Transcript

The Chemistry of Chemistry | Maxwell Finklestein | TEDxYouth@SJII

love what why how have you ever wondered why you obsess over a crush why holding hands with your boyfriend or girlfriend feels so great will you feel empty after a breakup the qu the aners to these questions aren't as simple as because you like them no the answer goes much deeper than that deep into the neurocognitive functions of the brain and the cocktail of different hormones responsible for our emotions all the way from that initial stage of attraction to marriage so let's explore the chemistry of chemistry I was really proud of that name to start let's try to answer the following question why why do we feel attraction in other words why is finding the one or using a more animalistic term a St mate important why not just mate with anyone now this all relates to the concept of sexual selection the subset of the darwinist theory of natural selection the human population varies enormously we all have different hair colors uh body shapes metabolisms and many of these characteristics are heritable meaning they get passed down from generation to generation and given that we have finite access to to resources like water food and shelter and we must compete for such resources and when we have overpopulation we have things like famine and War it's desirable to produce offspring that with with characteristics that best able them to survive hence the hence the saying survival of the fittest now sexual selection comes into play when one when one gender prefers members of the opposite sex with certain desirable characteristics hence allowing these characteristics to be pass down to Future to Future Generations so what do we look for and why now for an example of sexual selection we can look to giraffes female giraffes prefer mates with longer necks which are more able to find food than those with shorter with shorter necks and as a result of this we see a general population of giraffes with really long necks and able to eat eat leaves in the highest bows of trees and more able to survive than those with shorter necks what about with humans in 1995 the Swiss biological researcher klous wakin conducted an experiment to investigate human phon human phermones in their role in mate preference in this study women were asked to smell t-shirts worn by different men and the results showed that women preferred men whose MHC molecules molecules that are used to fight disease different from theirs now this makes sense genes that result in a greater variety of immunities will give Offspring a major survival advantage and in both of these examples we see a general population is created that is more able to survive now from an evolutionary perspective this is why we humans are are enslaved by our brains our senses or hormones to generally gravitate towards certain people that we find attractive it allows us to continue the human race so how does this work how are we programmed to respond in certain ways in response to feeling attraction how are we even feel this attraction in the first place now the answer to this question lies with hormones now I won't go too in depth here but hormones are essentially chemical Messengers biological substances that are all regulated in an endocrine system a collection of glands that produce hormones that to affect body bodily functions ranging from things like reproduction to to metabolism to growth and these are not the only functions of hormones every day we can physically see hormones carrying out their functions has anyone here ever felt happy sad hungry now these are all these are all caused by by the release of a certain cocktail of different hormones that give us the symptoms entailed with feeling that that emotion well I'm American we have a 36% obesity rate I consider hunger an emotion but back to actual emotions when our heart beats faster our muscles tense up when we feel a burst of energy our an increased breathing rate our blood pressure Rises we know that there are increased levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in our bloodstream and we know that we feel angry but what about attraction every single thing you feel throughout love and attraction is controlled by hormones and too often there are a lot of hormones that are rushing around our body so emotions can get very complicated during our relationship so let's start walking through all the different stages of relationship maybe you feel that as soon as you see someone maybe it comes along significantly after but the vast majority of relationships start with at least some level of attraction between two people referred to as lust now there are two different main hormones responsible for sexual attraction ones that are the ones that everyone's heard of before testosterone and estrogen one for men and both for women and each causing attraction towards towards the other well usually I don't discriminate but now secretion of these hormones um initiates young puberty which is why teenagers are well you know teenagers now in one study conducted in 2010 a group of women at different points in the ovulation Cycles wore the same t-shirt for three nights male volunteers are then asked to smell a series of t-shirts some worn some unworn and interestingly after smelling a shirt worn by by women undergoing ovulation male saliva samples showed an increase in in testosterone concentrations so what does that mean this means that the same hormones that may cause an increase in female libido during ovulation may also give men the testosterone boost that would encourage him to pursue a women that he may not have otherwise now this could link back to the nature of Attraction how we are supposed to find mates and continue the human race being attracted to one person may inherently increase the likelihood of them being attracted back to you if only it works like that all the time now before now before I go any further I want to emphasize the importance to differentiate between a desire for sex also known as lust and the deeper personal attraction sorry de uh deeper personal attraction associated with romance and love things found in healthy long-term relationships people can enjoy purely physical sexual encounters with with others that they have no real fondness for other than like an appreciation for their appearance and even that isn't really essential but the bottom line here is is that lust says nothing about the bond of love in a relationship and that's okay because relationships start there then progress to something F something more but how do we get to that something something more how do we get to an actual relationship now a major player in this is flirting but how does that work in animals we see flirting acts as Nature's solution to a problem that every creature faces in a world full of potential mates how to choose the right one now an article published in Psychology today explain this very explains this very eloquently and I quote our animal and human ancestors needed a means of quickly and safely judging the value of potential mates without going all the way and risking pregnancy with every possible candidate they encountered FLIR now flirting achieved that M offering a relatively risk free set of signals with which to sample the field Tri out sexual Wares and exchange Vital Information about candidates reproductive Fitness and General Health so essentially flirting serves as the human equivalent of an animal's mating dance when we lean towards a person when we smile at them when we make eye contact we as humans are conveying our feelings sending a message to other people to tell them we interested in them now another major player in flirting is touch in 2009 a psychologist named Matthew herenstein demonstrated that we have an innate ability to decode emotions by a touch alone now in a series of studies herstein had volunteer had volunteers attempt to decode emotions um to a list to a list of blindfolded individuals solely through touch and participants communicated eight distinct emotions with accuracy rates as high as 78% significantly higher than the chance value of about 25% and not only does touching allow you to send emotional messages but it also triggers oxytocin release enhancing trust and attachment essential aspects of a relationship touch also lowers stress hormones which not only make you feel better but also reduces that initial sense of nervousness or fear that you may encounter when meeting some meeting someone attractive and that same sense of fear is the excuse I give my friends when they ask me why women don't talk to me so let's say it works out you just started a relationship and you enter what's Cally termed as the honeymoon phase that's that initial period of a relationship with high levels of passionate love characterized by intense feelings of Attraction and ecy y as well as an idealization of one's partner now these feelings have physical manifestations too like heart palpitations and butterflies in the stomach and it's during this time when two people may share a first kiss a highly memorable occurrence in any relationship assuming you're sober now scientists have investigated this phenomenon and found that emotionally charged events whether it be anger or fear are character or Joy are characterized by Spike in the hormone nor nor epinephrine which CL nerve cells to remember events by increasing their chemical sensitivity at sites where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits so basically it readies our receptors to allow our brains to quickly adjust and lock that memory in place something that I find incredibly interesting but back to the honeymoon phase using fmri scanners scientists have actually identified brain regions associated with that feeling of Love individuals who experience passionate love show greater activation in areas of uh in areas like the CATE nucleus important in learning and memory as well as a vental segmental area Central to emotional processing now both these brain areas tend to be rich in dopamine and neurotransmitter associated with uh reward and motivation one study also revealed that the that recent lover vers had higher level levels of nerve nerve growth factor ngf and protein that Aid in the development and function of neurons and the authors then speculated that these enhanced ngf levels might increase a person's feelings of euphoria a connection and actually when measuring these ngf levels 12 to 24 months later they actually found that the differences between this passionate love group and others had actually faded so what does this mean this suggests that romantic love is an arousing yet that stressful experience but that these physiological changes are shortlived perhaps because we become acclimated with our partner over time but that's not necessarily a bad thing according to one study at NYU researchers found that that this phase wears off after about 30 months but and I quote many married couples reported entering a different type of love something just as deep if not deeper than that initial fire so what happens after The Honeyman face what happens when you know your partner and are in love now the drug cocaine lowers the threshold of pleasure centers in the brain meaning we feel really really good a lot easier in this same phenomen is seen in the brains of those in love essentially it's not just taking cocaine or being in love that we enjoy but it's that these things make everything else feel even better pain centers in the brain also begin to fire less so we aren't bothered as by things as much essentially we as humans love love but what is love now the answer to this lies not in the heart but in the brain during sexual activity or even by simply looking at photos of a loved one our brains experien surges in the hormones dopamine and neopine phrine triggering arousal and causing a heart rate to rise as well as motivating us to be with that person more and more oxytocin levels also rise nourishing bonding and attachment however we also experience abnormally low levels of Serotonin similar levels to those to the Rin of those diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder a likely cause of our obsessions during early love what about marital or long-term love a study published in 2011 in the Journal of a social cognitive and effective Neuroscience investigated the brain activity of individuals experiencing longterm intense romantic love using fmri scanners a total of 17 men and women married an average of just over 21 years underw fmri scanning while viewing facial images of their partner along with control images of of friends of varing degrees of closeness effects specific to their romantic partner were found in areas that were dopamine rich in the dopamine Rich award systems consistent with the results from early stage romantic love however individuals experiencing long-term love had increased activities in regions of the brain associated with maternal attachment especially regions dense with the hormones vas supress and oxytocin which are known to play critical roles in monogamous pair bonding overall these results show that the reward value associated with a partner maybe a sustained throughout love but in long-term Partners brain systems implicated in attachment and bonding play greater roles than they would in a newer relationship but what what happens when these reward systems unsatisfied what happens when we experience a breakup I was crushed it was a knife to the chest she ripped my heart out now metaphors like these aren't just a mode of language scientifically speaking we actually feel as though a heart is being ripped out of our chest kind of essentially the pain of heartbreak activates the same exact neurological regions as those in physical pain notably the anterior singulate cortex our brain essentially doesn't distinguish between physical and emotional pain which was rather they hurt all the same in fact a study published in psychological science had participants describ the levels of pain they felt while we living both a physical and and socially painful experience afterwards each participant was then tasked to work on a series of cognitive problems in the progress was monitored not only did participants who relive the emotionally painful experience report a greater level of pain but they also perform perform poorly on the following mental tasks something about emotions just seems to make that pain more long lasting and affects our ability to think which is why we should never deal with such issues alone and not only this but a study published in the Journal of neurophysiology examined the brain activity of an individual suffering from a breakup with fmri scans showing large similarities between in the brain activity of individuals of these individuals and those recovering from drug addictions the study examined the brains of 15 College age men and women had who had recently broken up with their partner yet still reported feelings of love and in this experiment they were asked to look at brain look at photos of the loved one among other photographs of course and while fmri uh machines examine examine their brain activity now results revealed that activated areas of the brain unique to the photo of their loved one with those that were dopamine rich in the same areas of which activate while under the effects of cocaine now this was consistent with their hypothesis that romantic rejection is a special form of addiction explaining why the Beloved is can be so difficult to give up our brains literally get hooked on love so when we go through a breakup it can look a lot like withdrawal this could also explain why behaviors relating to romantic rejection can be so difficult to control hence even though we know it's bad for us we might stalk our ex and our exes and social media anyway just because our brains are seeking that dopamine award that we associate with our ex like an addict seeking to relapse fortunately however break up pain is impermanent eventually the brain will accept that it will no it will no longer get the love that it deserves and the levels of dopamine will normalize and the stress called by high high levels of cortisol and norepinephrine will recede and we get over someone now this phenomena is eloquently explained in the book The idiot brain by Dean brette a neuroscientist at cardi University essentially during a relationship our brain adapts to expect the reward associated with our romantic partner think about everything the brain Associates the brain invests into sustaining a relationship all that value placed on one person if this ceases all that expected positive Sensations removed the brain is going to be seriously negatively affected hence the pain of a breakup however our brain chemistry will eventually revert to normal even if it is a slow process and in this case science and cliches really do match up things will get better with time now before I finish off I would like to emphasize that love is something that transcends science you can spend hours upon hours analyzing the why behind our emotions but never truly understand what they are what they mean I can tell you from personal experience that I'm just as emotionally incompetent now as when I started preparing for this presentation in a good love song will always illustrate the bond of love more effectively than any kind of scientific explanation but because it would probably be an act of War for me to subject you all to my singing voice I'm going to end this presentation with a poem that I feel truly depicts the varying nature of the journey to love and I promise I didn't find that on Pinterest hurt and pain there's much to gain peace and love it's all the same confusion and doubt we're not without we weep we smile we laugh we cry only to be hurt by one last trial life is a lesson so learn it well maybe one day you can tell its tale thank you