LISA: Welcome to Brainwaves, a new podcast exploring big ideas produced at the University of Colorado Boulder, I'm Lisa Marshall. It's February that means love is on the brain or is it just something going on in your brain what is love anyway?
[Random people]
AMY PALMER: Um joy. I think joy and connection feeling love is actually good for your heart so heart health I see a strong connection between love and health.
STEVE DUKKHA: Like extreme contentment and like safety, like that warm feeling but to me it's like safe like you don't need to be anywhere else.
BEN AND DEBBIE ELLIS: It’s pretty warm you could just tell like somebody cares about you and that's nice. Probably when you really can't stop thinking about them ever.
NICOLAS DE PASCAL: Nauseous, sick to my stomach more I would describe it almost as eating too much chocolate.
LISA: That was Amy Palmer, Steve Dukkha, Ben and Debbie Ellis and Nicolas de Pascal at Peace, Love and Chocolate in Boulder on the eve of Valentine's Day. Today we're going to try to learn more about that intangible feeling they tried to describe, we're looking at the science of love; why it happens, how it affects us and what to do when it doesn't work out. First we'll talk with Zoe Donaldson, an assistant professor of neuroscience that studies what happens in the brain to make love possible. Zoe, how unusual are we humans, can animals fall in love?
ZOE: We're not unique but we're almost unique so if you look at mammals about three to five percent of species are monogamous, meaning that they can form these long-term mating based bonds with their partners and this is something that we do as humans. And what this means is that it's actually a really hard trait to study there's not that many options out there if you want to try to study it in animals.
LISA: So what have you found?
ZOE: So one of the things that we know, so I should back up and say in my laboratory we study a monogamous rodent species they're called prairie voles, and we can study monogamy in these guys but we have to break it down into the bits and pieces and the bit that I like to study the most is actually that bond that forms between a male and a female. And we can that bond just like we would in humans by asking the animal, how much time do you want to spend with your partner? Versus this other equally attractive oopposite-sex animal, and one of the things we know from looking at this behavior is that there's a specific subset of hormones and molecules in the brain that you need for this, and they fall into two categories you have one set of molecules that's involved in sort of the pleasurable and rewarding aspects of these relationships and then you have another set that's involved in the more social aspect who is this individual what are they bringing to me? And these are hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin
LISA: So talk a little bit more about those, I think some people have heard of oxytocin not so many people have heard of vasopressin.
ZOE: So oxytocin and vasopressin are actually both hormones you make them in your brain and they do a whole variety of things for you. So oxytocin is involved in keeping you warm it's also involved in eating so if you have lots of oxytocin you actually eat less and it's also involved in a variety of behaviors that are involved in reproduction. So if you give oxytocin aartsen Quillen to say a snail, a female snail, it'll start laying eggs and as you may know if we give oxytocin to a woman who's close to giving birth it will induce labor, this is how we do it when we talk about inducing labor. And the other thing though is that it also coordinates the onset of maternal behavior so if you give oxytocin to a rat, she'll want to take care of pups desperately so she finds them incredibly rewarding. And so it's not really surprising that oxytocin is also serving sort of the same role in a different context , so not only is it facilitating the bonds between a mother and her infant but we know that in monogamous species it's also working to make those bonds between a male and a female cohesive.
LISA: And what about vasopressin just in a nutshell what does it do?
ZOE: So vasopressin is very similar they're actually molecularly they're very very similar, but vasopressin is much more important for males than for females and this is largely because males have more vasopressin in their brains, it's a testosterone sensitive hormone. One of the cool things about both vasopressin and oxytocin is that originally some of the things that they did for us is help regulate our blood pressure and our thermoregulation, basically being warm enough and so there are people out there that have speculated that the reason that these hormones which are sometimes called cuddle hormones are involved in bonding is because they were originally designed to make sure that we kept our temperature at the correct level and one way to do that may be to seek out someone to cuddle with.
LISA: So why does it help us to know the names of these chemicals? How do you hope this science will someday be able to help people who maybe can't form bonds?
ZOE: So I want to emphasize that this work is already helping people. One of the things that we can do is we can administer oxytocin intranasally so it's sort of like in a nasal spray, and there are clinical trials that are underway actually around the globe Australia,Europe, the US where they're using intranasal oxytocin in a variety of different ways. So one way that they're using it is they're giving it to couples during couples therapy, and within that context what you want to see is that you're building a new trust your building and enhancing an existing bond and when you give oxytocin you're giving it that little extra boost. In addition to that we see multiple clinical trials being done with oxytocin is being given to people with high-functioning autism to again give them a little bit of boost when they're undergoing therapies to build their social skills.
LISA: Fascinating, thanks so much for talking to us about your research. As they say love is a powerful thing even small things like holding hands can have a big impact. Now let's turn to brain waves Molly Pfannenstiel for a closer look at what exactly is going on there.
MOLLY: Men, did you know you can help reduce your partner's pain in the delivery room? University of Colorado Boulder researcher Pavel Goldstein discovered this when his first daughter was born. During the delivery his wife asked him to hold her hand and that seemed to reduce her pain that gave him an idea for a study. Goldstein's research found that a woman's pain level falls when an empathetic male partner holds her hand. This phenomenon is known as interpersonal synchronization.
PAVEL: Interpersonal touch, increased brain synchrony and also body synchrony within the partners.
MOLLY: Not only did the partner's breathing rates and heart rates sink their brain waves did too.
PAVEL: So basically we wanted to understand how the synchrony markers in our physiology, body physiology and brain physiology; how's it related to this touch related ?.
MOLLY: To find out, Goldstein used 22 to heterosexual couples. The woman underwent a heat treatment that caused mild pain, the man was first placed in a different room then in the same room but not touching and finally the man was able to hold his partner's hand.
PAVEL: In this study we found that partners - specifically partner’s touch decrease pain level if you compared to all other conditions. We found that as partner was more empathetic, the facticity of his touch was higher.
MOLLY: Not only that, the more empathetic the partner the less pain the women felt.
PAVEL: For the couples were male partner was more empathetic as they have a higher reduction in their pain but as a point you need you need your touch to really communicate your empathy.
MOLLY: To read more about this study go to colorado.edu/today and search for holding hands. I'm Molly Pfannenstiel reporting for Brainwaves.
LISA: Of course love doesn't always work out the way we want it to, sometimes love hurts. Here's Brainwaves’ Paul Beique with a surprising new discovery about how you can get over that heartache.
PAUL: Heartbreak, we've all felt it: that lingering ache that feels so real it hurts. In fact brain imaging studies have shown the pain of rejection lights up the same regions of the brain as when we feel physical pain so a broken heart really can feel the same as a broken bone. But how can we ease that emotional pain? New research at the University of Colorado Boulder has uncovered a surprising tool.
LEONIE: There's quite some research on placebo effects on physical conditions, especially physical pain, but also other somatic conditions like Parkinson’s for instance. But there is much less knowledge about how placebo effects on emotions or a kind of affective and mental states work.
PAUL: That's Leonie Koban, a postdoctoral research associate at CU’s cognitive and affective neuroscience lab. For years, scientists here have been studying the placebo effect, that's where sham treatments like sugar pills or fake acupuncture actually work, and they work really well. Some research has shown that when patients believe that a pill is more expensive or has more side-effects it actually works better to ease their pain or relieve their symptoms. Koban wanted to find out if the same held true for heartache.
LEONIE: We know that for instance in the treatment of depression placebo effects have quite a big contribution. And yes one of a kind of most immersive experiences in kind of human life can be kind of the loss or breakup with a loved person and so that’s why we chose like social rejection and a romantic breakup as a kind of stimulus condition.
PAUL: For the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers recruited 40 volunteers who had experienced an unwanted romantic breakup in the past six months. They were asked to come to a brain imaging lab and bring a photo of their ex into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine or fMRI, it shows brain activity in real-time.
LEONIE: Everybody saw pictures of the ex-partner, with an instruction to kind of really live the situation of the breakup and the negative emotions associated with that, and into rate how they feel, and most people felt pretty bad obviously.
PAUL: Then they brought the volunteers out of the machine and they switched things up.
Then have to put as opposed were assigned to a placebo condition where they got this nasal spray with an instruction that it was a powerful painkiller that would also reduce the emotional pain and suffering. The other half was told that this was just control spray they did not have an effect on the pain.
PAUL: Back in the machine both groups looked at images of their ex partners again not surprisingly the control group still felt pretty awful but something remarkable happened with the placebo group they felt less sad and the regions of their brains that are associated with pain they quieted down, while regions associated with pain killing brain chemicals lit up.
LEONIE: I think it shows that the brain reacts very strongly to suggestions and to social information and to expectations in general. What is becoming one more clear across like the whole neuroscience literature is that expectations and predictions have a very strong influence on basic experiences, on how we feel, what we see and what we perceive.
PAUL: More studies are in the works to determine how placebo works in the brain to kill our pain. but the researchers think is simply expecting that something will work will kick-start a process that releases our own natural pain killers. For now they say the takeaway is this; if you're feeling heartbroken do something about it, take a walk, go out with friends throw darts at your ex if you want to, just believing it will work will help it work for more information about this study go to colorado.edu/today and search for heartbreak.
LISA: Thanks for joining us on Brainwaves, I'm Lisa Marshall. Thanks to Andres Belton for creating our intro music, Paul Beique edited this show, Paul and Dirk Martin produced it, Andrew Sorenson is our executive producer, listen in next Tuesday right here on Brainwaves for a conversation about what it really means to cheat in sports.