At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love - how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage and to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and at home, Stephanie lost her beloved husband, John, following his intense battle with cancer. In Wired for Love, Stephanie tells not just a science story but also a love story. She shares revelatory insights into how and why we fall in love, what makes love last, and how we process love lost - all grounded in cutting-edge findings in brain chemistry and behavioral science. Woven through it all is her moving personal story, from astonishment to unbreakable bond to grief and healing. Her experience and her work enrich each other, creating a singular blend of science and lyricism that’s essential reading for anyone looking for connection.
Evolution has sculpted our brains and bodies specifically to build and benefit from lasting romantic connections. Early humans formed an intense preference for each other, a kind of relationship that biologists call a pair bond. Yet at some point in evolutionary history, their descendants - our human ancestors - took a giant leap, socially speaking. They adapted the skills used to build their own relationship (perspective-taking, planning, cooperation) and generalized them, forming bonds with other primates who were neither their reproductive partners nor their offspring. In other words, they made friends.
The neocortex began to grow along with our social skills. Areas for language and abstract thinking blossomed. These higher-order regions did not only grow in size; they also became better connected to other parts of the brain.
A desert locust’s brain, when it’s part of a swarm, grows by an impressive 30 percent, presumably to accommodate the additional information-processing demands of a more complicated social environment. Chimpanzees learn how to use new tools much faster when they are in groups than in isolation.
Research in evolutionary and social psychology had suggested that romantic love was a cultural universal, something that existed in every human society.
What contributes to attraction? In one study, photographs of participants were photoshopped onto the faces of opposite genders - and not only did the men fail to recognize themselves as women (and vice versa), but they also rated their own photo as the most attractive. Alikeness, it turns out, finding common ground, is a strong predictor of mutual attraction. Studies show that when people play a simple “mirror game” - in which they copy each other’s movements - they find the other person more attractive to a surprising degree.Smell also plays a critical role in attraction - but in an opposite direction. We tend to be attracted to people who have scents that are different from our own.
Falling in love sets off a whole array of biological fireworks, including triggering a heart-shaped region called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which pumps dopamine into the brain’s “feel good” reward circuitry. Meanwhile, your levels of serotonin, a key hormone in regulating appetite and intrusive anxious thoughts, plummet when you’re falling in love to similar levels as that of someone suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. So you might find yourself eating irregularly or fixating on small details, worrying about making “the right move” or sending “the perfect text,” and then replaying the date over and over again in your head. Oxytocin, a neuropeptide that is sometimes called the “bonding hormone” increases our feelings of empathy and trust. It also spikes when you look deep into your partner’s eyes or cuddle.
The case of Hugette: Early in the author’s career, she found while treating stroke-related hemifield neglect in a stubborn patient and artist, that her recovery was greatly aided by playing into Hugette’s passion for art. “I asked Huguette to draw her self-portrait from different angles, using mirrors to reflect her image from the right side to the left. Over and over again, I manipulated her field of vision, forcing her to pay attention to the neglected side…if she weren’t an artist - if she hadn’t had this passion, this love, for her work - she never could have recovered from such a massive stroke.” The author also notes that “Incidentally, love seemed related to many of Huguette’s breakthroughs in rehab. When we placed a photograph of a beloved family member - a grandchild, say - on her neglected left side, she noticed it more easily and faster than an image of an object or anonymous person.” She hypothesized that the activation of the limbic system, which manages emotions and memories and is also particularly effective at picking up on signals and sending them to the parietal lobe, gave her the “push” she needed to overcome her attentional deficit.
Based on this experience, the author began to wonder if love might be the key not only to helping an injured brain recover but also to helping a healthy brain thrive.
The Love Machine Experiment: The author designed this implicit association test to investigate whether positive emotional stimuli like love and passion (for a sport, for instance) could improve brain functioning in all people. People performed significantly better on a lexical task after being primed with the name of the person they undoubtedly loved vs being primed with a friend they had known for the same length of time. Undergrads came to her office often to ask to use the “Love Machine” to see which of two potential suitors they really loved. This effect may be the result of the name’s positive associations, which activated the brain’s “reward” system through not only the regions that process blissful feelings but also other connected areas, like those that help us parse written language.
In another study using fMRI, the author found that women primed with the names of their beloved partners and passionate hobbies enjoyed a significant performance boost on the cognitive lexical task compared to those primed with only friends. And the more they reported feeling in love with their partner, the faster their reaction times. The author also found that love - as well as passion (for a sport or hobby), but not friendship - unexpectedly triggered more sophisticated parts of the brain, like the bilateral fusiform areas and the angular gyrus. These are higher-order brain regions known to be involved in conceptual thinking, metaphorical language, and abstract representations of the self. The angular gyrus, appeared very recently in our evolutionary history and had evolved along with the traits that make us human: creativity, intuition, autobiographical memory, complex language, experiential learning, imagination, and thinking outside the box. The angular gyrus hadn’t been activated for other positive emotions, like joy and surprise. Might this suggest that love is not merely a feeling but also a way of thinking?
In a meta review, the author and her colleagues analyzed the brain map of romantic love to that of companionate love (the kind we feel for friends) and the only other type of love that had been studied extensively by neuroscientists, maternal love. Twelve regions (the “Love Network”) were activated by the three different types of love, but the intensity and pattern of activation were different. For example, romantic love triggered both the brain’s pleasure centers and the cortical regions that manage our sense of self, like the angular gyrus, much more intensely than friendship.
Robin Dunbar and Rafael Wlodarski from Oxford University found that making research subjects think about their beloveds made them significantly better at assessing the mental states of strangers, compared with subjects who were made to think about a close friend.
An overall pattern is that love seems to be a very complex social phenomenon that activates emotional and higher order parts of the brain. This activation seems to also make us better at other tasks that utilize those brain regions.
Love and Lust: A growing line of neuroscientific research suggests that passionate love and lust might rely on a single interdependent and unified brain network. Passionate love and lust, while often seen as opposing or rival forces, may actually work together.
The more women self-reported feeling emotionally close to their partner, the more they said they were satisfied with their physical relationship with that partner. These women also showed the greatest activation in a brain region called the insula. Located deep inside the cerebral cortex in a fissure where the frontal lobe cleaves from the temporal lobe, the insula plays a key role in self-awareness and responds to a host of different stimuli: pain, addiction, music, the pleasure we take in food. Broadly, it helps us make sense of - and assign value to - bodily experiences. The author found that desire wasn’t lighting up the whole insula but rather a specific isolated part toward the back of this brain region - the posterior insula. Feelings of love, meanwhile, triggered the anterior insula. This back-to-front pattern matched a broader tendency in the way our brains are organized: Posterior regions tend to be involved in current, concrete sensations, feelings, and responses; and anterior regions are more involved in relatively abstract thoughts or introspective awareness - what we think about what we feel. They saw a similar pattern with the striatum, a subcortical area that’s involved in processing rewarding experiences. The ventral, or underside, of the striatum - which responds to inherently pleasurable activities such as sensual touch and food - was intensely activated by desire. But the dorsal part of the striatum - which assesses the expected reward value of such experiences - was more activated by love. Overall, they found that love and desire were activating complementary parts of the same brain regions, reinforcing the idea that they are not necessarily opposing forces but have the potential to grow out of the other. Love was essentially the abstract representation of the rewarding, visceral sensations that characterize desire. The author suggests that other than sexual desire, the insula is also activated by pleasant smell and taste, as well as other bodily sensations. So couples could cook or dance together to achieve potentially similar effects.
How to make love last: A large body of research has shown that setting realistic expectations leads to greater relationship satisfaction. But adjusting your expectations does not necessarily mean lowering them. It’s more about letting go of the social pressure that often drives us to pursue unrealistic expectations without understanding what it is we really want or need, and what we can do without. The important thing about letting go of your expectations is that it must feel like an act of generosity or faith in your relationship - and not a sacrifice.
Self-expansion: The husband-and-wife social psychologist team Arthur and Elaine Aron have coined this term. It means that for couples deeply and passionately in love, the usual, transactional give-and-take that characterizes other social relationships doesn’t apply. They experience their partner’s victories as their own; they feel their partner’s pain in defeat or loss. The self-expansion impulse explains why, in experiments, people are particularly attracted to potential partners who have the qualities that they themselves would like to possess, qualities that are part of some “idealized self.” This may be why the angular gyrus is involved, it helps us understand metaphor, as well as self-image. Interestingly, the angular gyrus also plays a role in aspects of language, perhaps explaining the cognitive boost the author saw in lexical tasks.
Love has health benefits: Compared to single people, those in satisfying, healthy long-term romantic relationships sleep better. They have better immune function. They exhibit fewer addictive behaviors. They suffer fewer recurrent strokes. They even have a better survival rate for some diseases (including some cancers). Some of these improved survival rates can be attributed to the simple fact that you have someone else looking after you. But the effect is larger for people in satisfying relationships.
In an experimental setting, when couples were given small blister wounds and then asked to either talk to each other in a loving supportive way or to rehash a recent conflict, the wounds of couples who acted more kindly and lovingly toward each other healed 60 percent faster than their more combative counterparts. Physical touch seems to make this effect even larger. But physical touch in unhappy relationships did not appear to provide a benefit in analgesia.
Loneliness: Loneliness increases our motivation to bond with others - it’s the brain’s way of telling you: You’re in social danger. It is part of the body’s alarm system, like hunger and thirst. Paradoxically, although the pain of loneliness is ultimately meant to help us seek out or repair meaningful social connections, ironically, its immediate effect is to make us hypervigilant to social threats. At any time, roughly 20 percent of the United States population - sixty million people - report feeling so lonely that it is a major source of unhappiness in their lives.
Lonely people outwardly look no different - they weigh no more or less on average than the nonlonely; they are just as attractive, just as well educated. Perhaps most surprisingly, they even spend roughly as much time with other people, and are just as adept navigating the social world. It is about your subjective satisfaction in your relationships.
Social isolation decreases life expectancy. Scientists used to believe that it was the risky and harmful health behaviors that loners engaged in that accounted for their poorer health outcomes. But evidence is building that loneliness itself - and not the things lonely people do - has damaging effects on our health through the way it changes our brain chemistry and sets off a cascade of biological booby traps. A meta-analysis of seventy studies involving more than three million participants who were followed for an average of seven years showed that being lonely increased the odds of an early death by 25 to 30 percent - roughly the same level as obesity. But unlike obesity, there is very little understanding about how loneliness kills and what we can do to protect ourselves. Many of these health risks occur because the body has been shifted into a survival mode that favors short-term preservation over our long-term health.
To overcome loneliness the author suggests admitting you’re lonely, and not dismissing it, and understanding that you are probably operating under a negative bias due to your loneliness. She also suggests practicing gratitude daily, making altruistic volunteering a regular part of your life, understanding that loneliness is a choice and a state of mind, as well as trying your best to enjoy life. She also advocates for self-disclosure as a necessary part of close and satisfying relationships. To help a lonely person she advises against trying to do something for them, but rather to ask them to do something for you, to make them feel necessary and have a sense of purpose.
Why relationships end: While the reasons why people break up are, of course, complicated, they usually boil down to two main problems: a lack of intimacy or connection with our partner (what we term social reward) or feeling rejected or unwanted by our partner (social threat). Psychologists believe that the lack of social reward may be the bigger factor overall. Falling in love can lead to strong positive euphoria feelings that change over time. However, the absence of those positive, intense love feelings can make some people who have grown used to them feel like something is missing. The author advises that the trick to remaining satisfied and happily in love is to never forget that you and your beloved are always evolving, and so you always have to be engaged in the process of “getting to know” your partner.
36 questions to fall in love: Arthur and Elaine Aron and several of their colleagues conducted a telling experiment in the 1990s. It tested whether you could, by hijacking certain features of human nature, make two random strangers fall in love. The researchers sent a heterosexual man and woman of similar age into their lab through separate doors. The participants sat down together, faced each other, and took turns answering a series of thirty-six increasingly personal questions. They found that their experiment quickly and reliably created the kind of intimacy essential to the formation of romantic love, they also had an impressive anecdotal piece of data: Six months after their experiment, two of the research subjects got married. The experiment was popularized in a Modern Love column more recently when a woman used these questions in an interaction with a friend and found to her surprise, that after her initial discomfort, a deep well of affection opened up between the two of them that had never existed before. The experiment famously ends with four minutes of staring directly into your partner’s eyes without speaking. The experiment showed her that it was possible “to generate trust and intimacy” - the very feelings that underlie love - through action.
Based on this, the author strongly advocates for self-disclosure to build closeness. “Once you and your partner begin to self-disclose, one of two things will happen: (1) your relationship will get stronger, or (2) you will realize that you shouldn’t be in your relationship.”
Conclusions: We know that love is a biological necessity. We know that social connections enabled the brain to evolve into the most powerful organ in the universe. We know that evolution also developed aversive signals - like loneliness and grief - to encourage us to take good care of our social body. We know that to be alone is not to be lonely. We know that love not only rewards us with a natural high but also satisfies a human need to expand our self. We know that such expansion requires us to dive into our inner space, to be honest, to be true to ourselves, to reveal who we are. We know, from the brain’s perspective, that the love we feel for a person and a passion (like a sport or a career or a purpose in life) are very similar.
We must begin to view this phenomenon not as an isolated and ineffable emotion but as a cognitive and biological necessity, one that is measurable but ever changing, one that has the power to make us not only better partners but also better people.