for the vast majority of the brain’s reward pathway – and that means controlling both the good and the bad. We experience surges of dopamine for our virtues and our vices.

Love Hurts

The dopamine pathway is particularly well studied when it comes to addiction. The same regions that light up when we’re feeling attraction light up when drug addicts take cocaine and when we binge eat sweets.Cocaine maintains dopamine signaling for much longer than usual, leading to a temporary high. Attraction is much like an addiction to another human being.The same brain regions light up when addicted to material goods as when emotionally dependent on our partners. Addicts going into withdrawal are not unlike love-struck people craving the company of someone they can't see.

Attraction Addiction

Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brain, is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships.However, we can push the dopamine pathway too far when we become addicted to food or drugs.Similarly, too much dopamine in a relationship can underlie unhealthy emotional dependence on our partners.While healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice.

The Dope In Dopamine

The story is somewhat similar for oxytocin: too much of a good thing can be bad. Recent studies on party drugs such as MDMA and GHB shows that oxytocin may be the hormone behind the feel-good, sociable effects these chemicals produce.These positive feelings are taken to an extreme in this case, causing the user to dissociate from his or her environment and act wildly and recklessly. Furthermore, oxytocin’s role as a “bonding” hormone appears to help reinforce the positive feelings we already feel towards the people we love.

Feel Good Drug

That is, as we become more attached to our families, friends, and significant others, oxytocin is working in the background, reminding us why we like these people and increasing our affection for them. While this may be a good things for monogamy, such associations are not always positive. For example, oxytocin has also been suggested to play a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established cultural groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign.

The Double Edged Sword

And finally, what would love be without embarrassment? Sexual arousal (but not necessarily attachment) appears to turn off regions in our brain that regulate critical thinking, self-awareness, and rational behavior, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.in short, love makes us dumb. Have you ever done something when you were in love that you later regretted?

Losing Your Self?

As we’ve realized by now, it’s not just the hormone side of the equation that’s complicated. Love can be both the best and worst thing for you – it can be the thing that gets us up in the morning, or what makes us never want to wake up again. I’m not sure I could define “love” for you if I kept you here for another ten thousand pages.In the end, everyone is capable of defining love for themselves. And, for better or for worse, if it’s all hormones, maybe each of us can have “chemistry” with just about anyone. But whether or not it goes further is still up to ourselves.

Formula For Love?

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

People think that memory is supposed to be perfect. However, our brains are not designed to remember everything. People over the age of 50 often think all kinds of forgetting mean they have Alzheimer's. They're always forgetting names, and if they don't write down what they have to do later, they won't remember to do it. However, this is normal for all people.

Forgetfulness is normal

Alzheimer's starts with a sticky protein called 'amyloid beta.' It will bind to itself and form 'amyloid plaques.' If you have enough amyloid plaques accumulated in your brain, it will reach a tipping point at some stage that causes neurofibrillary tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and other symptoms we classically know as Alzheimer's. Before that tipping point, you're symptom-free. After the tipping point, the glitches in memory formation and retrieval are different.

How Alzheimer's start

Alzheimer's starts in your hippocampus, the place responsible for forming new memories. So, the very first symptoms of Alzheimer's will be not remembering what someone said a few minutes ago, repeating yourself over and over because you don't remember what you just said, not remembering what happened last week, even if it was meaningful. Things you would normally remember from last week won't get consolidated.

Alzheimer symptoms

It will invade your frontal lobe, so you'll have problems with problem-solving and decision-making. It will invade parts of your brain that have to do with where things are in space, so you might get lost in your neighbourhood. It will invade the parts of your brain that have to do with language so that you will have trouble to find the right words more and more. The disease will then move on to your limbic system and cause changes in emotion and personality.

Alzheimer's doesn't just stay in your hippocampus

The accumulation of amyloid plaques takes 15 to 20 years and can be influenced by how we live. Things that influence the amyloid plaque levels.<ol><li>Sleep. While you sleep, the glial cells in your brain clear away all the metabolic debris and amyloid beta accumulated in your brain while you were awake.</li><li>Diet. A Mediterranean diet can reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by almost half.</li><li>Exercise. A brisk walk for 30 minutes, four to five times a week, is enough to decrease your amyloid plaque levels.</li><li>Chronic stress will increase your risk of developing Alzheimer's.</li><li>Learning something new.</li></ol>

The good news

Every time you learn something new, you build new synapses, neural connections, and a 'cognitive reserve.' If someone with Alzheimer's built a lot of redundant connections,  they can dance around those roadblocks and still get to the memory they need.  So, learning new things gives a way to build an Alzheimer-resistant brain.

Learning something new

Only 2% of Alzheimer’s is 100% genetic. The rest is up to your daily habits. Subscribe to Big Think on YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/c/bigthink Up Next ► 4 ways to hack your memory https://youtu.be/SCsztDMGP7o People want a perfect memory. They wish that they can remember everything that they want to remember. But it doesn't work like that. Most people over the age of 50 think that forgetting someone's name or forgetting why they went into the kitchen is a sign of Alzheimer's. It isn't. Most of our forgetfulness is perfectly normal. If you are worried about developing Alzheimer's or another form of dementia, some simple lifestyle modifications can help prevent it: getting enough sleep, exercising, eating a balanced diet, and managing stress. Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/videos/cognitive-decline/ 00:00 The truth about memory & forgetting 01:12 Alzheimer's cause & symptoms 04:21 You need sleep 05:13 Eat a healthy diet 05:45 Exercise, even a little bit 06:15 Reduce stress levels 07:15 Always learn new things 08:39 The good news ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Lisa Genova: Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Still Alice, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens, and Every Note Played. Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and NPR. Her TED talk, “What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s,” has been viewed more than five million times. The New York Times bestseller REMEMBER is her first work of nonfiction. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read more of our stories on cognitive decline: Your personality is linked to risk of dementia and cognitive decline ► https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/personality-mental-health/ Is sleeping longer than 6.5 hours a night associated with cognitive decline? ► https://bigthink.com/health/sleep-cognitive-decline/ Risk factors that determine whether you’re more or less likely to develop cognitive decline ► https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/risk-factors-cognitive-decline/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Big Think | Smarter Faster™ ► Big Think The leading source of expert-driven, educational content. With thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, Big Think helps you get smarter, faster by exploring the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century. ► Big Think+ Make your business smarter, faster: https://bigthink.com/plus/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Want more Big Think? ► Daily editorial features: https://bigthink.com/popular/ ► Get the best of Big Think right to your inbox: https://bigthink.com/st/newsletter ► Facebook: https://bigth.ink/facebook ► Instagram: https://bigth.ink/Instagram ► Twitter: https://bigth.ink/twitter

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5 ways to build an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain | Lisa Genova

Scientists haven’t solved this still called “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” and a materialist solution is nowhere in sight. Not for lack of trying. Some, improving on Darwin, insist that chimpanzees really do think like people if you study them enough (no, they don’t). Others claim that artificial intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence. If so, that would be a credit to human intelligence because we created it.

Is The Mind Simply An Organ That Evolved Naturally?

AI capable of thinking like a human would be a philosophical problem, to be sure, because it would mean both that intelligence can create itself and that it can be instantiated in a non-biological form. However, such a development would not demonstrate that human intelligence is a material thing or that it arose from a material thing. If anything, it would more readily suggest the opposite.

Is Human Intelligence A Material Thing?

Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association notes the key role neuroscience has played in undermining a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role for neuroscience, perhaps, but that’s what happened:”Neuroscientist Donald Hoffman, who once worked with DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick in attempting to crack the problem of human consciousness, recently conceded that the nature and origins of consciousness remain “completely unsolved” and may best be termed an eternal mystery.”

Undermining The Materialistic Account Of The Mind

The brusque and decidedly no-nonsense Crick was in the event fated to meet his Waterloo when it came to the subject of consciousness, explains Hoffman. Crick had at first attempted to explain it somewhat airily as nothing but an “emergent” property which “naturally” arose when matter reaches a certain level of complexity. However, he was at length obliged to withdraw that vacuous contention, conceding that there is nothing about conscious experience that is relatable to the physical stuff or material of the brain. Consciousness simply lies beyond our empirical perception and cognitive reach.

Consciousness Just Cannot “Arise Naturally” 

Hoffman develops the point further: “At the most microcosmic level the brain consists of subatomic particles which have qualities like mass, spin and charge. There is nothing about these qualities that relates to the qualities associated with consciousness such as thought, taste, pain or anxiety.” To suggest otherwise, continues Hoffman, would be like asserting that numbers might emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.

Numbers Just Cannot Emerge From Biscuits

Both Hoffman and Crick were finally forced to conclude that all purely physicalist theories of consciousness had failed to provide illumination and that the state of consciousness could not be explained in neurological terms, a conclusion powerfully endorsed for more than three decades by distinguished British neuroscientist Raymond Tallis in his long opposition to what he terms “Darwinitis.”Any physicalist theory of consciousness must reckon with the fact that consciousness deals with information, which is not a material thing and follows different principles from matter and energy.

Darwinitis

One outcome in science today is the rise of panpsychism, the view that all life forms participate in consciousness to at least some minimal. Panpsychism attracts many because it allows consciousness to be real rather than illusory (as per physicalism) but it remains in the same general thought world as, say, Hoffman — though not that of Richard Dawkins. Wallace himself, as Hoffman notes, came to embrace a sort of natural theology. He contributed to a number of streams of early twentieth-century thought, as Michael Flannery’s book Nature’s Prophet details.

Panpsychism

The bottom line seems to be that we are not only ignorant but, alas, prostrate in our ignorance of the brain’s arcana. Theoretically, of course, there may yet emerge an as yet undiscovered materialist explanation for the brain and human consciousness. But to date we must conclude that today’s science cannot with integrity support such a claim on the evidence presently available.In any event, neuroscience today could marshall as many arguments in support of Wallace’s view of the human mind than of Darwin’s.

Natural Selection Vs Natural Thrology

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) share the credit, technically, for the theory of evolution by natural selection but Darwin became the icon. One reason they parted ways was that Wallace did not agree with Darwin that the human mind was simply an organ that evolved naturally, like any other. There had to be something more to it.

Philosopher Neil Thomas points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that’s what happened.

The Battle Over the Human Mind That Split Two Great Thinkers

Humans have an innate language instinct, which allows them to tackle communication on a whole other level.<ul><li>Since children learn grammar without studying it, they must have an innate capability to understand it.</li><li>There are two central principles behind all languages, which make them learnable.</li><li>You don’t have to worry about correct grammar so much, as its rules are only one part of using language correctly.</li></ul>

A Natural At Learning Languages

<ul><li> Language is the biological adaptation to communicate.</li><li> There have been anthropological studies of tribes that had no contact with the larger world until the 1920s. Among those tribes, language was acquired seamlessly, without specific instruction. </li><li>The human capacity for language is termed by the author as “Mentalese.” </li><li>Humans acquired language through their biology. This innate possession of language a “Universal Grammar.”</li><li>This proclamation ran counter to the social science theories of the time, which contended that language had to be deliberately taught by adults.</li></ul>

Defining Language

Since children learn languages as early as 18 months old, but can only learn from observing adults that do it the right way, they have no way of actively telling what’s right from wrong – they’re not studying languages, they just absorb them.Yet they still apply the right rules at the right time. For example, even deaf children apply the correct grammar, just by learning sign language from their parents.

Early Instinct

Children have a “window” for maximum language learning, while adults tend to have trouble learning a second language. This window must exist because children around four years old learn grammar and vocabulary so quickly; this exponential learning cannot be explained by adult intervention or guidance. Language learning can be encouraged, and children must be in a social environment to absorb language, but the exact words they remember and the grammar they display probably has a biological basis.

The Window To Learn A Language

All languages are based on the same two core principles.How come we can talk so effortlessly to one another? What is it about language that makes it so easy to communicate with it? There are two forces at play here:<ul><li>The arbitrariness of the sign.</li><li>Our infinite use of finite media.</li></ul>

The Two Core Principles

The form words take doesn’t have a direct relation to their meaning.For example the word “cat” doesn’t sound like a cat. The sound cats make is “meow” and they’re silent when they walk, whereas “cat” is a pretty strong, snappy, short and loud word.This is a good thing, because it keeps us from trying to decipher what the word “cat” means by thinking about the way it sounds and instead lets us jump instantly to the result, because we’ve paired the word with the image through generations of rote learning instead.

Signs Are Arbitrary

This principle allows us to express anything and everything, because even though the number of words in any given language is limited, the number of combinations of words isn’t. Since we use the rules of grammar to create our own sentences, we’re not limited in how much we can express, which makes it easier to get your point across.

Infinite Use Of Finite Media

Grammar is a crucial part of language, and it pays to know it well. However, while you’d be punished horribly in school in the 1920s for bad grammar, today it’s not such a big deal, mainly because grammar rules are only one type of rules that determine how well you use language.Grammar rules are prescriptive, which means they tell us how we’re supposed to talk or write. More and more though, scientists are concerned with descriptive rules, which describe how we actually talk.

Grammar Is Getting Worse, But It's Okay

You can be very much descriptively correct with your grammar, while being wrong in a prescriptive sense, just like a driver can follow the rules of physics in his car while breaking the laws of the country he’s driving in. Correct grammar is very much a relative thing, so don’t stress too much about it!

The Right Grammar Is Subjective

The theory that language is an instinct has opened up the possibility that humans have had access to language learning for about 2.5 million years. There are specific genes and regions of the brain that develop to allow the individual to practice language.While popular media accounts claim that chimpanzees can learn American Sign Language, most data suggest that chimpanzees are not mentally wired to acquire language. They lack the language instinct that humans possess.

Our Brains Are Hard-Wired For Learning Language

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

 We are born with an innate capability to understand languages.

The classic book on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind. In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

The Language Instinct

We overestimate how much attention people pay to our words and appearance. But in reality, everyone thinks what others think of them. Ex: Ankur is worried that everyone will hate his new shoes.

1. 🔦Spotlight effect

We believe that others are more influenced by social media and mass media than we are. And we often judge them. Ex: "You are clearly watching a lot of news"

2. 👀Third-person effect

We prefer things to stay the same; change is mostly considered a negative thing. And often change is uncomfortable Ex: "Ankur continues to be friends with toxic people because they are childhood friends."

3. 💰Status Quo bias

We assume that the stories of those who survived are the entire story. Because the "dead" are not there to share any story and hence we don't really know of them... Ex: "So many unicorns are being made every day. Entrepreneurship must be really awesome."

4. 💪Survivorship Bias

We remember incomplete tasks more than completed tasks. It also applies to our successes and failures. Ex: "Ankur continues to feel guilty that he hasn't finished those 2 tasks, ignoring that he has finished 10 others."

5. 📝Zeigarnik Effect

We tend to place a higher value on things that we have worked on ourselves. Ex: "Isn't the cake awesome? I made it."

6. 🍥Ikea Effect

We tend to overestimate the probability of bad outcomes. Because by default our brain leans toward negative probability. Ex: "I am sure I won't find a cab in time for the interview."

7. 😔Pessimism Bias

We draw different conclusions from the same information, basis how the information is presented. And that makes all the difference. Ex: "Only 5% of Indians invest in the stock market. There must be something wrong with it.Only 5% of Indians invest in the stock market. Imagine the potential."

8. 🖼️Framing Effect

We tend to think that the past was better than the future will be. Ex: "In our times, we had a lot more patience."

9. 🔮Declinism

We invest more in things that have cost us something, even if we face negative outcomes. The sunk cost fallacy occurs because we are not purely rational decision-makers and are often influenced by our emotions. Ex: "Ankur is still holding on to that stock investment with a -80% return. In fact, he is investing more."

10. 📉Sunk Cost Fallacy

We think future possibilities are affected by past events, even though they are independent. Ex: "Ankur is tossing the coin and heads have come up 9 times. Now it will tail for sure."

11. 💰Gambler's Fallacy

We tend to forget things that we can easily search for. Ex: "What was that movie name? God, I just read about it yesterday!"

12. 🔍Google Effect

Once we know something, we think that everyone else also knows it. Ex: "I shouldn't share this content. It's so basic. Everyone knows this."

13. 📖Curse of knowledge

Our failures are sensational, but our success is our hard work. Ex: "I passed that exam because I worked hard. I failed that interview because I got late."

14. 👨‍🦰Self-serving Bias

We judge others on their personality or behavior, but we judge ourselves on the situation. Ex: "Ankur is poor. He must be lazy. I am poor because I did not get the right opportunities."

15. 🧑‍⚖️Fundamental Attribution Error

We tend to agree more with folks in our group, than outside of our group. Ex: "Ankur is from Delhi, so I like him more than someone from Mumbai. Because I am from Delhi."

16. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑In-group favoritism

We don't think we have biases. But we see it in others. Ex: "I am not biased."

17. 🧑‍🦯Blind Spot Bias

Awareness of these biases is the first step then."The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

I wish we were taught about these biases in school, in addition to what school taught us. These biases prepare us for life in more ways than the curriculum does. - Ankur Warikoo

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

5 ways to build an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain | Lisa Genova

The Battle Over the Human Mind That Split Two Great Thinkers

The Language Instinct

17 Ways Our Mind Plays Tricks On Us🧠

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