Shortly before Christmas in 2005 I received an email from John Brockman, a fine writer, well know New York literary agent, and founding editor of Edge.org, a web site devoted to discussions of cutting edge science.  He was inviting me to submit an entry for a compilation he had entitled “What is your dangerous idea?”   

Last week my entry appeared in his new book,  “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable” Edited by Brockman, with an Introduction by Steven Pinker and Afterword by Richard Dawkins.   It was a privilege to be part of this endeavor so when HarperCollins asked me to help them promote the book by doing a series of live radio spots, by phone, I accepted. 

So, having talked about this all day yesterday, I feel compelled to discuss my idea here.  Some 100 million prescriptions for antidepressants are written annually in the United States.  Because these drugs are becoming generic, they will soon be widely used worldwide as well.   Many are SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.   These drugs raise levels of serotonin in brain--a good idea when you are horribly depressed:   These drugs blunt the emotions, curb obsessive thinking and help you sleep. 

BUT serotonin enhancers also suppress the dopamine system in the brain.  And dopamine circuits become super active when you feel intense romantic love.  So, connecting the dots, I hypothesize that when you take these drugs, you can jeopardize your ability to fall in love and/or stay in love. 

After giving a speech that included my idea at an annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New York City, it was picked up by the New York Times.  This apparently stimulated a medical doctor  in Texas to write the Times the following letter: “After two bouts of depression in ten years, my therapist recommended I stay on serotonin-enhancing antidepressants indefinitely.   As appreciative as I was to have regained my health, I found that my usual enthusiasm for life was replaced with blandness.  My romantic feelings for my wife declined drastically. With the approval of my therapist, I gradually discontinued my medication.  My enthusiasm returned and our romance is now as strong as ever.  I am prepared to deal with another bout of depression if need be, but in my case the long-term side effects of antidepressants render them off limits.”

I can’t tell you how many people have emailed me similar stories. 

Some people are chronically and severely depressed.  They may need to take one of these drugs for life.  I am not trying to minimize their path to sanity and comfort.  But many “normal” folks are taking these drugs for reasons of temporary malaise, and then continuing to use them after the depression has lifted.  These are the people that concern me.   We all know these drugs cripple your sex drive (in 73% of users).   But humanity has inherited other brain systems for reproduction as well, among them the neural mechanism for romantic love.  And these men and women may be jeopardizing this brain system too. 

What is a world without love?   If patterns of human love subtly change, all sorts of social and political atrocities can escalate.

For primal reasons.  Foremost, our forebears spent some 65 million years traveling along leafy highways above the ground.  Green was all around.   They also descended into the open meadows that wove between the jungle trees to roam another universe of green.  I suspect we still dimly feel this heritage as we fill our eyes and lungs with spring.

Then there are all the colors, sounds and tastes of spring.  Pink petals, whizzing bugs, asparagus and strawberries.  After months of gray and white and winter foods, these sensory experiences are novel, exciting.  And novelty stimulates dopamine circuits in the brain, circuits that can bring optimism and elation.

And of course, we undress in spring--flinging off the winter coat and hat, the scarf and gloves and boots, and begin to parade our “stuff.”  The excitement of “people watching” can also trigger the brain’s natural stimulants, heightening pleasure.

I still remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank years ago.  Anne wrote of what she did and thought as she and her family hid from the Gestapo in the home of family friends.  In the spring, she particularly liked to lay her head beside a boarded-up window and draw in the fresh spring air that seeped through the cracks.

This image haunts me every spring.  I know Anne’s craving.  I suspect our ancestors began to yearn for spring soon after they began to spread north from Africa over a million years ago.

What the hell was I doing, you might ask?   Well, I was dressed in my finest white evening dress, wearing my bear claw necklace with 21 claws that I traded years ago while living on the Navajo Reservation.  And like several hundred others dressed in black tie, I was attending the annual gala of the Explorer's Club at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. 

And I wasn't the only one eating tarantulas.  There we all stood, among the crystal chandeliers, thick red carpets, and flowing champagne, eating exotic appetizers--the first of many striking events in an evening of speeches about global warming, arctic travel and personal goals.   But as I sit here in my sweat pants working through a quiet sunday afternoon, I keep thinking about that tarantula. 

I asked many of the chiefs about the dishes as they served me.  But my most vivid conversation was the cheery looking girl serving up the rat.  I remarked to her, naively, that she must really enjoy cooking all these exotic foods. "Well," she replied, "I had to cook the tarantulas.  And they came in a box--alive."  Thinking on this, I don't actually know which would be worse, cooking them or eating them.  ...I wonder what kind of day she is having today. 

But this once-in-a-lifetime experience got me thinking about food.  About how our food customs are the last to vanish when we emigrate to a new country.  And how deeply our feelings about food must be wired in the brain.  For good reason.  The mouth is the body's gate keeper.  If we eat the wrong thing, we die.  So we are build to remember.  Perhaps I will forget the moment that the white arctic wolf entered the grand ballroom last night, or the fine poetic speech by Barry Lopez in which he said that we must not wait for our heroes; we must act ourselves to save the planet.   But, alas, I don't think I will ever forget that tarantula, legs an all, dangling at the end of a long tooth pick before entering my mouth.  I did only one thing right:  I didn't wear my glasses. 

I was not surprised. For some time I have thought this myself, for several reasons.   Foremost, women are generally better at picking up the nuances of body posture, gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice.   Moreover, the female brain has more nerve cables between the two hemispheres, as well as more long distance connections within each hemisphere--brain architecture likely to help them connect desperate bits of data. 

Women are also (on average) more interested in people, a trait that plays a role.  Intuition apparently comes from stored experience.  As a person learns how to run a company, diagnose an illness, or play a game, he or she begins to see regularities and organize these patterns into blocks of knowledge—known as “chunking.”  With time, more patterns are chunked.  And linked.  And these clusters of knowledge are stored in long-term memory.  Then, when a single detail of a complex pattern appears, the experienced person instantly recognizes the larger composition, bypassing plodding sequential thought. Both sexes "chunk" data.  But women probably chunk more data about people.  Then they use their well-connected brains to “read” minds.

But I chose to write about women’s intuition because new data support it!  Our brains are widely connected to our bodily organs via specific circuits, what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls “body loops.”  He believes these brain/body connections produce the “gut reactions” that people report when they get a “hunch.”  These gut reactions help to steer behavior. But recently scientists established that the heart responds more quickly than the head to emotionally arousing experiences, and that women are significantly better at processing these bodily reactions: intuition.

Why have women developed a keen intuitive sense?  Probably because ancestral women were obliged to decipher the needs of their highly dependent, prelinguistic young.  But today, as more business people must size up foreign clients and complex business problems, this intuitive judgment may become highly valued--giving women this business edge.   

Next time I will write about a skill of men.  Both have their talents.  To paraphrase poet Ted Hughes, men and women are like two feet; we need each other to get ahead.  Cheers,
Helen Fisher.

Which brings me to one of my favorite quotes.  "We struggle all our lives to know a few basic things about ourselves that the most casual passerby can tell us in a moment."  It seems that Mother Nature has produced many devises by which we advertise our virtues and our vices, enabling those around us to make careful choices in the game of love.   No wonder sunglasses can be so disconcerting.  No wonder some call the eyes the window to the soul.

But Mother Nature plays a role in jealousy. In an article in the Los Angeles Times on February 14th, David Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist, wrote that some 93% of American men and 82% of American women were the focus of an attempted seduction while they were in a relationship.  Moreover, 53% of men and 41% of women had lost their partner to a romantic rival: mate poaching.

No wonder, as an Australian Aborigine wisely said, “We are a jealous people.”  We can turn murderous, too.  In a study of 5,000 people in six cultures, 84% of women and 91% of men admitted to having had at least one fantasy about murdering a sweetheart or a romantic rival.  Many of us contain this “green eyed monster,” as Shakespeare called jealousy. But many don’t. Buss reports that sexual jealousy is “the leading cause of spousal murder worldwide.”

Which leads to the point of this blog: How do we help (and punish) Lisa Nowak, a woman who drove some 950 miles in diapers carting a mallet, knife, rubber hose and garbage bags--all carefully purchased to terrorize, if not maim, a romantic rival?

On Valentine’s Day evening a major American news channel invited a psychologist to help us understand Lisa. With utter confidence, this woman blamed all the usual suspects: Lisa’s possible “attachment” problems as a child and the stress of her current marital situation.

I don’t believe her. As we learn more about the brain, it is becoming evident why so many people around the world lose control when jealous. Jealousy triggers activity in the amygdala and hypothalamus, brain regions that can initiate violent aggression. Not just in humans. When dominant male rhesus monkeys watch a “consort” copulate with a rival, these males also show more activity in the amygdala. Many become aggressive too.

When will American psychologists stop blaming all of our misdeeds on poor parenting? I suspect: never. Because they feel they can “fix” the patterns we built as children. And they don’t know how to “fix” our biology.

I don’t either. But ignoring biology is not the solution. As we learn more and more about the brain, we will have to cope with all these data. In fact, I suspect this may become a prominent 21st century issue: How to help and punish all those unfortunate human beings who lost their fight against this (sometimes) wicked old witch: Mother Nature.

Why is it that we are so interested in celebrities?

I think our fascination may be due, in part, to the lack of local community in our lives. For millions of years our forebears traveled in little hunting and gathering bands, often consisting of about 25 men, women and children. Then as many as 500 people assembled at large lakes during the dry season. And across the firelight, in the dark, beneath the stars, they gossiped about their neighbors. This way they set social norms, ostracized offenders, and sized up where they stood in the social whirl.

We still live in communities--but often they aren’t local. For example, I don’t know my neighbors in my apartment building in New York City. My colleagues at Rutgers have never met my close friends; nor have my friends in publishing, at Chemistry.com, in my email network or in my other social and business networks ever met one another. In short, the only people that you and I and everybody else “know” in common are celebrities and others in the news.

Television has become the global campfire. We sit around it and get the news; then we share our thoughts about these events and people with our pals.

And gossip, we do. As we discuss the life of Anna Nicole Smith, her many lovers, the unknown father of her daughter, and her trajectory into stardom, we are still doing what we did a million years ago. We are measuring our own achievements, tailoring our goals, adjusting our plans, building mutual codes of ethics, and laughing and crying together.

“How misfortune with a knapsack plods the earth” wrote the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. Misfortune visits all of us, even the rich, the beautiful and the famous. Perhaps as we see the celebrities struggle with life the same way we do, we feel our own good fortune and renew our deep connection to humanity.

Semper ad astra, Helen

I say this, of course, in response to the tragic story of Lisa Nowak, esteemed astronaut who drove 950 miles wearing diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop, donned a trench coat and wig, and stalked her romantic rival as this woman walked to her car in an airport parking lot. Through a two inch slit in the car window, Lisa then sprayed her competitor with pepper spray.And after the woman sped away, she disposed of her cache of questionable utensils in a garbage can: a BB pistol, a steel mallet, some rubber tubing, several plastic garbage bags, a fresh knife with four inch blade and some $600.

Why are Americans transfixed by this story? Can we remember times when we, too, wanted to maim a rejecting lover or romantic rival? Do we feel that if an astronaut can “lose it,” maybe we might?

I have something to add. I and my colleagues have just completed a study of the rejected brain in love. We put 15 men and women into a brain scanner and watched what happens when a spurned man or woman looks at the photo of their abandoning sweetheart.  Several brain regions become active: Among them is a region associated with taking big risks for big gains and big losses, as well as a brain factory that registers physical pain. Other areas that “lit up” included those for obsessive-compulsive behaviors and for controlling anger.

This brain circuitry is no excuse to terrorize an innocent human being. But in Lisa’s case, her brain centers for impulse control were no match for her romantic ardor, pain and fury.

“Parting,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is all we need to know of hell.” I suspect that many of us have felt murderous at some point in our lives—but we controlled ourselves.  Othello, however, Shakespeare’s tragic character who murdered his adored wife out of jealousy, represents the many who have fallen prey to this primordial, powerful and sometimes horribly destructive brain system: romantic love.

Semper ad astra,   Helen

It’s about romantic compatibility, in this case “MHC” compatibility.  MHC means Major Histocompatibility Complex and it refers to a particular set of genes you inherit in your immune system, your body’s chemical defense system against intruding aliens, aliens in the form of bacteria, viruses and other no-good-niks.  Each of us inherits our own version of this complex set of genes. 

In a classic study, women were given men’s tee-shirts to sniff.  And to the astonishment of many scientists, women preferred those worn by men with a different set of MHC genes than their own.  They distinguished this by smell. This unconscious preference probably discourages “inbreeding” with close relatives and can create a stronger immune system in one’s young. 

But get this.  Scientists have now looked at MHC compatibility among romantic couples and they report that the more genes in this system that a couple share, the more sexually unfaithful the woman is and the more she is attracted to other men during in the middle of her menstrual cycle—when she is ovulating and likely to get pregnant.

I’m not excited about adultery, hardly.  But this new study supports a theory I have about romantic love, a theory at the core of my endeavor to match members of the new Internet dating/relationship site, Chemistry.com.

This endeavor began two years ago when Match.com came to me and asked me why we fall in love with one person rather than another.  There are many forces that guide attraction, of course.  We tend to be attracted to those of the same ethnic and socio-economic background, as well as those with a similar intelligence, good looks and religious values.  We also fall in love with those who supply our needs.  And certainly your childhood plays a role.  But when scientists administer personality tests to long-married couples, NO patterns of personality similarity or differences emerge.

So after a good deal of reading, I came to believe that humans fall into four very broad genetic types, what I call the Explorer, Builder, Negotiator and Director--each associated respectively with the activities of dopamine, serotonin, estrogen and testosterone.  Moreover, I theorized that we are regularly attracted to individuals (from our background) who have a different genetic profile.  This way partners can bear more varied young and co-parent with a wider array of parenting skills. 

Today some 1.6 million men and women have joined Chemistry.com, (a sincere thanks to them), and I have collected data on the first 523,622.  And from the ways these men and women have answered the questions I devised to join the site, it appears that we are attracted to those who are genetically different from ourselves—in more ways than just MHC compatibility! 

In short, these new data on MHC compatibility suppport my theory and boost my conviction that the folks at Chemistry.com can match men and women more effectively using a biological approach (as well as the standard means of matching).

Equally important to me as a scientist, we are beginning to understand nature’s blueprint for mate choice—one of the most profoundly important decisions we make in life. 

Semper ad astra,  Helen Fisher.