Essentials: The Science of Love, Desire & Attachment

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are going to talk about the psychology and the biology of desire, love and attachment. One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology is this notion of attachment styles. And this was something that was discovered through a beautiful set of studies that were done by Mary Ainsworth in the 1980s, in which she developed a laboratory condition called the strange situation task. The strange situation task involves a parent, typically a mother, in the studies that were done, but a parent or other caregiver, bringing their child, their actual child, into a laboratory. And there's a room with a stranger. And the mother enters the room with the child, and there's some toys in the room. And typically the mother and the stranger will talk. Obviously the stranger is part of the experiment. It's not just some random person off the street. And the child is allowed to move about the room. They can play with toys or not. But then at some point, the mother leaves. And then at some point later, designated by the experimenter, the mother comes back. And what is measured in these studies is both how the child, the toddler, reacts to the mother leaving and how the child reacts to the mother returning at the end of the experiment. So there are a lot of variations of this, but the basic findings are that toddlers, children, fall into four different categories of attachment style. The first style is the so-called secure attachment style. The secure attachment style is one in which the child will engage with the stranger, with the experimenter, while the parent is present in the room, but that when the parent or other caregiver leaves, the child does get visibly upset. However, when the caregiver, meaning the mother or father or other caregiver returns, the child visibly expresses happiness that the caregiver has returned. And the interpretation of this is that the secure child feels confident that the caregiver is available and will be responsive to their needs and their communications. These children are also very good at exploring novel environments after the parent is gone and while the parent is there. The second category is the so-called anxious avoidant or insecurely attached. They do not exhibit distress on separation, and they generally tend to have some tendency to approach the caregiver when they return, but there doesn't seem to be a general expression of joy. The third category is the so-called anxious ambivalent slash resistant insecure category. The anxious ambivalent resistant insecure toddlers really show distress even before separation from their mother or other caregiver. And they tend to be very clingy and difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns. And the third category of attachment style is the so-called disorganized or disoriented or D for the letter D babies. It seems like these children just don't really know how to react to a separation. And they just start to manifest behaviors and emotional tones that aren't observed in other situations. Now what's interesting about this from the perspective of desire, love and attachment is that the categorizations of children into one of these four different categories as toddlers is strongly predictive of their attachment style in romantic partnerships later in life, which is to me both amazing and surprising and not surprising all at the same time. The good news is that these templates can shift over time. And one of the more powerful ways to shift those templates over time is purely by the knowledge that they exist and the understanding that those templates are malleable. So, I mentioned that the neural circuits for child parent or child caregiver attachment are repurposed for romantic attachment later in life. But what are these neural circuits? What do they do? I mean, it's so attractive, if you will, to think about a brain area that controls love or a brain area that controls desire or a brain area that controls attachment, but it simply doesn't work that way. Instead, there are multiple brain areas that through their coordinated action create a sort of a song that we call desire or a song that we call love or a song that we call attachment, not a literal song, but rather different brain areas being active in different sequences and with different intensities can make us feel as if we are in the mode that we call desire or in the mode of love or in the mode of attachment. But beneath all of that, is this element of autonomic arousal? So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system is it's kind of a seesaw. We can be alert and calm or we can be very, very alert. We can be in a state of panic. We can be fast asleep. So we can be extremely calm or we can just be kind of sleepy, semi calm, but still also alert. So think about it like a seesaw and that seesaw has a hinge and that hinge defines how tight or loose that seesaw is, how readily it can tilt back and forth. Our autonomic tone is how tight that hinge is. And there are biological mechanisms to explain this, but here I just want to stay with the analogy of the seesaw for now.