'The formula to make salt in chemistry is simple. The formula to make lasting love? That was way more complex.'
by Stephanie Cacioppo. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillian Publishers. No part of this excerpt may beBefore I came along, only a few other researchers had tried to use the tools of neuroscience to study love. One reason for this is that it is an exceedingly difficult subject to tackle. The way the brain encoded the connection between two people was not something we could easily discover, much less measure or put into a mathematical equation.
“You are working so hard to get your PhD. Why would you throw it away on a subject that’s so common, so . . . simple?”His description shocked me. The formula to make salt in chemistry is simple—one part sodium, one part chloride. The formula to make lasting love? That was way more complex. And broad-minded scientists understood that.
While there may have been some initial hesitation among academics about the value of studying love, the popular press was very quick to embrace my work—especially around Valentine’s Day, when I got interview requests from magazines like. After the first few articles, colleagues began teasingly referring to me as “Dr. Love.
On my patent application I actually called it a “System and Method for Detecting a Specific Cognitive-Emotional State in a Subject,” but the students preferred “Love Machine,” so that was the name that stuck. It was a 10-minute computer-based test that I designed, which, the students believed, could help them make up their minds when deciding between two potential romantic partners.
This evolutionary response happens through what the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls a “low road”—a direct emotional pathway designed to elicit defensive responses without conscious thought. It is like an expressway connecting the visual input of the threat from your eyes to the amygdala, triggering the hypothalamus to turn on the “fight-or-flight response,” the body’s self-defense mode.
The results suggested that, just as we are hardwired to detect and react to danger, we are also hardwired to respond to the opportunity for positive experiences, things we don’t want to move away from but toward. The need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury. As we’ve learned, humans evolved because of love, and we evolvedlove. So perhaps love had its own ancient pathway—another one of LeDoux’s “low roads”—to the brain.
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