former washington correspondent and college professor who is cheerful bright awards and a nights science fellowship at m i t she's written a series of four books on the brain with scientific american including the one she just published so we're talking about love tonight but first let's hear a little bit about you well i've been working as a freelance journalist writing about health and science for a while about thirty years now and i wanted to make sure everyone understands that i am not a doctor and i'm not a scientist i'm a journalist and my job is to go out and collect a lot of complex information most of it in this case of these books from medical journals and studies and put them in language that i can understand which means language you can understand i hope and the first book i did is a day in the life of your brain and then scientific american brave new brain which is about breaking research on the brain and then of course the book of love and sex and the fourth one is coming out in may that will be about the healthy aging brain so we can talk about aging and then oh wow we all want to know about how to i think that you know what i love and so so want to get started tell is what is the book about what well kind of i think the subtitle says that you know the neuro science of how when why and who we love and a little background in the past fifty years we've learned more about the human brain than we have in the fifty thousand years before that and yet we still don't know a lot but in the past couple of decades there perfected ways of looking inside the brain and one of the really great tools is called a functional magnetic resonance imaging  and that is a technique by which they can actually look at your brain while you're doing something with your thinking talking or in some cases in gauging insects and they can see what part of your brains become active and so this is very interesting for people who want to know what happens in your brain when you're in love and much of the research for this came from scientific american articles and other for more breaking news about the brain but it talks about all kinds of love from the love of a parent and child and by the way when you have a child your brain gets bigger believe it or not that fast yeah and it talks about the love  which we all feel in some way will maybe not all of us most of us feel in some way or another and of course it talks about erotic love and sex so so the brain actually reacts differently to all these different stimuli pertaining to  kinds of love out and yes that is interesting but doing some imaging they've discovered that when someone is thinking about mad passionate sexual erotic love certain parts of their brain are active that are different than when they're talking about maternal love or when there's when they're experiencing unconditional love and yet those parts overlap and no matter that the type of love activates specific parts in all cases the thinking brain is involved which is something that we wouldn't think about right and think it's all emotion but your thinking brain is evolved in love too that's really fascinating now is it different for men and women the brains of men and women are not too different in terms of their geography but they're influenced differently by the chemicals the hormones that make estrogen that makes a woman female and testosterone that makes a male male and also the various neurotransmitters and chemicals that are released whenever they're engaging in sex dopamine which is a neurotransmitter that's involved in what's known as the pleasure circuit and that gets activated when we're having sex but it's also the same neurotransmitter that gets activated when we have music and when we're exposed to drugs so you see that sex drugs and rock n roll really a chemical that's released when a woman is breastfeeding whenever she's giving birth and it's also released after orgasm you know and men and women so it's sometimes known as the cuddle hormone and oxytocin is important for  trust among people so you have the dopamine which gets your pleasure circuits going and then you have the oxytocin which makes you more open to trust and love so is there a reason why some people happened to follow what the wrong people did you great about that well i do you buy the wrong done or the person you know like the bad boy or the bag or oh yeah yeah well actually this is more the realm of psychology but there was a psychologist a very famous a johns hopkins university named john money and he postulated that everyone had what he called a love map an idealized idea of the perfect mate the perfect lover and she mentioned this to a class at one time and everyone knew exactly what he was talking about because everyone seemed to have that feeling now what is your love map who knows helen fisher who's done a lot of research on sex and the brain postulates that there are several things that might contribute to the idea of you right ideal mate it could be someone who reminds you of one of your parents it could be someone who fulfills a need or has qualities you don't have or has qualities that match yours to chemistry between people or we refer to a chemical love meaning you know the hormones just were set on fire and they got together but it's not something that's going to last forever you know like your whirlwind relationships between the stars and so on and so forth those are always referred to as chemical romance well something like that in the book some you read about yes you can there's a whole chapter actually i've titled the chapters after love songs ok so the chapter on erotic love is called that old black magic ok and it does happen that there is well a chemical and electrical reaction to when we see some people one of the researchers has found or says that you can tell if you are attracted to someone within one fifth of a second or less from seeing them  so that's at least attraction at first sight if not love at first sight and of course the the desire to have sex is part of the biological imperative it's how we reproduce ourselves so that's a very powerful thing that's the chemical love i think you're talking about and whether that becomes something else or whether it has something else added to it later that keeps people together depends i think on a lot of factors visually but there's there's something else that goes on there too there is some of that really can't be tempi determined because there is always that little mystery there we do know that isn't so much opposites  attracting because that's a very temporary thing but rather people with which we have a great deal in common are the ones we tend to bond with more by the way that something interesting i found out that was probably somewhat surprising to me but shouldn't be and that's the the the most the type of love that might be the best for your brain and your body is would you know friendship works for me you are wise i think many people think that when you say let's just be friends it's sort of the kiss of death for a relationship but actually it means you're probably moving to a deeper more meaningful level because a friend can be your lover your spouse your child it can be anyone it doesn't mean th ere's not romantic or passionate love involved necessarily but it means i think a deeper commitment to someone i agree i agree it's different a different kind of love a different feeling that you have but it's just as strong when i know i have i have the most wonderful girl friends in the whole world court absolutely love and i mean that yeah i love them they're they're super let's see if i can without my glasses read this i start this chapter with this absolutely wonderful quote that i do have to to read you because it's so beautiful it comes from an african saying apparently a friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself they remember your beauty when you feel ugly your holiness when you are broken your innocence when you feel guilty and your purpose when you are confused that's beautiful wow yeah and that's that's true love right brings tears to my eyes that's beautiful now what possessed you to start gathering information to write a book like th you know it started with a phone call ok four years ago from alan rinzler who is a very well known editor for a company called josie bass which is an a venerable san francisco publishing company and they're also which are a huge publishing corporation but but alan got my name from someone called and said i'm looking for someone to write a book called a day in the life of your brain and i said wow that sounds fascinating we may want to do another one or two also began writing a day in life as your brain which turned out to be an enormously difficult project because whose brain man woman child you know what do you mean a day in your life does everyone do the same thing at the same time of the day and i discovered that our brains are pretty much the same except for the extremes of illness and age so the basic mechanism you know the three pounds of thinking meat that we have in our skoal is the same in most of us and then i just figured i'd take the main things we wanted to know about throughout the day and sort of shoo who shoehorn them into the appropriate hours so that was a real challenge and then he wanted me to do the scientific american brave new brain which is about cutting edge research of what's coming for your brain like the microchips in your brain that they predict will have within the next twenty years so you won't need a cell phone oh yeah  in my cell phone and then they have the look of love sex in the brain which was a lot of fun and the one i just finished as it is the healthy aging brain which will be out in may which is a very hopeful look at our brains as we age and what we can do to try and keep them healthy so as you were it you were collecting the information are your your materials to write this book what was the most fascinating thing that you found in your research so so let's say there are a couple of zero a couple of things that i found surprising that shouldn't be and that's that a lot of the the truisms and sayings that we've heard not just for  decades but for thousands of years about love neuroscience is finding is true for example the greeks had names for different kinds of love thousands of years ago and we're finding yes we do have different kinds of love and it's also the information about about friendship i thought was surprising the information about orgasms orgasms are fabulous for your brain and in fact may help your brain ward off dimension into later life and why is this whenever you are sexually excited and have an orgasm your heart beat increases and you circulate much more oxygen oxygenated blood through your brains you actually nourish in your brain when you're having an orgasm now is there anything else that creates this the same reaction sports ok physical exercise does the same thing another way to keep your brain young and fit but the other thing that happens whenever you're having an orgasm or whatever you are in a very comfortable relationship is that it lowers the anxiety level there's a part deep in your brain called the amid dilla which is like a little century's a very very old part of your brain and it's always on alert for dangerous you're a fight or flight center that's how it's always looking for danger or something new and if that's if that's on all the time as you've heard psychologists talk about then we suffer stress and anxiety is hard on the body and they're now thinking that the high levels of stress contribute to dementia in the brain as well because the chemical cortisol is just coursing through your body so sex lowers that it actually puts your image will it pretty much to sleep soothe it so it's not so much on alert for at least the time that you're having sex and that's fascinating because sex must be very very important for your brain to turn off it internal century now this is for any age by yourself doesn't matter well yes i would be on puberty let us ok yes yes yes you're right yes sex with someone else or yourself probably one of your favorite people can be very healthy for you well that's good to know you know and you know we should be embracing that more too that it is healthy for us yes but do it in such you know we want to encourage everyone to experience allow absolutely and it's not just about loving somebody it's about loving things as well as yes loving our animal companions and the love of god  we aren't certain scientifically if god exists or not but research has shown that prayer and the practice of spiritual experiences contributes your mental and brain health they aren't exactly the same to your mental health meaning your mind and your brain health meaning your physical organ that you're bringing and i think that is absolutely fascinating that  the the practice of prayer is good for you it's like a form of meditation too it's very soothing now loving what you do loving loving what you do absolutely i think someone was quoted recently that that's so fascinating well let's talk more about the physiological reaction in our brains when we fall in love you talked about who we fall in love with why we fall in love why they fall in love with us is there is there any kind of formula for about well not a predictable one necessarily but whenever we do fall in love or experience love it sets off what i refer to as the reward circuit or the pleasure circuit and that wonderful neural hormone dopamine the same lips excited by cocaine and other drugs goes coursing through our body and it helps us remember the experience and when we remember it we remember the experience you want to repeat which has something to do possibly with addiction and when we have a bad experience we know we don't want to have that experience or see that person again so falling in love with love is really what it's all about i think it's just strengthens it all the time yeah ok let's talk about love addiction because that's a very real thing is does love addiction happen to people who would have the propensity towards other addictions or is it something different there there are some differences of opinion let's talk about sex addiction ok you know love addiction is people who need to be in love all the time and i'm not sure that's really an addiction i think it's a whole way of being and it works very well for some people we know some people are very cheerful and loving and other people are pretty grouchy but i think really what you're referring to is a sex addiction well i'm talking about you know young young girls young man does you know when you you're in love with somebody and you can't bear to be without that person you know and you can't live your life in a very mean or productive way because this is all you're thinking about is this other person you're obsessed that is a very good definition of erotic love ok it is what it is and it passes eventually and the other kind of thing was mentioning the sex addiction which is the desire to have sexual experiences over and over and over again with loads of people and all the time which she would like into an addiction for hard drugs there some difference of opinion about whether that's a true addiction or not but it certainly be can become a way of living that can be very destructive and that's a whole other thing we talk about some of us are born with  what's known as the risk gene some of us have more of a propensity towards risky business than others but that's a whole other discussion so if you're feeling low in the chemicals that live produces can that be activated with remembering that feeling that's a very good question in my experience that so whether i don't know recall if that scientifically shown to be so but remember i talked about oxytocin that hormone of trust and good feelings you can actually buy that in a spray is that o on the internet where they advertise by this and make everyone fall in love with you i'm not sure it's not really a but he call it a love potion necessarily but yes you can add oxytocin and they've found that by giving oxytocin to i hope and saying it's correctly to autistic children that it is a improves their ability to communicate and socialize with others i also heard that's very good for people who are grieving oxytocin well that would be wouldn't it because it it it makes you feel good it makes you feel trusting and loving maybe we should just give it to everybody especially on valentine's day  and so they actually help preserve your your molecules in your sig or cells actually so that would be your brain cells your neurons and red wine contains for several and that's also an anti oxidant so that's good for your brain they can get in touch with you and how they can pick up copies of your book well my book is available at just about every bookstore at barnes and noble this month as a matter of fact they're featuring it coming up there's a book party everyone's invited february ten which is a friday from sixty nine at one zero zero nine nine street opposite the new temple coffee shop on the twelfth you in sacramento can see me at the avid reader at two p the tower records i would love people to come and ask questions and talk to me if you want to get in touch with me check my website judith horstmann dot com and there's a place where you can click on an email address and email me i'd love to hear from you my answer every email i get let's give some information about the paranormal connections our ears the first and third of each month monday at nine pm tuesday at one p m wednesday at five am on access channel seventeen you can watch paranormal connection on line go to access sacramento dot org click on watch seventeen you can email me at don is journey at s b c global gun net i'll be happy to put you on the mailing list to inform me of our upcoming is much as love sex affects our brain a very positive ways tell us about the negativities tell us what happens when we're without yes some research has shown that social isolation like solitary confinement actually is dangerous for your brain it in fact you can be regarded almost as torture you start going through some chemical changes in your brain when you're isolated from others and some people been doing research on loneliness and that found that in fact there are more lonely people today than ever before in history that we know recorded history that we know of in contrast to twenty five years ago most people have only one or two people they can confide in they consider their friends and loneliness has actual physical effects on your body and it depresses your immune system makes you more likely to be ill and some research is showing that it might be connected to a higher risk of dementia so get out there and find someone doctors are saying now that i mean researchers are saying rather that doctors the future might write a prescription that says you know you find two new friends or at a bar that does have been laughing you syndrome and it happens in people who generally tend to have a heart issue anyway after a severe emotional shock they can have something that resembles a heart attack it isn't exactly that they can be treated immediately a very more common expression of that is when a spouse dies or a mate someone that one has been very close to dies you can have that broken heart syndrome and that can be taken care of if it's treated quickly enough and while many people go through a period of grieving they do recover and go on to love again but another study from scotland does show that many people who have lost their mates over a long period of time die a short time process not everyone but you can die of a broken heart well before we end this little conversation that we're having how about some parting words is there anything that you would like to impart on our audience tonight find someone or something to love and hold on tight that's beautifully said trying to think the song find somebody to live john lennon john lennon lennon john lennon all you need is louder you need is love and that's so true it's so true very chair well thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your beautiful books and your expertise and thank you for the