The Brain

You walk into a room—and there he is. He turns and, spotting you, grins, and you light up. Your heart flutters, your fingers tingle, you grin back. You feel no threat; indeed, you feel oddly safe. His face reminds you of your beloved father’s. He has the same smile, and, like your father, he seems kind and funny. He also looks a bit like that movie star you lust after, the one with the blue eyes, broad shoulders, and sculpted abs. Hmm; very sexy. You move forward, and so does he. You shake hands, then stand together, chatting. After a while, you begin to mirror the way he stands and moves his hands. When he shifts weight to his left foot, you shift yours to your right. When he crooks his arm and sets it on his hip, your arm soon finds its way to your own hip. He mentions a hassle at work, and you know just what he’s feeling. Suddenly, you feel close, connected. You are falling in love.

We feel love in our skin and, we say, in our heart. But as new science is making clear, the true locus of love is the brain. That would have shocked the ancients, who almost uniformly held the brain in low esteem. Egyptians mummifying the dead scrupulously preserved the heart and other organs for use in the afterlife but were so unimpressed with the brain that they routinely scooped it out and threw it away. The Greeks, too, were generally dismissive. Aristotle ruled the brain “an organ of minor importance” whose duty it was to cool the blood. Hundreds of years later, Descartes concluded the brain was a kind of antenna by which the spirit communed with the body.

Today, thanks to new research techniques, we’ve gained more knowledge about the brain in the past twenty years than we had in all the centuries before. We also know that the three pounds of furrowed, jellylike matter that rests inside our skull is integral to the process of dancing lovingly with another. Indeed, the brain is a profoundly social organ, oriented toward making and managing connection with others. From our earliest days, our brain grows and develops in response to our love relationships, and as we mature, our brain actively works to fasten us to our loved ones. Indeed, says psychologist Dan Stern of the University of Geneva, the brain is so relational that our nervous system is actually “constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own.”

Love Shapes the Brain

Our brain thrives on social connection from the day we are born. Our early relationships build the brain, literally. In the first four years of our lives, our brain grows at a very fast pace as emotional interactions with a loving parent or caregiver kindle a host of biochemical processes that boost nerve growth and connectivity. That gelatinous tissue residing in our cranium is actually a collection of one hundred billion neurons, or nerve cells, each of which puts out little tendrils, called dendrites, toward its nearby fellows. These neurons talk to each other by firing electrical and chemical impulses across the gaps, or synapses, between them. Think of neighbors chatting across a backyard fence and you will have the general idea.

Unlike neighborly chats, however, neural signaling happens almost instantaneously and without our ever being aware of it. Moreover, the chatter between neurons is nonstop, critically so. Leave a neuron alone and it dies; give it only an occasional call and it shrinks. This constant dialoging structures our brain. And the more often neurons talk to each other, the easier and stronger the connection becomes. Activation leads to architecture. “Fire together, wire together,” as the saying goes.

Emotional interaction advances brain development, and lack of it does the reverse—dendrites don’t branch out; the tendrils that relay signals are fewer and stunted, and messenger chemicals are in shorter supply. Infant monkeys who are isolated from their mothers or mother substitutes show gross deficits in multiple areas of the brain, including those involved in the processing of emotion, such as the hippocampus. They display stereotypical behavior, such as repetitive rocking and head banging, and they contract more frequent illnesses of almost every kind. Isolated human babies, such as those reared in institutions, show similar effects. Many sicken and die at an early age. Survivors often mature with attention problems and cognitive and language deficits.

Needless to say, all this affects the ability to form and maintain social connections later in life. Specifically, loving contact is key to growth of a specific type of nerve cell, the mirror neuron, associated with empathy (more on that later). As psychologist Louis Cozolino of Pepperdine University observes, “Without stimulating interactions, neurons and people wither and die. In neurons, this process is called apoptosis, while in humans, it is called anaclitic depression.”

Besides stimulating general brain growth, early interactions with loved ones are crucial to organization of the right brain, a central site for the processing of emotion. The right hemisphere is especially responsive to nonverbal cues, such as facial expression and tone of voice. Developmental psychologists suggest that right-brain-to-right-brain signaling, beginning when infants are around four months old, constitutes the first and most basic language between child and parent. Colwyn Trevarthen, professor of child psychology at the University of Edinburgh, calls these interactions “protoconversations.”

These early moments of meeting, if they are positive, tune youngsters’ brains to the social channel, teaching them how to communicate their needs and thereby evoke satisfying responses. Babies learn how to get their mother’s attention and draw it back when she misses or mistakes their signals—the general process of attunement, misattunement, and reattunement. They learn to attend to the signals their mother sends by focusing on her face and holding still for longer lengths of time; they also learn to read what she wants from them. All in all, we learn in these first interactions whether we can depend on loving responses from another to help us keep our emotional balance. We also get the first glimmerings of how others see us and begin to formulate of our sense of self.

If we are lucky, our first caregiver’s expressed delight in us tells us that we are indeed delightful; open responsiveness shows us that we are cared for and valued. If we are unlucky—perhaps our mother is stressed or clinically depressed—we will not get consistent emotional reassurance and nurturing, and we may feel unloved and unworthy. We pick up that we are emotionally on our own. With repetition these exchanges are burned into our brain and form a neural template—a kind of “if this, then that” guide—for our close relationships from childhood into adolescence and adulthood. Positive childhood models tend to enhance our ability to shape adult romantic attachments. And negative models do the opposite. I see it in couples stuck in misery. I ask Marcus, “What happens to you when your wife goes still and quietly tells you, ‘I need you so much. I love you’? You bite your lip and turn your head away?” Marcus blinks at me. Slowly he starts to speak. “I am treading water here. There is no place in my brain to put that. If she tears up and tells me she needs something, I freeze. Her tears are indictments. I must have screwed up. If she is upset, she is going to put me out in the cold. Right now, I can’t move.”

In Marcus’s family, his mother’s disappointment or tears were always a prelude to angry outbursts, and he remembers as a small child being sent to his room and left there by himself for hours whenever his mother erupted. He learned that another’s upset meant that he was flawed and unlovable and about to be deserted. As an adolescent, his solution was simply to stay away from his family and play video games in his room. Now, with his wife, there is no obvious workable solution; everything that he knows how to do makes her more angry and upset.

Some psychologists argue that a person’s way of dealing with emotions and relating to others is primarily genetically based—that is, determined by nature, not nurture. A person’s innate temperament may incline him or her to be more or less stoic or volatile. But there is growing evidence that repeated patterns of early interaction with caregivers are extremely powerful and can mold lifelong responses to negative emotions and stress. Psychologist Michael Meaney of McGill University in Montreal has discovered that in rats, a mother’s intense nurturing of her pups, including grooming and licking, is powerful enough to influence her offspring’s effectiveness in regulating fear responses and acting adaptively in the face of danger as adults.

These highly nurtured rats can stay composed even when tightly restrained or stressed, a condition achieved when researchers put them into canisters filled with water to see if they swim or sink! I have an image of the much-loved little rodents lying lazily on their backs with little gin and tonics in their hands, humming a tune called “My Mommy Loved Me; Nothing Bad Will Happen” as they float happily around. Their less-loved cousins, on the other hand, are paddling furiously and screaming their heads off: “How could you do this to me…I will drown!” (No, Michael Meaney didn’t let the insecure ones drown; psychologists are, in fact, a sentimental lot.) The highly nurtured rats also showed lower levels of stress hormones compared with the rats that received less intense care.

The popular axiom that evolution favors “survival of the fittest” is usually taken to mean survival of the most aggressive. Today, at psychological conferences, we’re hearing much more about survival of the “most nurtured.” We’re discovering that devoted nurturing can overcome the influence of genetic inheritance and even reverse it. And that applies at every step on the evolutionary ladder.

Psychologist Stephen Suomi, who assisted Harry Harlow with his monkey experiments and now heads a major research laboratory at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, has found that highly reactive monkeys, the genetically primed “bad” boys and girls, actually become skilled leaders and all-around good citizens when cared for by extra-attentive mothers. In general, we now know that no matter what your genetic heritage is, it is repeated experience that turns genes either off or on. The experience of being held and groomed appears to switch off genes that make the brain sensitive to stress hormones and switch on genes that start up calming mechanisms.

This kind of research has recently been extended to humans in studies of so-called “dandelion” and “orchid” children. As described by developmental psychologists Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona and Thomas Boyce of the University of California, Berkeley, dandelion youngsters have the ability to thrive in all environments. Orchid children, in contrast, are highly sensitive to their environment, especially the quality of parenting they receive. If neglected, they wither; if cared for, they flower with unusual beauty.

In one experiment led by geneticist Danielle Dick of Virginia Commonwealth University, DNA from 400 adolescents who had been followed from birth was analyzed for variations in a specific gene, CHRM2, that is implicated in alcohol dependence, antisocial behavior, and depression. They found that children with the gene variant who had less engaged, more distant parents exhibited the most undesirable behaviors, such as delinquency and physical aggression toward others. But children with the gene variant who had very attentive, involved parents had much better outcomes. They had fewer behavioral problems and a significantly lower risk of depression and anxiety, which are risk factors for future troubles. This points to the power of secure connection to bring out the best in all of us.

Devoted early nurturing grows brains that are better able, years later, to regulate stress, connect with others, collaborate to solve problems, and, of course, dance a meaner tango. The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness. The evidence is that throughout life we build on the scaffolding provided by our first relationships to find our emotional balance and link to others. A mother sings in a low voice and softly touches her baby’s cheeks as she rocks him to sleep each night; he calms and his heart rate slows. He learns that voice and touch will soothe him, and eventually he can soothe himself just by calling up the memory of the singing and touching. In this way, we gradually develop automatic ways of managing emotion that carry into our adult love relationships. This process also builds expectations about the ways in which emotional moments with our romantic partners will play out.

David, whose mother swung between being high on painkillers and being irritable and abusive, tells me in a therapy session, “I can’t get past the feeling of heat here in my chest. I want to escape. It seems like anytime a strong feeling comes up, I want to run. I don’t know what you mean by ‘comfort.’ The only emotion I know about is anger. Maureen’s saying she really feels love for me right now as I talk about my fears, but I would never ask anyone to take care of me. I don’t know what to do when she gets all syrupy with me. Emotions are private, to be dealt with on your own. What does it matter if she knows how I feel, anyway? What is she going to do about it?” David’s response fits with brain research that finds that insecurely attached adults have strong physiological reactions to any uncertainty or to psychological stress, and that avoidants in particular—like David—tend to make many more errors reading their partner’s signals, even when they are tender, loving overtures. They have not learned to trust such messages and so cannot use them to calm their fear.

The good news is that we don’t have to stay fixed in negative neural pathways. The brain, as we’ll discuss later in this chapter, is amazingly plastic, and we can create new neural circuits, altering our ways of perceiving and signaling our emotions to loved ones and revising our expectations of how they will respond to us.

The Neurochemistry of Love

The concept of a love potion, a substance that can turn on love, is found in almost every culture. Many concoctions—made from plants, herbs, insects, animal organs, precious stones, and corals—have been touted. They don’t work. But there is one potent formula that our own body manufactures. Called oxytocin (a name that sounds more like a detergent than a font of euphoria), it exists only in mammals and is both a neurotransmitter, meaning it communicates with the brain and nervous system, and a hormone, that is, it communicates with organ systems, too. Oxytocin was discovered back in 1909, but research on this chemical has exploded just in the last decade. The number of Google searches for the word has soared 5,000 percent since 2004.

Scientists have dubbed oxytocin the “cuddle hormone” for its ability to promote strong bonds between mother and infant and between adult lovers. It’s also called the “molecule of monogamy” (more on that in Chapter 5). But it’s most accurately described as the master chemical of social connection. Both sexes have oxytocin receptors in their brain, but oxytocin levels are generally higher in females. Males have higher levels of a very close cousin, vasopressin (the difference is just two amino acids), which has the same linking effect as oxytocin but also stimulates aggressive behavior, such as mate guarding. We’ve long known that in humans, oxytocin is released during breastfeeding and orgasm. But with more sensitive assays, we have now discovered that our brain gives us a little dose of the cuddle hormone whenever we are physically near to those we love. In fact, just thinking of our loved one will trigger a rush of this hormone.

This chemical packs a punch. A whiff of oxytocin increases our tendency to trust and engage with others in a less defensive, more empathetic way. Anna Buchheim, a clinical psychologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and her colleagues invited into their lab 26 male students who scored as insecure on attachment questionnaires and gave them a dose of oxytocin. At another time, the students received a placebo. When they received the neurotransmitter, 69 percent of the students responded in a more secure, affiliative way to a series of pictures depicting events such as loss and separation from a loved one. They shifted from agreeing with statements like “I would distract myself and take care of this by myself” to endorsing statements like “I would share with someone and look for support.” This shift into secure responses was particularly noticeable in anxiously attached men.

Oxytocin turns off our threat detector, the amygdala, as well as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—the “get up for challenge” part of our nervous system—and turns on the calming, “relax, all is fine,” parasympathetic nervous system. The effect is to reduce fear and anxiety and lower production of stress hormones. In one experiment, both men and women rated even strangers as more trustworthy and attractive after a dose of oxytocin than they did before taking the neurotransmitter. In another study, 47 couples were given either a placebo or oxytocin before discussing an area of conflict in their relationship. Those who received oxytocin showed significantly reduced levels of the principal stress hormone, cortisol, after the discussion. They also displayed a significantly higher ratio of positive to negative behaviors; partners more frequently held eye contact and agreed with each other and were less belligerent and blaming.

What I see in a couple therapy session is that as one person takes small emotional risks and the other learns to respond, they “retune” each other’s nervous systems to higher levels of equanimity, which makes them more trusting and flexible. And this is exactly what happens when we first fall in love. “Falling in love” is an accurate phrase. It’s a risk, reach, reassurance dance. Oxytocin seems to prompt us to take chances and rewards us with contentment when we find reassurance in our partner’s arms. Mutual vulnerability and recovery with our lover, accompanied by oxytocin release, is the true tale of love.

All the recent findings support John Bowlby’s claim that the bond of love is a safety and survival mechanism and that one of its main roles is to make life less terrifying. And, as with most core survival processes, there is a feedback loop. Oxytocin spawns trust, trust generates closeness and sex, orgasm stimulates oxytocin, and around it goes. Entrepreneurs have been quick to sense opportunity. You can order an oxytocin-infused nasal or body spray called Liquid Trust online. Before you rush to stock up, however, remember that our clever brains tend to adjust for context. Spritzing the hormone likely won’t make you feel more loving toward someone you already distrust.

That said, the social effects of oxytocin are still mind-boggling. When dosed with oxytocin, we fixate more on others and gaze longer into their eyes. Scientists suggest that this may be why oxytocin helps us better read others’ facial expressions and correctly tune in to their intentions. Let’s face it—most signals in love relationships are subtle or ambiguous and require decoding. If you don’t think so, try interpreting “I am too tired for sex tonight.” We have to decide if that means “I am tired” literally, or “I am tired of you,” or “This is the end of your sex life forever.”

In a study by psychologist Gregor Domes and his colleagues at Rostock University in Germany, young men between the ages of 21 and 30 were asked to look at pictures of people’s eyes after being given at different times oxytocin or a placebo. They were told to pick from a list of words the one that most closely captured the emotional and mental state they saw. After oxytocin, the young men were much more accurate in their readings, even when the expressions were subtle and ambiguous. Domes notes that the hippocampus, the region of the brain that is key in retrieving memories, is very rich in oxytocin receptors. He suggests that oxytocin may help pull up stored images of expressions that aid people in interpreting what they see at a given moment. The adaptive advantage of such a chemical boost is obvious when it comes to romance. The accurate interpretation of nonverbal signals allows us to tune in to and effectively coordinate moves with our partner to create a harmonious dance.

As if this isn’t enough, oxytocin receptors are also plentiful in the part of the brain—the nucleus accumbens—that is central to production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that makes us feel elated and euphoric. Researchers believe that oxytocin increases release of dopamine, further supporting attachment between partners. We tend to stick around people with whom we feel pleasure.

Because dopamine activates the same neural circuitry as cocaine and heroin, some scientists have wondered if love could be viewed as an addiction. There are similarities: when we are smitten, contact with the beloved produces positive feelings, just as a drug does; there is a “hunger” for contact with the loved one, and there is distress when this hunger is not satisfied. But an addiction is a negative, costly, compulsive behavior that constricts a person’s life and behavior. Positive romantic love, on the other hand, expands our world; it makes us more confident, flexible, and open. Moreover, secure connection seems to protect against addiction. Recent research at Duke University shows that rat pups who are touched frequently by their mother have higher brain levels of interleukin-10, a molecule that suppresses a craving for morphine. Similarly, bonding in monogamous prairie voles appears to decrease the rewarding effect of amphetamines in the brain. I have an image of a little rodent wiggling his whiskers and whispering to his spouse, “I don’t need no drug but you, my voley baby.”

The Neurons of Love

While some researchers are focusing on brain chemicals, others are concentrating on different types of brain cells and delineating their roles in love relationships. Here, too, the findings underscore the fact that nature has wired us for connection. We are much more of a social animal than our individualistic society has recognized. As a master researcher in this area, Marco Iacoboni of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, asserts, “We are not alone, but are biologically wired and evolutionarily designed to be deeply connected to one another.”

One of the most exciting areas of current inquiry centers on mirror neurons, so named after a remarkable and serendipitous discovery in the 1990s in the laboratory of neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma, Italy. A member of his team—Vittorio Gallese or Leo Fogassi; no one is sure at this point—was moving around the lab while a female macaque with electrodes in her brain sat quietly in a chair awaiting her next task in an experiment on motor control. The researcher idly picked up something—a peanut or ice cream; no one is certain which one. Suddenly, a burst of sound came from the computer that was recording the monkey’s brain activity. Even though she wasn’t doing anything, her brain had lit up as if she were the one picking up the food!

Researchers had accidentally stumbled on the solution to a mystery that philosophers have struggled with through the ages: How do we know what is happening in the mind of another? The answer: mirror neurons. They put us inside the body of others, making us literally feel what they are feeling. Mirror neurons explain why we shrink back in our seats with fear when the hero is abruptly attacked by Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street and why we soar with joy when the young bicyclists lift into the blue sky in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. These neurons are kicking in when we wince after a kid tumbles off a swing onto the ground and when we break into a smile watching a friend’s eyes light up as we carry in a huge birthday cake.

This ability to enter into another’s experience is especially pertinent in love relationships, in which responding in a sensitive way to a partner’s needs is so central. When we see our sweetie’s mouth droop down or eyes well with tears, our brain mimics the experience for us. In a sense, we physiologically try on the feeling. The line between us and our partner blurs, and we automatically, without conscious reflection or deliberation, feel and know he or she is sad. This is invaluable in helping us tune in to a mate and in building intimacy, safety, and trust—the very bonds of love.

This exquisite sensitivity begins when we are about two years old, at about the same time we start to be able to recognize ourselves in a mirror. “Knowing me” and “knowing you” are linked; they are two sides of the same coin. So how do we distinguish between our feelings and those of others? Our mirror neurons take care of this for us as well. A subset of these brain cells, super mirror neurons, fire more rapidly for our own experiences and more slowly for the experiences of others. The brain is a perfectly honed social device, supporting our sense of self while seamlessly linking us to others.

Mirror neurons do more than just mirror the observed actions of others. They clue us in to their intentions. Mirror neurons don’t fire if we see someone aimlessly pantomiming or pretending with no real purpose in mind. For example, if someone acts as if they’re reaching for a pen, but there is no actual pen, our mirror neurons remain dormant. But they will fire when they sense a goal, even if it is not completed or is slightly modified. In a sense, they fill in the blanks; they predict and anticipate. Say someone is going to close his hand to pick up a pen, but he is distracted and pauses; then he opens his hand to pick up pliers instead. Mirror neurons will have fired as the person reaches, because the intention—to pick up an object—remains the same. Mirror neurons are our “intention radar,” which allows for the instant coordination of complementary responses with another person.

In love relationships, mirror neurons are how we automatically “know” what our loved one will do. Marie’s distress has registered with her husband, Simon, and his face is now sad and concerned. She sees that, and her facial muscles duplicate what she sees. His hand reaches out, and she knows he is going to stroke her arm. She bends toward him. He laughs and says, “Maybe I was just reaching for my wineglass.”

“No,” she responds. “You were reaching for me.” Simon smiles and pulls her into his arms, and they hold each other. A small moment, but so much has happened. And so easily.

Mirror neurons have upended our assumptions about how we read each other. We used to think that Marie would stay in her head, reasoning out what Simon would do. But now we know that we comprehend each other’s intentions in less judicious fashion. In a flash, Simon felt what Marie felt, and Marie felt what Simon felt—and she got his intention. Such moments of connection are the lifeblood of love relationships.

Often when I am training therapists, I do a demonstration session with a couple I have just met. Members of the audience are mystified that I can tune in to each partner’s deeper emotions so fast and so easily. They ask me how I know what a partner is feeling. Do I have an algorithm of feelings, an “if this, then that” list? I do, but usually it is not up and running in my brain. There is no effort involved. If I stay calm and am attentive to the partners’ gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions, I can feel what they feel even when they cannot give it a name. I can see fear and the intention to turn away before one of them even says, “I don’t think it’s useful to talk about this.”

Empathy Is Us

The torrent of research into the brain is presenting us with a dramatically different view not only of love relationships but also of human nature. Western society has long held a rather pessimistic view: we are essentially insular, selfish creatures who need rules and constraints to force us to be considerate of others. Today, we are drawing a diametrically opposed portrait: we humans are biologically driven to be associative, altruistic beings who are responsive to others’ needs. We should, it seems, be called Homo empathicus.

Empathy is the capacity to perceive and identify with another’s emotional state. The word, coined in the 20th century, derives from the Greek empatheia, meaning “affection” and “suffering.” But the concept was first developed by 19th-century German philosophers who gave it the name Einfühlung, meaning “feeling into.” Empathetic concern in higher mammals probably evolved from a need for flexible, adaptive parenting to assure survival of the young and from a need to collaborate in defense and hunting to assure a pack’s or tribe’s continued existence. How strong that capacity is in human beings is being proven in study after study.

Most fascinating, perhaps, is research showing that just imagining or thinking that another person, especially a loved one, is in pain makes us respond as if we are going through the exact same experience. In one experiment, neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues at the University of Zurich found that when a woman received a small electric shock to the back of her hand, the woman beside her, who received no shock, reacted as though she had received it, too. The identical area of the brain lit up in both women; the same pain circuit was activated. We literally hurt for others.

Roughly, the way empathy seems to happen is: you see me—or even, as in the experiment above, imagine me—experiencing a strong feeling, maybe pain or disgust; you mirror my response in your brain; you mimic me with your body (your face crinkles in the exact same way as mine does); you respond to me on an emotional level and move into empathetic concern for me; you help me. As we imitate others, we also communicate and show them that we feel for them; this creates instant connection. In Oregon State University psychologist Frank Bernieri’s study of young couples teaching each other made-up words, pairs who showed the greatest motor synchrony, that is, those who mimicked each other most closely, also had the strongest emotional rapport with each other. In my own team’s studies of forgiveness, nearly every injured partner told his or her lover some version of, “I can’t forgive you until I see that you feel my pain. Until I know that my pain hurts you, too.”

Empathy is not limited to humans. Primatologist Frans de Waal, in his book The Age of Empathy, lays out a clear case that all species who have mirror neurons and a sense of self (that is, they can recognize themselves in a mirror)—including humans, dolphins, apes, and elephants—respond to each other’s pain and grieve when one of their number dies. In other words, they show all the signs of emotional bonding and empathy. Rhesus monkeys, for example, refuse to pull a chain that gives them food if this act delivers an electric shock to their neighbor in the next cage. The monkeys starve themselves to avoid inflicting pain on another. Elephants walk miles to mourn at the grave of a herd member, and chimpanzees offer solace, hugging, holding, grooming, and calling to a stricken relative who has lost a fight with an older member of the troop.

It is distressing to see others in pain, especially if they’re familiar to us. So why do we sometimes have such trouble feeling empathy for those we love? Three possibilities, gleaned from the everyday experiment called a couple therapy session, present themselves. First, a person’s mirror neurons may be underdeveloped or functioning poorly; failure of the mirror neuron system has been associated with an inability to resonate emotionally with others, as in autism. Second, stress or depression may have exhausted a person’s mental resources, so that he or she is essentially emotionally numb. Depression and stress hormones, such as cortisol, have been shown to impede brain growth and even damage its social and emotional centers. Abuse early in life tends to shrink the hippocampus, the area of the brain that deals with ordering experience into coherent emotional memories. As a result, the brain becomes more sensitive to emotional stressors, such as separation anxiety, but has a less developed neural network for containing such anxiety.

The third and most common reason is that we simply become distracted. Some preoccupying emotion, such as the overwhelming fear of upsetting or losing a partner, blocks the ability to focus on the other’s anguish. It is hard to concentrate on another person when you are spending all your brainpower just trying to calm yourself. As I was tumbling through a terrible storm at thirty thousand feet in the small silver tube called an airplane, all my empathy training deserted me when the large man sitting next to me suddenly said, “I think I am going to have a panic attack.” I heard myself say, “No. You’re not. Just stop it.” I only had time for a little guilt when we were safely on the tarmac.

The bottom line is that how well you are able to deal with your own emotions will greatly affect your ability to tune in to and feel empathy for others. The attainment of emotional balance allows us to engage with, feel for, and respond to the concerns of others. Being securely attached furthers this balance. Psychologist Omri Gillath of the University of Kansas looked at what happens in the brains of women with different attachment styles when they are dealing with difficult emotions. He asked them to first imagine emotionally neutral events, such as shopping with their partner; then he asked them to imagine everyday arguments; and finally he asked them to call up painful relationship scenarios, such as their partner leaving them for someone else or dying. Then he instructed them to stop thinking about these things.

He found that the more anxiously attached women had more active emotional brains than the other groups did when thinking about the painful scenario. In particular, the anterior temporal pole, which calculates the emotional significance of events and, especially, processes sadness, really got busy. Meanwhile, the orbital frontal cortex, which regulates emotion, took a nap. Without a braking mechanism, the women’s brains simply continued ruminating on the painful event. Women who were avoidantly attached weren’t able to suppress their thoughts and feelings very well, either. Key emotional areas of their brains stayed active. This parallels previous research by Mario Mikulincer, who found that avoidant people’s ability to suppress emotion is incomplete and easily disrupted by any kind of mental task—for example, being asked to remember a seven-digit number. Under even this minimal stress, thoughts and emotions rebounded, and emotional balance was compromised.

Gillath’s brain-scan study affirms numerous other studies showing that more securely attached people fare best in dealing with difficult emotions. They can generally tolerate them better and regulate them more effectively; they are less likely to be swamped by or obsessed with their feelings or to labor excessively to deny them. Being flooded with negative emotions or constantly working to numb ourselves inevitably distracts us from being emotionally present with others, from tuning in to others’ feelings and needs. We have to have some measure of calm and security within ourselves before we can be sensitive to and caringly respond to others.

Pete, who has PTSD as a result of childhood abuse, has known only one safe relationship—the one he has with his wife, Sally. He is so terrified of losing her that when she is upset with him over even the most minor thing, he blanks out emotionally. He cannot pick up on Sally’s cues. “This stuff is like a foreign language to me,” he tells me. “I don’t get it. It doesn’t compute.” After a few therapy sessions, during which we worked on getting him to stay calm while he focuses on Sally’s face, he seems better able to resonate with her emotions. He looks sad as she cries and squirms in his chair as she complains, but he is constantly sidetracked by his own strong physical sensations of panic. I ask him, “What do you see in her face?” He replies, “All I know is that she is angry with me, and all I want to do is stop it, fix it. I am thinking of all the ways out, and then it just becomes too much, so I freeze up.” He cannot tune in to or name—much less tolerate—his own emotions or Sally’s.

Perhaps his brain, like those of institutionalized Romanian orphans, has not fully developed the neural pathways that allow him to stay present and be empathetic to his wife. Perhaps it is simply fear, which focuses us in on ourselves, blocks sustained attention to others, and prevents the decoding of their signals. Perhaps someone like Pete, who never experienced secure attachment as a child, is extremely sensitized to threat and has only inefficient ways to calm his attachment fears. This neural pathway of fear and loss is the deepest, most traveled, and most easily accessed in Pete’s brain. As he falls into attachment panic and tries to deal with this emotion by shutting down, he automatically draws negative responses from his partner. Pete’s mirror neurons are not in top form, so he has no sense of his impact on Sally or how he sets up interactions that confirm his worst fears.

However, when a dance goes wrong, it is almost never due to just one person’s brain patterns, emotional style, habits, or expectations. The other person’s responsiveness or lack of it always plays a part. Amanda Vicary and Chris Fraley, psychologists at the University of Illinois, asked individuals to imagine themselves in a relationship story and, at twenty predetermined points, choose between options that describe what they would do next. For example, at one point, after the subjects are told that their partner has been talking on the phone with a former lover, they can select either “I am glad to know you still get along with people you have dated” or “Is there still something going on between you two?” These choices, in essence, forced the participants to interpret their supposed partner’s intentions.

In the first phase of the study, the story was written so that the selection of a given option—positive or negative—didn’t affect how the imaginary partner responded. The imaginary partner was impervious and unresponsive. The insecure folks then consistently kept choosing statements that showed they distrusted their lover. In the second phase, the researchers shaped the story so that the partner was occasionally supportive. That show of concern was enough to slowly change insecure folks’ attitude toward their hypothetical partner. They began to judge the partner’s intentions more favorably and to select the more affirmative statements at the predetermined points. Interacting with a warm partner made everyone, secure or insecure, more positive. Just as the potential to maintain negative patterns exists, so does the potential for change.

The Plastic Brain

One way to change our behavior is to change the brain. Scientists used to firmly believe that we were born with a finite number of brain cells and that when any were destroyed, we were out of luck. But the brain, it turns out, is much more plastic. We grow new neurons and new links between neurons throughout our lives as we have new experiences. So can we grow Pete’s brain in couple therapy by shaping new experiences for him? Perhaps. Every experience changes our brain somewhat. One way to create new neural pathways is to block our usual ways of behaving. For example, if we were to wear a blindfold, within two days our visual cortex would begin to process signals from touch and hearing.

So maybe we can help Pete replace his “freeze” reaction with a “tell Sally what the fear feels like” response. Once he is better at modulating his own fear, we can then help him to see and respond more caringly to Sally’s pain. We can help him focus by asking him, “What do you see right now on Sally’s face? Can you feel in your body what this feels like for her?” And we can help Sally to send clearer emotional signals to Pete. We can also increase the elements that promote empathy—perceived familiarity and similarity—by getting partners to recognize their mutual longing and vulnerability. Finally, we can help them express the empathy they feel. We can see we have made headway when, in our twelfth session, Pete says to Sally, “I am getting now that we are both scared, that you are vulnerable, too. I see it in your eyes and see that it hurts. I don’t want you to feel scared. I don’t know what to do, but I want to comfort you. ”

Our neurons are always ready to sing the song of connection with another. It seems that all through adulthood there is the possibility of the flowering of new neurons and networks in our brain as we have experiences of love and loving. Walter Freeman, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. He concludes from his survey of learning across the human life span that there are two major events that naturally create massive neural reorganization: one is falling in love and bonding with a partner and the other is beginning to parent. (Any parent will tell you that the first few months of taking care of baby definitely rearrange your brain!) Freeman suggests that oxytocin is a key “neuromodulator” that can enhance or diminish the overall effectiveness of the connections between nerve cells.

Since the brain is fundamentally an organ of socialization, it makes sense that there are heightened periods of plasticity when the brain is rapidly adapting to new circumstances. New connections with a caring other shape and reshape us; new neural connections, new emotions, new understanding, and new moves in the dance of love can offer us a new world and sense of who we are. Pete tells Sally in our last session, “Now that I know how to reach you, I feel different. Bigger somehow. Less careful. This new way we have of being together is changing me. Seems like I can explore more now, take chances.”

I think of passages in Louis Cozolino’s book The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. Cozolino, a psychologist at Pepperdine University, points out that early relationships optimally sculpt key parts of our brains, such as the prefrontal cortex, in ways that allow us to “think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in problem solving.” Now we know that it is not just early relationships that have this effect.

We now understand key aspects of the chemistry of love, such as the function of the cuddle hormone, oxytocin, and the workings of the neural pathways of human connection. We are beginning to see that part of the “fire” of love is the firing of key nerve cells—the mirror neurons, which connect us with others. But more than this, we now understand that not only does biology shape love relationships, but these relationships in turn also shape and regulate our physiology. A kiss can bring a cascade of oxytocin and dopamine that shuts off stress hormones, brings down our heart rate, and tunes up our brain’s ability to read our lover’s face.

This kind of science goes a long way toward explaining why the brain itself is now considered a social organ. Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, observes that established explanations for why we evolved with such huge brains are inadequate. Such brains are exceedingly expensive in terms of the energy needed to keep them going, and most animals survive just fine with brains that are much smaller. Dunbar suggests that our brain size is not so much the result of having to master technical problems such as creating tools or shelters as it is the consequence of our having to engage with others to survive and thrive. Social interaction is a complex chess game: we have to anticipate the actions of others as well as the effects of our own actions on them, and we need lots of brainpower to do that. Thus our brains grew larger and ever more designed for connection.

Shakespeare asks, “Tell me where is fancy bred…in the heart or in the head?” Scientists reply firmly, “The head.” But some of us would put the main source of love much lower. “Love is the poetry of the senses,” rhapsodized Honoré de Balzac. American writer Harlan Ellison puts it more bluntly: “Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled.” That’s one hell of a misspelling, but let’s examine this issue in the next chapter.

Experiment 1

Set aside thirty minutes when you and your loved one can be together quietly. Choose a time when you are both feeling relaxed—that is, not just after a fight. And choose a place where you will not be interrupted.

Begin trying to tune in to each other. Stand face-to-face and almost toe-to-toe, but not touching, and look at each other’s chest. Then synchronize your breathing. Find a steady rhythm.

Then one of you should speed up the rhythm, and the other should try to match it. Once you are in sync, reverse roles. But this time, the “leader” slows down the breathing rhythm.

Continue the breathing exercise through three more exchanges.

Then add a new element—shifting weight from one foot to the other. Start out breathing in unison and moving onto the same foot as the other person.

Once this is fluid and easy, the taller person should begin to gently turn his or her shoulders to the right or left and then back to center. The other person follows, matching the pace and movement.

After a while, switch the lead.

Once you are again in tune, begin turning shoulders so far that you both begin to lose your balance. The “follower’s” job is to repair the loss of balance with a little pressure from a hand placed on the leader’s arm. Do this five times, then switch the lead and do it five more times.

Sit and talk about whether moving into physical synchrony made you feel more emotionally connected to your partner. If it did, describe how that feels so the other person can understand. If it did not, see if you can pinpoint what got in the way of getting to a more tuned-in place.

Experiment 2

This experiment explores your level of empathy and your ability to read your partner’s intentions.

A. Imagine you are wanting to talk with your partner about the job interview you had a few hours ago. You are worried about it. But your partner seems distracted. You begin to talk about what happened, and he or she begins to give you advice about the things you might have done at the beginning of the interview to make a good impression.

Do you say:

Which of these three possible responses is the most relationship enhancing and likely to elicit empathy and a loving response from your partner?

Now imagine that whatever your reply, your partner says: “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe I am not really tuning in here. You probably want me to just support you. Those interviews are hard.”

What do you say next?

Even though your partner first disappointed you, did you subsequently respond positively to the later offer of care? Discuss with your partner how easy or hard it was for you to accept this attempt to repair the disconnection between the two of you.

B. Your partner admits forgetting to arrange for a tradesman to visit next week, as you had asked. Your partner sighs and murmurs, “Today just felt like everything was going wrong in my life. I felt down.”

You say:

If you couldn’t manage the most empathetic response—you know which one it is!—reflect on what made that response difficult for you.

Let’s presume that your mirror neurons fired. Did you not connect emotionally with the information your neurons sent? Were you caught up in and distracted by your own feelings and unable to focus on your partner’s cues? Did a belief or judgment, such as “You do your tasks no matter how you feel,” get in the way? Do you feel anxious or unsure of what to say when your partner confides a vulnerable feeling?

No one can be empathetic all the time, but if we want to build a loving bond, we do need to know what blocks our empathy and learn how to tune in and respond.