Helen Fisher Interview

USTREAM TV — Dec ’08 — Helen, it is very special for me to have you here because Helen actually gave us the idea of the theme of love when I listened to Helen a few years ago. And I was thrilled that Helen could actually make it here. I’m so glad you made it.

Helen is a anthropologist and research professor and Helen is seen as the expert not only in the US but around the world on how people fall in love. Let me give you the title of her books, Why We Love, The First Sex, Anatomy of Love and The Sex Contract. I’ve read a few of them and I really advise you to read them. It is very scientific as you will see.

I think we’re very, very lucky to have you here and Helen the floor is yours and thank you very much.

Thank you very much for having me and thank you for coming. I am delighted to be here. I and my colleagues have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. 15 of them were happily in love, they had just fallen in love within the last 7 months, 15 were rejected in love and the last 17 had reported they were still in love after 21 years of marriage. We just actually announced that study at the Society for Neuro Science in Washington, DC.

The world thinks you cannot remain in love long term and we’ve proven that’s not true. You can fall in love long term if you pick the right person. So what I’m going to talk about is what happens in the brain when you fall in love, the evolution of love and why you fall in love with one person rather than another. That is my most recent research.

Match.com dating site came to me 4 years ago and asked me why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? I don’t know, nobody knows. They said would you like to start a new dating site for us? And I said well I don’t know if you have the right person. I’m an anthropologist and I study why we’re all alike and you’re asking me why we’re all different.  Anyway I said do you think you have the right person? And they said they thought they did. And so I embarked on my newest research which is why you fall in love with one person rather than another.

So this is the short story of love. In the jungles of Guatemala there stands a temple in the jungle and it is built by the greatest sun king, of the grandest state, of the grandest civilization of the Americas, the Maya. It was built by a man called Casacumchowam. He stood 6 feet tall, lived into his 80’s and was buried beneath this temple around the year 720 AD.

And Mayan inscriptions say he was madly in love with his wife. She was a woman who died young and so he built the temple in her honor. And every spring and every autumn exactly at the Equinox the sun rises behind his temple and perfectly casts his shadow over her temple. And as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon, it perfectly bathes his temple in her shadow. And today some 1300 years later, these 2 lovers still touch.

Around the world people love, they sing for love, they dance for love, they compose stories, poems and novels about love, they retell myths and legends about love. They have love charms, love magic, love potions, they pine for love, they kill for love and they die for love. In fact anthropologists have found evidence of love in every single society that they looked for it in 170 societies in all.

In fact, I did one questionnaire study with 800 Americans and Japanese to see if they expressed the same degree of love and they do. Men express just as much love as woman do, in fact men fall in love faster than women do because they’re so much more visually oriented. Men are much more likely to kill themselves when a relationship is over then women are. Women are more hard headed in terms of love, not much but somewhat more hard headed then men are. And the information about love goes back I don’t know the oldest love poem comes from 4,000 years ago in ancient Samaria. So around the world people love.

Shakespeare once said, “What tis to love?” I think mankind has been wondering this since our ancestors sat around their campfires or lay and watch the stars over a million years ago. I think we evolved actually because love means so many different things to so many different people; I have come to believe that we have evolved through three distinctly different brain systems for love.  One is lust the craving for sexual gratification associated with testosterone in both men and women. Pablo Neruda called it an eternal thirst, an infinite ache. W. H. Arden called it an intolerable neural itch. That is what happens you suddenly feel this craving for sexual gratification; it can often have no object.

The second brain system is romantic love and the one I’m going to talk more about. Its passionate love, obsessive love, being in love, infatuation, I think it’s all the same thing.  Associated with different brain chemicals and I’m going to maintain that it’s associated with dopemine and nurapronephrin.  I think these are also the same brain chemicals that most of you are feeling when you’re being entrepreneurs and being driven to the desk in the middle of the night obsessed with your work.

And the third brain system is attachment, that sense of calm and security that you can feel for a long term partner. I think that these 3 brain systems evolved for different reasons. I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a whole range of partners. I think romantic love evolved to help you focus your mating energy on just one person at a time. And I think attachment, the third brain chemical, evolved so you can tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise your babies.

These 3 brain systems interact with each other.  For example, when you fall madly in love with someone, elevated dopamine in the brain drives up testosterone in the brain. And suddenly just 3 weeks ago a person, a person at the gym, another person in your social circle or at work suddenly every single thing about them becomes sexually attractive.  And the reason is as you’re falling deeply in love with somebody it’s driving up dopamine in the brain and dopamine triggers the testosterone system, they have a positive correlation between these 2 brain systems and suddenly they become very sexually attractive to you, which of course, is the point of romantic love to start the whole mating process.

But can you fall in love with somebody after having casual sex with them?  Well no not always. Most liberated adults have copulated with somebody who they never fell in love with. As a matter of fact, we now know that a lot of these hook ups, these one night stands, people will go off and try to sleep with somebody in order to trigger this brain system for romantic love and it doesn’t always happen.  Nevertheless, it can certainly happen and the reason is any kind of genital stimulation drives up dopamine in the brain and dopamine will trigger feelings of romantic love.

Not only does having sex with somebody sometimes trigger romantic love but it can also sometimes trigger deep feelings of attachment to somebody because with orgasm there is a real flood of (10:06 drug names) the chemicals associated with attachment. So one of the things I say to people is, I don’t care who sleeps with who but I do recommend if you don’t copulate with somebody who you don’t want to fall in love with because indeed it can happen in the brain. You can feel deep attachment or mad romantic love for somebody who you had no intention of falling in love with simply because these 3 brain systems are interconnected.

They’re not always connected though. As a matter of fact, they can operate very independently. You can feel deep attachment to one person while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for a whole range of people. In fact, we’re capable of loving more than one person at
a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from feelings of deep attachment from one person to feelings of wild infatuation for somebody else. There is a committee meeting going on in your head as you swing from one brain system to the other.

Plato once said when the mind is thinking you’re talking to yourself. You couldn’t do this if indeed these 3 brain systems weren’t sometimes connected and interconnected and less connected. So I have hypothesized that we evolve these 3 brain systems to be connected with each other so that we would be driven to go out and search for sex, fall in love, form a pair bond and rear our children as a team. And that these 3 brain systems became somewhat unconnected from each other so that millions of years ago our ancestors could form a pair bond with one individual and also have what anthropologists politely call EPCs or extra pair copulations with other people. Thereby males would have more children with extra lovers and women would acquire more resources for the children they got.

So we evolved what I call a dual reproductive strategy.  A tremendous drive to pair up and rear our children as a team, a restlessness in long relationships, a tendency to adultery, divorce and remarriage. We’re not puppets on a string of DNA of course. We make decisions on our lives. The whole evolution of the cortex is associated with making decisions and overriding our biology. I’m just saying we’ve inherited a human nature of conflicting drives, drives that bring us great joy and great sorrow.

So I want to go through some of the characteristics of romantic love and then on into what we found in the brain, why love is an addiction and why you fall in love with one person rather than another.

The first thing that happens when you fall in love is the person takes on what I call special meaning. As one man said to me, he said the world had a new center and that center was Mary Ann.  George Bernard Shaw said it differently, he said, “Love consists of over estimating the differences between one woman and another.” And indeed we do. Before I put these people into my MRI machine, I would ask them what they do not like about their sweetheart. And they could tell me what they didn’t like about their sweetheart but then they just swept it aside and focused on what they did like about their sweetheart.

You also feel intense energy when you’re madly in love. As one man in the South Seas said, I felt like jumping in the sky. You can walk all night, talk till dawn, a tremendous euphoria when things are going well. Very much like the experience of cocaine and as a matter of fact we found out there is activity in the same exact brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. There are many differences between cocaine and romantic love and one of the real big ones is cocaine wears off and romantic love can last for months or years. Real mood swings into despair when things are going poorly. Intense bodily reactions and we call it the sweaty palm syndrome, the pounding heart, the sweaty palms, the dry mouth. It’s sort of a bad deal. At the very moment you want to be you’re most wonderful you’re around somebody who you want to impress and fall in love with and you’re overcome with the inability to talk or walk at times.

Real emotional dependency on this individual. As Walt Whitman said, oh I would stake all for you. And indeed you will. The last question I asked people before I put them in the machine was would you die for him or her? And they would say yes. When you’re madly in love you will do just about anything to win a person.

Adversity heightens the attraction. As the Roman poet said, the less my hope the hotter my love. The more the person doesn’t call back, doesn’t email, doesn’t respond and the more you like them the more we understand what is going on in the brain. It’s called separation anxiety and a term I call frustration attraction. You become extremely sexually possessive of the person and in science it’s called mate guarding.  In fact I would guess the vast majority of all our worldwide crimes of passion homicide, suicide, clinical depression, stalking, comes from this primal craving to possess the person you’re in love with.

If you’re just casually sleeping with somebody you don’t really care if they are sleeping with somebody else. But you become very sexually possessive when you are in love.  But the 3 main characteristics of romantic love are craving for emotional union. You want to sleep with the person that you’re in love with but what you really want them to do is to call, to write, to invite you out and to love you back. You’re highly motivated to win this person. People around the world will do in order to win romantic love is staggering.

And the most important characteristic of romantic love is obsessive thinking. The first question I would ask people before I put them in the machine was how long have you been in love? It had to be short these machines are very expensive and its very time consuming to put someone in the machine. I wanted to catch them in our first experiment when they were falling in love. But the most important questions that I asked always is what percentage of the day and night do you think about your sweetheart?  Because when it is an obsession there is somebody camping out in your head.

And last but not least romantic love is involuntary. As Stindahl once said, “Love is like a fever it comes and goes quite independently of the will.”  And indeed it does. So we started putting people into the MRI machine. This is a cartoon from the magazine the New Yorker and of course you can’t get 2 people in an MRI but nevertheless what happens in the machine and I put myself in 3 times before I put anybody in. what happens in the machine is they look at a photo of their sweetheart for 30 seconds and they look at a neutral photo for 30 seconds and we scan the brain while they’re looking at their sweetheart feeling that rush and also while they’re looking at a neutral photo that calls forth no negative or positive feeling.

The problem with that design is when you’re madly in love with someone you can’t stop thinking about them. And so what we did was we put between the positive and the neutral a distraction task. And what the task was is we would cast a large number on the screen like 4,381 and they would have to look at the number for 30 seconds and just in their minds count backwards in increments of 7.  And indeed the finest techies in the world have trouble doing that. Its drives all the blood to a tiny little part of the parietal lobe and cleanses the mind for perhaps a few seconds and we can capture the brain in a neutral sate. So it’s positive, count back, neutral, count back, positive, 6 times for 12 minutes and that way we’re able to capture on film on these scans the brain in love.  What you do is you put the positive and neutral together and all those scans you cancel out what they have in common and you have the brain in love.

We found activity in many brain regions but perhaps most important a tiny little factor near the base of the brain called ventral tegmenal and this is the brains area and we found some activity in the cells, the A10 cells that are exactly the same cells that become active when you feel the rush of cocaine. These brain cells make dopamine a natural stimulant in the brain and spray this stimulant to many brain regions.

I began to realize what romantic love is, I always thought it was an emotion or even a group of emotions and certainly there are a lot of emotions involved.  But what it basically is it’s a drive, a basic mating drive.  It has all of the characteristics of a drive.  I will say only one thing about the characteristics, the most interesting here is the fact that there is no facial expressions.  You can look at somebody and know whether they’re angry or whether they’re surprised or happy. You cannot look at somebody and know
whether they’re hungry, thirsty and in the same way you can’t look at somebody and know whether they’re in love.

In fact, I’m actually trying to bring that word drive back into the lexicon. I think we have a lot of drives, certainly ambition is a drive, creativity is a drive many drives. And romantic love is down near the base or our human drives. It can be stronger then the will to live, its much stronger then the sex drive. If you ask somebody to go to bed with you and they say no thank you, you don’t kill yourself or somebody else but around the world people kill for love.

So as an anthropologist I always have to go through a little bit of evolution and then I’ll get onto more about why we fall in love with one person rather than another.  All animals love I will maintain, it’s a basic brain system.  There is not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anybody they all have favorites, too old, too young, too  scruffy and they won’t do it unless they’re in a scientific lab in a tiny little shoebox. They will not copulate with just anybody that comes along, neither of course will human beings. They’re attracted to some and not attracted to others.  If you take 2 gorillas, they show all the signs of snuggling and hugging that you would see on a park bench in Paris today. And if you saw them as people rather than animals you would say they were in love.

Our ancestors did not pair up to rear their young. 97% of mammals do not pair up to rear their young, only 3% do and people are among them. I’m constantly being asked by the press why we’re so adulteress and I feel like saying that’s not the news; the news is why we bother to pair up at all. So just tracing the evolution of these brains systems for attachment and romantic love, our closest relatives chimpanzees are a good model for what life could have been like 6 million years ago living in the trees. A female did not need a mate to help protect her. She carried her baby on her back and did not need a mate to help her rear her young.  And pair bonding and I think our modern sense of romantic love had not begun. The trees began to disappear, our ancestors were forced down to the ground where they had to begin to stand up on 2 feet instead of 4 to hold their tools and weapons and carry food. And by 3 ½ million years ago, we began to walk on two feet.

And with the beginning of walking and carrying females began to have to carry their babies in their arms. I don’t see how a female could have carried the equivalent of a 20 pound bowling ball on one arm and sticks and stones in another and protected and provided for herself. And I don’t see how a male could have protected a harem of females. And we evolved from 3 ½ million years ago and there is a good deal of evidence of this now, the brains circuitry I think for basic attachment and basic human feelings of romantic love. A trait that we see around the world at any age. This brain system can be triggered at any age. The youngest person I found who was in love was 2 ½ and I certainly I know people in their 70’s and 80’s who are madly in love.

So I then wanted to find out what happens when you are rejected in love? I find that more interesting then when you are intensely in romantic love. When you’re rejected in love that’s when you become a menace to society. When you’re happily in love you’re certainly not a menace to the world around you. So I then put 15 people who were rejected in love into the machine and found some of the understanding of why we go so crazy when we’ve been dumped.

I found activity in two brain regions associated with intense romantic love and also several areas associated with addiction and craving and attachment. It’s a very bad combination for getting to work on time.  I came to believe that romantic love is an addiction and has all of the characteristics of addiction including the most important one here I think is relapse. Somebody has dumped you 8 months ago and you’re doing okay and you’re beginning to recover and you’re suddenly driving along in your car and you hear a song that reminds you of the person you’ve been in love with. That craving can comeback, the obsession almost instantly. Romantic love is a drug and its one of the most powerful drugs on earth.

And can it last? This is our third experiment.  And indeed we found activity in the same brain regions associated with intense romantic love and also deep attachment. The one difference between long term love and short term love is that we find new brain regions associated with calm and pain. In short, early stage romantic love is replaced by a new calm.

So having understood something about the brain’s circuitry of romantic love I then wanted to find out why you fall in love with one person rather than another.  And this started when Match.com the internet dating site came to me as I said and asked me why it is you fall in love with one person rather than another. I said I don’t know, nobody knows. A lot of people maintain that opposites attract, others maintain that birds of a feather flock together, that similarity is the case. When you look at any dating site out there they will very comfortably say to you oh yes its similarity that attracts or oh yes it’s complimentarily. Nobody knows.

What we do know is in terms of similarity we do tend to fall in love with somebody from the same ethnic background, same socio economic background, same religious values, same similar goals, same level of intelligence, same general level of education and good looks.

We know that and in fact every single dating site on the internet matches by these. There is no way to measure intelligence but there are dating sites out there that say they measure by intelligence. There is no way that can be true. We also tend to fall in love with somebody who gives us what with need, with whom we can have the right lifestyle, play the right roles. Your childhood plays a role in who you fall in love with but nobody knows how or why. The Freudians have theories; there are a million theories on how your childhood plays a role. They probably all are right under some circumstances. And certainly timing plays a role.

And I think we evolve as we grow up and emerge and we develop a love map, an unconscious list of what we’re looking for in a partner. But you can walk into a room where everybody is from your background, your level of intelligence, your general level of good looks and you don’t fall in love with all of them.

So I came to think that maybe biology also plays a role. There are two parts of personality, there is your character which is everything you grew up to believe and understand and then there is your temperament which is all of those characteristics that you have that emerge at least in part from your biology.  So I read a great deal on genetics, I also took a look at all the drugs people take and from accumulating a good deal of data about the brain and about brain circuitry, chemistry and physiology I’ve come to believe that we have 4 very broad biological types of human beings, scales of human beings associated with different brain chemical system.  I call them the explorer, the builder, the director and the negotiator. I’m rather sad I called them that actually had I read my Plato and my Aristotle and others I would have used different terms for these. Plato called the explorer type the artisan. He build the guardian, the director was rational, and the negotiator an idealist.

Whatever you call them I think they’re associated with 4 very broad brain systems, brain pathways. And there are a lot of other chemicals involved in each one of these pathways but most of the data is on these 4 brain systems. I will also say we’re all a combination of all of them. This happens to be me; I’m largely dopamine and estrogen. I would imagine that most of the people in this room have a tremendous amount of dopamine in them and also a good deal of testosterone, the director brain syste
m.

This is the explorer, those who express dopamine are risk taking, and they can’t tolerate boredom. As I said I would guess a good deal of the people in the room have the dopamine system, highly energetic, restless, spontaneous, impulsive, very optimistic compared to other types, highly sexual. As a matter of fact, people will take drugs in order to become more sexual to drive up the dopamine system. They are the most curious of the 4 types and the most creative. As a matter of fact, if Parkinson’s patients take el dopa they will become more creative. They’re autonomous; they’re flexible, open minded and unconventional. They also have a lot of bad characteristics; nobody gets out alive, other side of the moon of the personality.

So I created a questionnaire and I forgot to tell you this to measure to what degree you express these 4 brain systems. And that questionnaire on International Match.com has now been taken by 7 million people and my studies are on 40,000 of them.

I think Sarkozy is the explorer type. When I take a look at the words he uses and the way he moves, what he says, his various activities these are comments of his directly out of the Economist. He admires, “Openness, entrepreneurial verve, dynamism,” he’s impulsive, risk taking, hyperactive and definitely interested in diplomacy not war. And his secondary type I think is the director. He’s direct, he’s blunt, he’s quick tempered and I’ll go into them later. I think Obama is also an explorer. His whole focus was on change, on new, on energy, on active. With all that McCain tried to do to adopt this same strategy of change he couldn’t do it with the sort of genetic vitality that Obama had.  Obama has other characteristics that displays his biology. He moves with a style. People who express a lot of dopamine move with grace and style. He also has a lot of expression in his face.

The builder type is cautious, cautious but not fearful. They’re calm. You know when you take Prozac or Paxil you’re driving up serotonin systems in the brain and this is what makes you so calm. They’re social, very networking, they know everybody, they’re managerial. I would guess there are far fewer builders in the room then other types. They’re fact oriented, literal, precise, detail oriented, these are the people that are good at trivia. They can memorize phone lists, they can remember your face, they can remember names and they’re not highly theoretical.  I think Colin Powell is a perfect example of a builder.  They follow social norms and are conditional.

As a matter of fact, in America I can do all kinds of studies on Chemistry.com and Match.com and the red states are full of builders. I did one questionnaire in which I asked where would you like to live. And the builder type, the guardian type wants to live in the suburbs, wants to live in the countryside; whereas the high dopamine type wants to live in the city where the energy is and the action is.

We found that self transcendence or religiosity is associated with specific genes in the serotonin system.  This is why some people are much more religious then others. And one their fine characteristics are they’re very good and we know the genetics of this they’re very good at figural and numeric creativity. They also can be very stubborn, close minded, rigid, moralistic and controlling. I think a very good example of the finest of the guardian or builder type is Gordon Brown. He has many of the characteristics of the builder and it’s not at all surprising to me that he seems to be the world leader at the moment at trying to get us out of this economic crisis because he has the biology for it. These people are religious and they are much more religious then other types.

The director or the rational associated with elevated activity in the testosterone system. Analytical, logical, direct, decisive, bold, very tough minded, exacting. I would also suspect that there are a great many people in the room who are high testosterone types. They’re inventive, focused, very good at what we call rule based systems and that is everything from engineering to mathematics to musical to understanding the structure of music. Beethoven was probably a director as many of these orchestra leaders and conductors are. Also very good at mechanical devices, etc.

Emotional contained, when I was at Dabos I was fascinated to see how many men in the room moved only their mouths while they talked. It’s that emotional containment that is associated with activity in the testosterone system. They’re competitive, rank oriented, independent and do what scientist called altruistic heroism. These are the people who will rush into a burning building to save a stranger and it is associated with activity in the testosterone system.

Of course there is a down side to this. They have what scientists call mind blindness. They’re not good at picking up on the feelings and needs of others.  They are less empathetic and can be very aloof. A good example, women can show a lot of activity in the testosterone system as well as men. And I thing Anglo americal Germany called the Iron Frau is a very good example of the high testosterone director type. John McCain is the perfect example. He’s got all of the physiological characteristics of the high testosterone type. They heavy jaw is built by testosterone, they heavy brow ridges, the high forehead these are all examples of high testosterone. I’m not surprised that during his acceptance speech when he was going to run for President he used the word fight 43 times. He’s blunt, impatient, proud of being not Mr. Congeniality these are all examples of the high testosterone type.  He had one other characteristic that I was highly fascinated with.

This research comes out of the 1930’s and it was recently rewritten by a guy name John Manning at Harvard. If you had a lot of testosterone in the womb it will not only change the brain in certain ways but it will also make your 4th finger longer than your 2nd finger. So look at your hand with your palm towards you and if your 4th finger is longer than your 2nd finger you had a good deal more testosterone in the womb. If they’re the same length you had more estrogen and if your pointing finger is longer then you also had more estrogen.  Of course in his speech where he conceded he had a beautiful moment where he held his hands up like that, it was on the front page of the New York Times and as you look at his right hand you can see a very high testosterone man.

I do think that around the world we had the perception that he was a more war like individual then Obama and we intuitively picked up on his biology.  Hilary Clinton I think is also a director. And in fact I can probably explain why she sticks with Bill.

Negotiator is the 4th of these very broad brain systems. The negotiator sees the big picture and do what I call web thinking, holistic and synthetic thinking. They’re very good at long term planning. They’re very imaginative, the most imaginative of the 4 types. I would imagine there are a lot of bloggers who are a combination of the high dopamine which is the creativity, curiosity and the negotiator, men as well as women. To really write blogs well you have to have skills. They don’t have very good people skills but they’re very good at intuition, empathetic, nurturing, emotionally expressive, introspective, and agreeable.

They’re also indecisive, they can be very unfocused and very unforgiving, hypersensitive, they can stab you in the back. And as I say none of these 4 types are all perfect. I think Bill Clinton is the perfect example of the negotiator type. Very contextual thinking. As he wrote in his book, I think it’s very important to have a synthesizing mind, which he does.  He has real language skills, he can’t stop talking. His book is 963 pages long. He’s very emotionally expressive. If you happened to watch while his wife as giving a speech at the Democratic convention he cried. I think Sabatar
o of Spain is also a negotiator.

I did a lot of studies to validate these 4 types and one of them was I did a study of 178,000 men and women on the dating site, Chemistry.com in America to see what words these people used most. The explorer high dopamine type the word they used most was adventure. The builders used the word family. The directors used the word intelligence and it was very important to them and negotiators used the word passion. I do think as you watch people’s language, as you watch the way they express themselves you can know a great deal about their biology. We’re all peacocks and we are constantly showing who we are, not only our background and our education but also our genetics.

So I think love is something like a funnel. You walk into a room and the first thing you do is look at somebody and they’re either in or out, too big, too small, too fat, too skinny, too short, too thin they’re out.  They open their mouth and their voice will give them away, they have the wrong accent and they’re out. You very rapidly pick on their goals, whether you can fit into their lives and what I’m trying to add is the second half of this component.

It’s now thought that more than 50% of who you are is built by your biology. It is that second half of this puzzle that I’m trying to bring to the mating process. Then I took a look at 28,000 American to see who from these different 4 types is attracted to whom. And that is embargoed material so I won’t tell you about it. My book comes out and it’s called Why Him, Why Her and it comes out in January.  But I’ve begun to understand the biological attraction to one person then the other.

So I’ll close with this, women tend to get intimacy from face to face talking. We swivel until we’re looking at each other, we do what we call the anchoring gaze and we talk to each other. And I think that comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Words are intimacy to women.

Men tend to get intimacy from side by side doing. As the man on the right looks at the man on the left, the man on the left will look away. And I think this comes from millions of years of sitting behind a bush on the African grasslands looking straight-ahead into the savannahs trying to hit that buffalo in the head with a rock.

The problem comes when we don’t understand each other. Thank you very much.

Do we have any questions from the audience?

Audience: Helen you were talking about the role of chemistry when we walk into a room and see somebody, I was wondering what about the role of energy? We talk about it in terms of the spark, the twinkle in the eye. Isn’t there some sort of energy field involved in this as well?

Helen: I’m sure there are but I don’t know what they are and I don’t think science has been able to quantify that. But definitely energy…for example the explorer type, the high dopamine type has a huge amount of energy and you can see it immediately in them. You can see it in this room; you can feel it in this room; whereas the builder type, the high serotonin type is very calm and laid back. They stand in only one position.

As a matter of fact, in New York we threw a party for the 4 types and watched them and the builders all showed up in suits and planted themselves and the explorers were moving around. So as we begin to define these various personalities and as we create a paradigm for understanding them then we can begin to look at that kind of thing.  I would imagine smell has a good deal to do with it too.

Audience: It was a great talk; will you put your slides up on the site?

Helen:  I haven’t decided.

Can we put your slides up Helen?

Helen:  I generally say no but let me think about it.

Audience: Would it be possible to draw any kinds of conclusions from your talk to web design and women talking face to face and men talking side by side?

Helen: Yes absolutely. This is very important to me because there are so many ways we can use this data. Not only by using certain words, by using certain colors. I now know how these different types doodle, I know where they want to live, I know their educational level. I know how to appeal to the 4 types. There are ways to design a corporate board putting different percentages of these people on a team if you want a certain type of team you would create them biologically in some ways rather than others. I think there are ways to understand your children.

As a matter of fact, my editor he read my main manuscript and his first response was I finally understand my son. So I think there are many ways you can use anthropology and this kind of data to reach people.

Audience: Have you interviewed many lesbian and gay couples and what you’ve learned from them?

Helen: Yes on Chemistry.com I believe they match exactly the same way straights do. I originally wanted to put gays into the functional MRI and study the gays the same as the straights. I maintain this brain system is exactly the same in gays. Who you fall in love with is going to differ if you’re gay or straight but how you feel when you love is going to be exactly the same.

For example, the fear system or the surprise system, these are brain systems that are so basic and they have nothing to do with sexual orientation. So the reason I haven’t studied gays yet is I’ve been so busy trying to find the basic pattern firstly. But almost 10% in the United States of Chemistry.com are gay and so I watched who they chose to go out with as opposed to straight and who they chose to go out with and there was no difference. In other words, the explorer types still went out with the explorer types, etc.

So I will definitely study them and my hypothesis is they will be exactly like straights in many, many ways.

Audience: This speech was a real revelation because of so many things that have gone wrong in startup teams like dah had I but known this 10 years ago. Is there any test or method of hiring?

Helen: Yes. I’ve created the questionnaire and the questionnaire is now scientifically reliable. I also have 12 validity points. I do hope that Linda Avery and I can also study the genetics of it also. Actually I’ve started a study where I’m collecting blood saliva and urine and I’m giving 200 people the questionnaire and also taking blood saliva and urine to really nail it down. But there is no question I have a reliable test and an accurate test that actually measures these things. And down the road I really do hope that we can use it for hiring, for understanding our colleagues, for understanding what went wrong, etc.

You know I’ve been studying people for 30 years and I think I finally understand them.

Audience: Are the boundaries between different kinds of love clear? Can I learn from what you said about romantic love?

Helen: I’m not quite sure I understand your question.

Audience: The boundaries or differences between the kinds of love are they clear? Like between loving my wife and loving a book.

Helen: Oh yes. I imagine when you like a book you don’t stay up all night with it, you don’t get possessive when somebody else borrows it, you don’t kill your neighbor who steals it. It’s a very distinctly different thing. And what we really found in mapping the brain that it really arises from different parts of the brain. But let me be clear these brain systems overlap in many ways. This is not a cut and dry system. And in fact, even for your wife I’m sure there are times when you’re madly in love with her and times you flat out hate her but you’re always attached to her.  There are ratios between these
chemical systems. But the brain system for romantic love is really quite distinct.

Thank you very much Helen.

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