- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. [upbeat music] I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode is about the biology, psychology and practices
of social bonding. From the day we are born
until the day we die, the quality of our social bonds dictates much of our quality of life. It should therefore be no
surprise that our brain, and indeed much of our
entire nervous system is wired for social bonds. Now social bonds occur
between infant and parent, there even particular wiring
diagrams within the brain and spinal cord and body that are oriented towards
the specific bonds that occur between infant and mother, as well as infant and father. And we have specific brain
circuitries for friendship, specific brain circuitries
that are activated in romantic relationships. And as it goes, specific brain circuitries that are activated when we
break up with a romantic partner or when they break up with us, or when somebody passes away, moves away, or otherwise leaves our
lives in one form or another. Today, we are going to
talk about those brain and nervous system circuitries, we're also going to talk
about the neurochemicals and hormones that underlie their function. And we are going to touch
on a number of important and actionable tools that you
can apply in everyday life. And because we are
headed into the holiday, the New Year and Christmas holiday, that you can deploy in
your various interactions with family members and friends. And should you not be spending time with family members and friends, today, we are also going to talk about how to achieve social bonds out of the context of family and romantic partnership and friendship. So today's episode is going
to include a lot of science, a lot of actionable tools, and I'm confident that you will come away from today's episode with tremendous knowledge
about how you function. For instance, if you're an
introvert or an extrovert, why is that? Turns out there may be a
neurochemical basis for that. Maybe you're somebody that
really enjoys social media, maybe you're somebody that doesn't. Today I'm going to talk about
a gene or a set of genes that predicts whether or not
you will follow more people or seek out more online,
social interactions or fewer. Believe it or not, there's
biology around that now, and it's excellent peer reviewed work. We will also talk about
how bonds are broken, and why breakups can be so painful, not just romantic breakups, but breakups with
friendships and coworkers, and how to move through
those more seamlessly. So regardless of your age, and regardless of whether or not you are in a romantic partnership of one form or another, or not, I do believe this episode
will be useful to you as you explore the social bonds that already exist in your life, and as you seek out new
and changing social bonds. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and
research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of
my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer
information about science and science-related tools
to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality. I've spent a lifetime
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by Headspace right now. So again, if you're interested, go to headspace.com/special offer today. Let's talk about the
biology of social bonding. And I want to point out that I used the word
bonding intentionally. It's a verb. And in biology, we want
to think about verbs because everything in
biology is a process, it's not an event. And when we think about things
in biology as a process, that means it's going
to have multiple steps. And today we are going
to explore the steps, start to finish of social bonding. Meaning how social bonds are established, how they are maintained, how they are broken and
how they are reestablished. Now an important feature
of biology generally, but in particular, as it
relates to social bonding, is that the neural circuits
meaning the brain areas and neurons and the hormones,
things like oxytocin, which we'll talk about today, and the other chemicals
in the brain and body that are responsible for the
process we call social bonding are not unique to particular social bonds, they are generic. What I mean by that is that
the same brain circuits that are responsible
for establishing a bond between parent and child are actually repurposed
in romantic relationships. And this might not come as
a surprise to many of you, many of you are probably
familiar with this idea of securely attached people
versus anxious attached people versus avoidant attached people. We're going to touch on that a little bit, but all of that has roots
in whether or not children and parents formed healthy social bonds, or whether or not they had
challenged social bonds. Now it's clear from the scientific and psychological literature that just because you might have had a not so great or even terrible
social bond with a parent or with some other caretaker
or loved one as a child, that doesn't fate you to have
poor social bonds as an adult, there's a lot of plasticity in the system, meaning it can change, it can rewire in response to experience. And as we will soon discover, there specific components within the neural circuits of your brain that are responsible for social bonding that allow you to place subjective labels on why you are doing certain things and to rewire the neural
circuits for social bonding. So we're going to touch
on all of that today. But the important feature
really to point out is that we don't have
12 different circuits in the brain and body for
different types of social bonds, we have one, and there's some universal features that underlie all forms of social bonds. So we're going to start by exploring what those neural circuits are, and then we're going to see how they plug into different types of social bonds. And then we're going to explore things like introversion, extroversion, where we're going to touch on a little bit about things like trauma
bonds, healthy bonds, and various other aspects of how humans can bond to one another. And as you'll soon discover, there is a unique chemical signature of all bonding of all kinds. And you're going to learn how to modulate that chemical signature. Before we talk about social bonding, I want to talk about it's mirror image, which is lack of social
bonding or social isolation. Now for better, for worse, there is a tremendous
literature on the biology of social isolation, and all of the terrible things that happen when animals or humans
are socially isolated at particular phases of life. Now, for those of you that are introverts, you are not necessarily damaging yourself by deciding to spend less
time with other people. Many people like time alone, I personally am an introvert, I get a thrill out of spending time with one or two close friends, but I enjoy a lot of time by myself. I like to socialize, so I wouldn't call myself
an extreme introvert, but I know there's some
extreme introverts out there. But when we talk about social isolation, what we're referring to is when animals or humans are restricted from having the social contacts that they would prefer to have. And to just briefly touch
on the major takeaways from this literature, which spans back a hundred years or more, being socially isolated is stressful. And one of the hallmark
features of social isolation is chronically elevated stress hormones, like adrenaline also called epinephrin, like cortisol, a stress
hormone that at healthy levels is good for combating inflammation, helps us have energy early in the day, focused throughout the day. But if cortisol is elevated for too long, which is the consequence
of social isolation, the immune system suffers and other chemicals start to be released in the brain and body that are designed to
motivate the organism, animal or human to seek out social bonds. An example of one such chemical is a peptide called tachykinin. Tachykinin is present in
flies, in mice and in humans, and under conditions of social isolation, it's levels go up, and because of the brain areas that contain receptors for tachykinin, people start feeling very
aggressive and irritable after social isolation. Now that should be a little
bit counterintuitive to you, you would think, oh,
you know, if you isolate an animal or a human, and then you give them the opportunity for social interaction, they
should behave very well, they should be thrilled, they're finally getting the nourishment, the social nourishment that they've been lacking for so long. It turns out that's not the case. Chronic social isolation changes the nature of the brain and body such that it makes
social connection harder, and it makes the person who's
been isolated, irritable, even aggressive with other people. Now, I don't want to go too deeply into the biology of social isolation, because it doesn't actually
afford us that much insight into what healthy social
bonding looks like. So today we're going to focus
more on the functional biology, a dual meaning of the word functional, as opposed to the pathology
of social isolation. However, I do want to point out that social isolation
starts to deteriorate certain aspects of brain
and body pretty quickly, but how quickly depends again on how introverted or
extroverted somebody is. So if you're somebody
who is socially isolated for the holidays, or has been socially isolated
for a period of time, and is craving social contact,
that is a healthy craving. And as we'll learn next, the healthy craving for social contact has a very specific brain circuit, has a very specific
neurochemical signature associated with it, and has some remarkable
features that you can leverage in social contacts of all kinds. I think some of the more
important and exciting work on social bonding comes from
the laboratory of Kay Tye. Kay is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, she's an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And in recent years, I would say in about the
last five or six years, her laboratory has made
a fundamental discovery as to why we seek out
and put so much effort into social bonds. And the key discovery that she made is that much like hunger,
much like temperature, much like thirst, we have brain circuits that are devoted to what's
called a social homeostasis. Many of you have probably
heard about homeostasis before, homeostasis is the characteristic of various biological circuits and even individual cells to try and maintain a certain level. It's most easily thought of
in the context of hunger, if you don't eat for a while, your drive to pursue
food and think about food and make food and spend money on food, and indeed to enjoy food goes up. Whereas when you're well fed, you don't tend to seek out food with as much vigor or as much intensity, you wouldn't invest as much
time, effort, money, et cetera. So homeostasis is the
aspect of cells, tissues, and organisms to seek some sort of balance to regulate themselves. In a crude way, you can
think about the thermostat on your home as a homeostatic circuit. When the temperature goes up a little bit, it cools things down to
maintain a certain temperature. When the room gets cold, it hits a certain level
and a sensor detects that, it clicks on and then the heat goes on to maintain a certain set temperature. So that's a simple way of
thinking about homeostasis. Every homeostatic circuit
has three components, or at least three, one is a detector, meaning the organism or the thermostat on your wall has to have some way of detecting what's going on in the environment, all right, in the context
of social bonding, whether or not you are
interacting with others and whether or not those
interactions are going well. So that has to be detected,
that's the first thing. Then there has to be a control center, that's the second thing. And the control center is the
one that makes the adjustments to, in the case of social bonding, to your behavior and to your psychology. So you'll soon learn that
there are ways in which the more time that you spend alone, the more motivated you are to seek out the pictures of faces, the
interactions with actual people, physical contact, and so forth. Now that might seem obvious to you, but thanks to the work
of Kay Tye and others, it's remarkable to learn that there are specific brain centers that are adjusting our
psychology and biology so that we seek out
bonds more aggressively, or maybe we don't because
we are perfectly sated or satiated with respect
to how much contact we've had with other people. Now, the third component
of this homeostatic circuit is the effector. The effector is actually what drives the behavioral response, it's what leads you to
pick up your social media and start scrolling, it's what leads you to text a friend, it's what leads you to
call a friend or make plans and what leads you to follow
through on those plans. So again, those three
components are a detector, a control center, and an effector. And as you'll soon learn, the neural circuit that
controls the social homeostasis actually has a fourth component, and that fourth component is one that places subjective understanding as to why you are doing
what you are doing, and establishes your place in a hierarchy. Now, I know the word
hierarchy can be a little bit of a barbed wire one
because people immediately start thinking about boss and subordinate, or in couples, a leader and a follower. But when we talk about social hierarchies in the context of human interactions, social hierarchies are very plastic, meaning in one setting, one
person can be the leader, in another setting, the other
person can be the leader. You probably have groups of
friends or family members where you're constantly passing the baton as to who's going to drive,
who's going to navigate, who's going to pick the restaurant, who's going to clear the dishes and who's going to do certain
activities and not others. So hierarchies are very dynamic. And as a consequence, social
has to be very plastic and very fluid so that you move from one environment to the next, even with the same people, you have to be able to
make those adjustments. And in the case of the
social homeostasis circuit, those adjustments are made by
a particular brain structure, I've talked about on this podcast before, it's called the prefrontal cortex, it is the seat of our higher
consciousness, if you will. It's what allows us to play
subjective labels on things so we are not strictly input
output, we're not robotic. Meaning if you go to dinner with a friend and they are exceptional
at choosing restaurants, well, in the context of the
social homeostasis circuit, your prefrontal cortex would allow them to pick the restaurant because basically they
are dominant over you in their capacity to
pick good restaurants, at least in this example. Whereas as you leave that restaurant and perhaps you are navigating to a where to get a drink after dinner, or where to walk through the city, perhaps you have the
better sense of direction. And so then the social
bonding has to be maintained as you switch the hierarchy, okay? So that's the role of that fourth element, the prefrontal cortex. Now I just briefly want to
touch on some of the brain areas that thanks to the work
of Kay Tye and others, we now know underlie the
detection, control and response. Okay, I call them the detector,
control center and effector because inside of that description, isn't just a bunch of
names of neural structures, there are also hints as
to what the underlying neurochemicals are, and by understanding what
the neurochemicals are, you can start to think
about tools that you can use to form social bonds and
maintain social bonds in better, healthier ways. So let's talk about the detector first. Now, keep in mind that
you have your senses, you have your vision, you have
your hearing, you have touch, you have smell, you have taste. Sensation as I've talked about many times before in the podcast,
but I'll just remind you, sensation is the conversion of physical stimuli in the environment into electrical and chemical signals in your nervous system. The language of the nervous system is electrical and chemical signals. So photons of light are
converted to electrical and chemical signals, pressure on the skin or
light touch on the skin is converted into electrical
and chemical signals and so on and so forth. So all of that of course is
flowing into the nervous system, but the detector that
underlies social homeostasis involves mainly two structures, one is called the ACC, the
anterior cingulate cortex, and the other is the BLA,
basal lateral amygdala. And when you hear the word amygdala, you're probably thinking fear. But today, as you'll see, the amygdala actually has many different sub compartments and components. And there's a reason why
the basal lateral amygdala, which is associated with certain aspects of aversive behaviors, meaning moving away from certain types of things or interactions, there's a reason why the
BLA is such an integral part of the detector system, and that's because just as it's important to form healthy social bonds, it's vitally important to try and avoid unhealthy social bonds. And so the basolateral
amygdala is mainly associated with these aversive type responses of just moving away from certain things. The control center in the
social homeostasis circuit involves a brain area called
the lateral hypothalamus and the periventricular hypothalamus. The lateral hypothalamus and the periventricular hypothalamus contain neurons that are able
to access the hormone system in order to influence the
release of things like oxytocin, which is a hormone neuropeptide, it's got a part hormone,
part neurotransmitter, it's kind of a hybrid, we're going to talk a
lot about oxytocin today. So we've got the ACC and the BLA, these are their areas are mainly involved in moving away from things,
although also toward them, that's the detector. Then we got the control center, which is in the hypothalamus, and then there's a very
special and important area associated with social bonding that I want everyone to learn, which is the dorsal raphe nucleus or DRN, dorsal raphe nucleus. The dorsal raphe nucleus
is a small collection of neurons in the midbrain,
so it's deep in the brain. And most of the time when
you hear about raphe, R-A-P-H-E, by the way, raphe nucleus, you're talking about serotonin. Serotonin is a neuromodulator
that is often associated with feelings of satiety
after eating, warmth, basically satisfaction with
things that you already have. However, within this dorsal raphe nucleus, there is a small subset of
neurons that release dopamine. Dopamine is a neuromodulator most often associated with movement, craving, motivation and desire. And the neural circuits
that are rich with dopamine are things like the substantia nigra, the mesolimbic dopamine system, the VTA, the nucleus accumbens, et cetera. Those names don't have
to mean anything to you. However, this unique
population of dopamine neurons in the raphe is truly unique in that it's responsible for mediating what I've been calling social homeostasis. It is the effector or the response that mediate social homeostasis. Now I haven't told you exactly
what social homeostasis is. Social homeostasis, just like hunger, is the process by which when
you lack social interaction, you start to crave it. What's very interesting about the fact that there are dopamine
neurons in this raphe structure that is the effector
for social homeostasis, what this means is that
when you are not interacting with people at a frequency or intensity, that is right for you, dopamine is released into the brain. In most popular
conversations about dopamine, and even in scientific circles, when you hear dopamine release, you think about reward or feeling good, because indeed many behaviors and drugs of abuse increase dopamine. That's one of the reasons they have so much addictive potential. However, dopamine is not
associated with feeling good, it is actually the neurochemical that's responsible for movement toward things that feel good. So to zoom out and
conceptualize what we have here, we have a brain area that is a detector that either will move us toward or away from certain types of
experiences or sensations. We have a control center
that is going to release certain hormones and neuropeptides
into our brain and blood, depending on the sorts of interactions that we happen to be having. And we have this response system, which is the dorsal raphe nucleus that contains dopamine neurons. And when we are not
interacting with people at the frequency or
intensity that we crave, dopamine is released, and that dopamine causes us to seek out social interactions of particular kinds. So let's talk about what
social homeostasis is and how it plays out. And again, let's use hunger as an example. So let's say you're a person who eats every three or four hours regularly. So on Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, you're just accustomed to eating
every three or four hours. If just suddenly I steal your meal out of the fridge at work,
something I would not do, but just for sake of
mental experimentation, that would probably cause you to go and seek out food
through some other route. You might buy food, you probably be upset first, but then you go buy
food or replace the food that you were going to eat, you'd be hungry for that food. And indeed there are
hormonal type mechanisms and other mechanisms that
when we eat regularly and we predict that food is coming in, we actually start secreting insulin, which is for mobilizing blood sugar, there are hormones in the bloodstream that make us hungry on a
regular clock-like schedule, and you would seek out more food. Similarly, if you're
somebody who is accustomed to a lot of social interaction, and suddenly I take away
that social interaction, you would feel kind of let down, you would crave a replacement
social interaction. You might be upset that you
had a lunch date with a friend, you're used to having lunch
with them every Wednesday, and they cancel and you
would crave the interaction. Okay, this is called a pro-social craving. And indeed, this is what you
see in animals and humans. If you, what's called
acutely isolate them, which is just a fancy scientific word of saying deprive them
of social interactions in a short-term basis, they start engaging in
pro-social behaviors, they start texting other people, they start seeking out social interactions of different kinds. And that makes perfect sense, right? But thought of from the different side, you could also imagine how well, if you're getting
a social interaction with somebody on a daily or weekly basis, and suddenly you remove that interaction, well, then people might not care, they might just think, well, I'll get the interaction tomorrow or the next day or the next day, because they're sated, much in the same way that the person who eats very regularly might say, "Well, I ate four hours ago, and I'll eat eight hours
later, no big deal." But that's not what happens. There's a prediction
that we are going to have certain types of interactions, and when those interactions don't happen, we replace that lack of
interaction with a drive and a motivation to seek
out social interaction. And that drive and
motivation is caused by, or I should say, is driven by dopamine release
from that dorsal raphe. And so the takeaway is that
when we lack social interaction that we expect, we become pro-social. However, if we are
chronically socially isolated, meaning we don't have interactions with people for a long time, we become actually more introverted. This is separate from all
of the tachykinin stuff that I talked about earlier, or falling into states of chronic stress, but it's well-established now
that in humans and in animals, if you don't give them
enough social interaction, they actually become antisocial. And so this is actually a little bit like what one might see
with long-term fasting. Okay, I gave the example
of eating every four hours, now let's give the parallel
example of somebody who's been fasting perhaps
for two or three days, if they are expecting to eat, and then the meal doesn't arrive, they are not necessarily
going to immediately try and seek out food. And that's a little bit counterintuitive, you would have thought, well, they haven't eaten
in a very long time, they're going to be very
motivated to seek out food, but no, they are accustomed to fasting. Similarly, the social homeostasis circuit works in a way such
that when we don't have social interactions for a very long time, we start to lose our craving
for social interactions. Let's look at the social
homeostasis circuit through the lens of what's commonly called introversion and extroversion. Now, typically when we
hear about introverts, we think about the quiet
person at the party, or the person that doesn't
want to go out at all. And we think about an
extrovert as somebody who's really social, the
so-called social butterfly, who enjoys social
interactions, is really chatty, is kind of life of the party type person. That's the cliche or the kind
of pop psychology cliche, but actually in the psychology literature, that's not really the way it holds up. Many people who appear introverted
are actually extroverted. The quiet person at a party
could be an extrovert, except that they just
don't talk very much. The characteristic of an extrovert is somebody that gets energy or feels good from social interactions, they sort of get a lift, and we can predict that that lift occurs because of some release of dopamine within their brain and body. And indeed there's evidence for that, neuroimaging study support that, other forms of neuro-biological analysis support that as well. We can also imagine that the person who's talking a lot is somebody
who's very extroverted, but oftentimes people who
talk a lot for their work or they're somebody who's very social when you interact with them, that person gets back to their car and is absolutely depleted and
exhausted by that interaction or all sorts of social interactions. So we really can't predict
whether or not somebody is an introvert or an extrovert simply based on their behavior, it's really more of an
internal subjective label. However, if we look at
introversion and extroversion through this lens of the
social homeostatic set point, and we think about
dopamine as this molecule that drives motivation to
seek out social interactions, what we can reasonably assume is that introverts are
people that when they engage in certain forms of social interaction, either the amount of
dopamine that's released is greater than it is an extrovert, that's right, I said greater
than it is at an extrovert, and so they actually feel quite motivated, but also satisfied by very brief, or we could say sort of
sparse social interactions. They don't need a lot of social
engagement to feel sated. Again, the parallel
example would be hunger. This would be somebody who
doesn't need to eat much in order to feel satisfied. Whereas the extrovert, we can reasonably assume
releases less dopamine in response to an individual
social interaction. And so they need much
more social interaction in order to feel filled
up by that interaction. And indeed this is supported by the neuro-biological imaging studies. So rather than thinking about
introverts and extroverts as chatty versus quiet, it's useful to think about
people, maybe yourself, maybe other people you know, as how much social interaction they need in order to bring this social
homeostasis into balance. Now there's the fourth component of this social homeostasis
circuit that I mentioned before, and that's the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex
is involved in thinking and planning and action, and has extensive connections
with areas of the brain like the hypothalamus, which is responsible for
a lot of motivated drives. It also has connections with the various reward centers of the brain, and it can act as kind of an accelerator, meaning it can encourage
more electrical activity of other brain centers, or as a break on those brain centers. A really good example,
it's kind of a trivial one in the context of today's discussion, but it's a concrete one so I'll use it, it would be, I know many people
out there use cold showers as a way to stimulate metabolism and build up resilience
and this sort of thing. If you get into a very cold shower and you feel as if you want to get out, but you force yourself to stay in, you're forcing yourself to stay in because your prefrontal cortex is placing some subjective
label on that experience. Either you're doing it
for a certain benefit or you've got a timer, and you're using the
timer as the regulator of how long you're going to stay in, basically your overriding reflexes. And that's the main function
of the prefrontal cortex. But as I mentioned earlier, the prefrontal cortex components that wire into the social
homeostasis circuit are responsible for evaluating where you are in a given hierarchy. And that affords you a ton of flexibility in terms of the types
of social interactions that you can engage in, and whether or not you're
going to spend time with certain people or not, whether or not you're going
to engage and then disengage. What do I mean by this? Well, let's say you're
an extroverted person, you're somebody that likes
a lot of social interaction and you get a lot of
dopamine release on whole from a lot of social interactions. So maybe one interaction with
a teller at the supermarket, isn't really going to
give you much dopamine, but going to a party will
give you more dopamine, and so you seek out these
larger social interactions. However, you might go to a party where somebody says something or you see somebody there that
you'd much prefer not to see, and therefore you decide to leave. The deciding to leave is regulated by that prefrontal cortex component. So it's important to understand that just because there's
a homeostatic circuit that involves areas like the amygdala and the hypothalamus and
these deep brain regions, like the dorsal raphe, as a human being, you have flexibility over
your social interactions and that flexibility arise
from those prefrontal circuits. So there's a ton of
subjective nature to it, there's a lot of context to it. So while there are some predictable elements of these circuits, they are not simply what we
would call, plug and chug, you have flexibility, you are able to say, "You
know, I love parties, but I really don't want
to go to that party because so-and-so is there." Or, "I very much don't like
going across town in traffic, but I'm going to do it today because a certain collection of people, or perhaps a certain individual will be at that particular party." And so the prefrontal cortex again, is what allows you that subjective ruling or ruling over what would
otherwise just be reflexes. So now I'd like to drill
a little bit deeper into this incredible neural structure that is the dorsal raphe nucleus and this small collection of neurons, the dopamine neurons of the dorsal raphe because while it's a small collection, they are very powerful. Loneliness has been defined by the great psychologist, John Cacioppo, as the distress that
results from discrepancies between ideal and perceive
social relationships. Let me repeat that. Loneliness is not just being isolated, loneliness, as he defines it, is the distress that
results from discrepancies between ideal and perceive
social relationships. It's when we expect things to be one way, and they're actually another way and which way we expect them to be and which way they turn out,
again, is highly subjective. What you expect from friendships, and what other people
expect from friendships could be entirely different, but the circuit that
underlies friendship bonding is exactly the same. And it is this dorsal raphe nucleus and the dopamine neurons in that nucleus that underlie the bond
that is social friendship and all types of social bonds. There's a key finding in the literature, the title of this paper is Dorsal Raphe Dopamine Neurons Represent the Experience of Social Isolation. This is a paper from Kat Tye's lab, the first author is Matthews, Gillian Matthews to be specific. What they did is they were
able to selectively activate the dopamine neurons in
the dorsal raphe nucleus. And when they did that, they induced a loneliness-like state. Now, how did they know it
was a loneliness-like state? They knew because it motivated the seeking out of social connections. This is the kind of social hunger that I was referring to before. Whereas when the dopamine
neurons of the dorsal raphe are inhibited, meaning
their activity is quieted that suppressed a loneliness state. So that's a little
counterintuitive, right? It's a group of neurons
that when activated makes you feel lonely, and when this brain area is not activated, it suppresses loneliness. But if you think about it, that's exactly the kind of
circuit that you would want in order to drive social behavior. When you're feeling lonely, dopamine is released and
it causes you to go out and seek social interactions. When this brain area has
enough social interactions, that's sort of a figure of speech, brain areas don't have
enough social interactions, but when enough social
interactions have happened, that the neurons in this brain areas shut down their production of dopamine. Well, the loneliness state turns off. So what we think of as loneliness as this big kind of dark cloud, or, you know, fog in our
psychological landscape, boils down to a very small set of neurons, releasing a specific
neurochemical for motivation. And to me, this really changes the way that we think about loneliness and that we think about
social interactions. There's so much subjective
landscape to loneliness and to social interactions, but at the end of the day, what it really is is that
we are all social animals to some extent or another, and we all crave social interactions to some extent or another, although the extent will vary depending on where you are in the introversion
extroversion continuum. And it is indeed a continuum. Now, the other aspect of the
study that was really important gets back to that issue of
hierarchy and social rank. What they found is that depending on where you see yourself
in the social rank, the dopamine neurons in the raphe will lead to one consequence or another, meaning moving toward social interactions or moving away from them. So the whole system is set up so that you have a ton of flexibility and control over social interactions. So just a couple of key points
and actionable takeaways based on the information
I've offered up until now, if you think of yourself as an introvert, it's very likely that
you get a lot of dopamine from a few or minimal social interactions. Whereas if you're an extrovert, contrary to what you might think, social interactions are not going to flood your system with dopamine, they actually are going to
lead to less dopamine release than it would for an introvert, and therefore you're going to need a lot more social interactions in order to feel filled
up by those interactions. Now I've been drawing a lot of parallels between this social seeking or avoiding social isolation and hunger, but is that really the case? And could it be that they're
actually interactions between the different drives? Meaning could social isolation or the desire to seek
out social interactions actually relate to the
hunger system and vice versa? And indeed the answer is yes. We don't have 50 different
homeostatic systems and 50 different neurochemicals
to underlie our drive, to eat our drive for
romantic interactions, our drive for friendship interactions, we have essentially one, maybe two, and they all funnel into
the same dopamine system. And there's a beautiful
paper that illustrates some of the crossover between these different
homeostatic drives. The title of the paper
is Acute Social Isolation Evokes Midbrain Craving
Responses Similar to Hunger. This from Rebecca Saxe's lab at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of technology, Dr. Kay Tye is also an
author on this paper, the paper was published
in Nature Neuroscience. It's a really terrific paper. Just to briefly summarize what they did, they took people that were categorized as socially connected
healthy human adults. So these are people that are used to pretty frequent social interactions, and they socially isolated
them for about 10 hours. And they had no opportunity
to access social media, email, fiction reading even, and certainly didn't have the opportunity to interact with people face to face. So what this did is it
increased social craving, both subjectively the people said that they were now craving
social interactions, and then they did brain imaging in response to images of people, people interacting, food, flowers, other types of stimuli, some of the stimuli or these images that we call them stimuli but their images really, had
a lot of social engagement going on in them, others did not, some had a lot of faces
showing, others did not. And as you might suspect, there was activation of
many of the brain areas that we've talked about earlier, dorsal raphe nucleus and other brain areas associated with dopaminergic neurons. When the socially isolated
people viewed social cues, people interacting, faces, and so on and less so
for things like flowers, however, they also had increased responses to images of food, which is interesting and actually is consistent
with the literature that when people are socially isolated, they often will start eating more, or they will change the nature
of the foods that they eat. Now we think of that as comfort foods or soothing oneself through eating rather than social interaction
as a kind of pathology, but while it might not be healthy, depending on the context and the person, it's really important to understand that the reason that happens is because we have a common circuit and that the system meaning the person is actually craving dopamine release. They don't consciously know this, this is all subconsciously carried out, but they're craving dopamine release. And if they can't get it
from social interactions, as they normally would, they'll
start seeking it from food. Now they did an important
reverse experiment as well, where they had subjects go
on 10 hours of food fasting. Now these were not people that
were familiar with fasting, they weren't doing intermittent fasting, they were eating more
typical meal schedules, and so that created
increased hunger, et cetera, but it also increased
their appetite if you will, for social interactions. And so the important point here is that there's a common biology, there's a common circuitry
that underlies homeostatic craving of things that
maintain us as individuals and as a species. And it really places social
interactions as right up there in the list of things that
we could consider so vital for our survival and for our health. Things like food, water,
social interactions really sit within a top
tier amongst each other, and they use the same common circuitry, dorsal raphe dopamine neurons, in addition to other structures, in order to create this drive, to seek out certain types of stimuli. Now, this is a very reductionist
view of social bonding, I realized that, but it's important to realize that while we place all
the subjective context, oh, I miss this person, or I really would like
to avoid that person, at the end of the day, it really all funnels into a system whereby a single neurochemical is either being released and motivating us to seek out more of a
particular type of interaction or is not released, and therefore we are perfectly comfortable staying exactly where we are. As I say this, some of
you are probably thinking, "Oh, that's probably what
happens when you fall in love." And indeed that's the case. When people enter romantic relationships, that to them are very satisfying, there's this period that, you know, that the theory is that it lasts anywhere from six days to six months, although some people
report that this feeling can last many, many years, even decades of just feeling
completely filled up and sated by the experience of
being with that person. So much so that cravings
for food are reduced, cravings for sleep are reduced. Now there's all sorts of activities and things that go along with
new romantic partnerships that take up time, that might
get in the way of things like sleep or things like food. But the point is that dopamine
is the final common pathway by which we seek out things and we end up feeling
as if we are satisfied by certain types of interactions. Now, similarly, if
you've ever been isolated for a long period of time, your focus might have shifted
to what you're going to eat, what you're going to cook for dinner in a much more heightened way, the importance of those sensory stimuli and those types of interactions, and indeed the taste
of food itself expands. So normally when we are
in social relationships that are ones that are familiar to us, we have a balance of
these different drives. But when one particular drive takes over and we are very focused on it, because they all funnel
into the same circuitry, there really isn't the seeking out of certain types of behaviors like food seeking when
we're newly in love. Now that doesn't mean that
food won't taste good to us so that we don't seek it. And indeed, there are
experiments that have been done where if people have just fallen in love, the taste of a strawberry
can just be incredible. The other effect of
dopamine is that it changes the way that we interpret sensory stimuli, our detectors actually change when we are in heightened states of dopaminergic activity or drive. Basically what this means
is that things seem better than they would when we have
less dopamine in our system. The point here is that
there's a lot of crossover, there's a lot of meshing together of different homeostatic drives that they don't exist
in separate channels. And it's only under conditions in which one particular homeostatic drive is kind of being played
out to the extreme, such as the example of falling in love, that we tend to avoid or sort of overlook the other homeostatic drives, and that's because simply
we're getting enough dopamine, we don't need anymore. Up until now, I've been focused on the organizational
logic of social bonding, which is really just nerd speak for how is it that we
form bonds, avoid bonds? Why do people seek out more or fewer bonds than others, et cetera? Now I'd like to shift gears a bit, and focus on what are
some things that we can do to encourage the formation
of healthy bonds? There's a beautiful
study that was published in Cell Reports, Cell Press
Journal, excellent journal. The title of this paper
is Conscious Processing of Narrative Stimuli
Synchronizes Heart Rate Between Individuals. I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but I'd like to mention it again and go into a little bit more depth because it points to specific actionable items that we can all use in order to enhance the quality and depth of social bonds of all kinds. Now this study involved a very
simple type of experiment, they had people listen to a story, everybody in the study
listened to the same story, but they listened to that
story at different times and indeed in different locations. So different people, same story. And they measured things like heart rate, they measured breathing, et cetera. Now, what was the
motivation for doing this? Well, there's a long standing literature showing that our physiology, things like our heart rate, our breathing, our skin conductance, meaning the amount of sweating, can be synchronized between individuals, and that synchronization can occur according to a variety
of different things. There've been studies that
have people look at one another and they look and actually
see that their pupil size of their eyes starts to synchronize. People's breathing can synchronize, people's body temperatures
can even start to synchronize, or at least shifts in body
temperature can synchronize. One person gets cooler, the
other person gets cooler. A lot of this is subconscious, some of it can be
detected by conscious cues like flushing of the skin, or actually seeing
someone's pupils change. But actually the pupil reflex
is a really good example, whereby except for rare cases and certain highly trained individuals, most people can't control
their pupil reflexes in a very deliberate way, it's truly a reflex,
it's an autonomic reflex. So there's a lot of literature showing that within small groups or two people, these physiological signals
can be synchronized. What this study found was
that when people listen to the same story, but at different times, their heart rates start to synchronize. This is incredible because
people are listening to the story at different times, but the gaps between their
heartbeats become very stereotype and map almost precisely onto one another. That's incredible. Now we also know from
an extensive literature that the quality and perceived
depth of a social bond correlates very strongly with how much physiological
synchronization there is between individuals. In other words, when your
bodies feel the same, you tend to feel more
bonded to somebody else. And so this whole thing is
a rather circular argument, when you feel closer to somebody else, your physiology synchronize, and the reverse is true as well, when your physiologies are synchronized, you feel closer to other people. This is what I call
the concert phenomenon, if you ever go to see your favorite band, or you go to a concert
that you particularly love, you often look over at somebody and you'll see them
enjoying the same thing, and they're often in a
similar state as you are, maybe their sort of like
favorite song comes on, and you actually feel
connected to that person. You feel like you're in... Obviously there's a shared experience, but there's also a shared
physiological response to that experience. And so this can happen and mass
with large groups of people, or it can happen just
between two individuals. And as the study points out, it can actually happen
between individuals, without them actually
interacting with one another. When the story they are listening to is the anchor or the
driver of their physiology. This really points to
the fact that the body and the brain are reciprocally connected. Yes, indeed, what we think, what we hear, what we feel drives our physiology, our heartbeat, our respiration, et cetera, but our heartbeat and respiration also are influencing our state of mind. And in this case, it's encouraging certain
types of social bonds when our heart rates are synchronized. And you can leverage this, how can you leverage this? Well, let's take a upcoming
example of the holidays. There's a sort of a joke, I think it was Ram Dass, sort
of Buddhist philosopher type that said, "If you think
you're enlightened, go visit your parents." And I think what he was referring to is that some people, not all people, have challenging relationships
with their parents. We're going to talk about
child-parent attachment and interactions in a few minutes, but you know, some people
have a wonderful relationship to both their parents
and more power to them, I think that's wonderful,
we should all be so lucky. Many people have challenged relationships with their parents, or they have a great
relationship with their parents, but their parents know, or they know how to drive that dart right into that particular soft
piece of psychological flesh by saying just the slightest thing, or even by raising their
eyebrow or rolling their eyes or the tone in which they do something. This is also true between siblings. I think many of you can think of examples where this is true. Many people when they
interact with others, expect that the mere interaction
with the other person is going to create the sense of bonding. And often that is the case, for instance, if are involved
in intimate disclosure, if people enjoy each
other's company so much that just the mere sight of
somebody evokes great feelings and it's mutual, that often can happen. But in many types of social interactions, it's not the direct
interaction with that person that makes us feel close to them, but rather it's shared experience. And shared experience
is shared physiology. That's the point I'm trying
to make by way of this study about conscious processing
of narrative stimuli synchronize this heart rate
of different individuals. So for instance, if you
have a somewhat challenged or somewhat, let's call
it a slight friction in getting close with somebody, or it can be a challenging interaction, oftentimes, it's very
useful to focus outward on some other common narrative, a movie, oftentimes people will
watch a game together. Actually there's a lot of critique that people or families will focus outward too much on external events, but these external events can
be observing the grandchild and how wonderful they are, or observing the meal
and how wonderful it is. Or as we commonly see
in various traditions, there's a story that's repeated each year, certainly in the upcoming holidays, there's Christmas stories, there are themes and traditions, and those themes and traditions anchor a number of different
aspects of our psychology. They're really wonderful, they thread through the ages really, and allow us to link
our own experiences up with previous generations and experiences. But in addition to that, they synchronize our physiologies. And so sometimes it can be useful rather than expecting others
to shift our physiology in the way that we wish, or us shifting their physiologies
in the way that we wish, and then expecting some
bond to mushroom out of that in some beautiful way, to focus on some external stimulus, to focus on something
that will synchronize the physiologies of both people, that can act as a bridge in
order to establish social bonds. And this is not a hack or a workaround for making terrible relationships good, this is actually at the
seat of what we come away from a social interaction with as feeling "Wow, that was
a really wonderful time." Often a really wonderful
time can be by virtue of the specific things that were said, or the specific things
that one engaged in, but more often than not
the final common pathway, we should say, of great experiences was a
great physiological experience and a shared physiological experience. I have a short anecdote
that relates to this, I have an older sibling
and she used to say that when she was in college, the best dates that she ever went on were dates where she was asked to go out and listen to music. She pointed out, however, that oftentimes the guys
that would ask her out would take her to jazz clubs, she always had the theory that they would ask her to jazz clubs because at jazz clubs
typically you would sit down and then she had to conclude
that they couldn't dance. My sister likes to dance. And so anytime someone
actually had the nerve to take her dancing, those turned out to be particularly, let's just say, satisfying
dates and relationships, at least they lasted longer, that's all I know about them, that's all I want to know about them, she's my sister after all. But the theory behind
whoever was asking her out on these dates was it was the right one, which is that if you want
to bond with somebody, you create a common physiological response through a common and shared experience. And that is often a good entryway into establishing whether or
not it's always a question, whether or not there can be
common physiological experience between two individuals. Up until now, we've been
talking about social bonding through the lens of neurocircuits that are already established. However, early in the episode, I mentioned that these
very neural circuits that are responsible for social bonding in adult forms of attachment, be it romantic or friendship or otherwise are actually established
during development. One of the more important, and I think exciting
areas of early attachment as it relates to adult attachment, comes to us from the work of Allan Schore. Alan shore, spelled
A-L-L-A-N, Schore, S-C-H-O-R-E is a psychoanalyst who
also has deep understanding of neurobiology of attachment, both in childhood and in adulthood. And he's focused a lot on differences between right brain and left
brain forms of attachment. Now in an early episode of
the Huberman Lab Podcast, I touched into the fact that
most of what's discussed in the general public in
sort of pop psychology and even in some neurobiology courses about right brain versus left brain, and one side of the brain
being more emotional, and the other side being more
rational is completely wrong. Okay, most of what I see out
there is actually backwards to the way things actually work. And while there is some, what we call lateralization of function, meaning certain brain functions
are handled by neurons on one side of the brain or the other, the idea that one side of
your brain is emotional, and the other side of
your brain is rational is just simply not true. However, the work of Allan Schore points to some very
concrete neural circuits that do have a lateralization bias, meaning they are more right
brain than left brain, or more left brain than right brain, that underlies certain forms of attachment between child and parents, in particular child and mother, and that these right
brain-isms, if you will, and left brain-isms for attachment, get played out again and again in our forms of attachment as adults. So I'd like to talk about
that work briefly now, because I think it
really points to a number of important features of
how we establish bonds and the different routes
to establishing bonds. So within the field of psychoanalysis, there's been a longstanding
discussion, of course, about the so-called
unconscious or subconscious, the things that we are not aware of. And I think there's growing evidence pointing to the fact that
at least one major component of the subconscious or the unconscious is the so-called autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is the portion of our nervous system that controls our reflexive breathing, our heart rate, our skin conductance, meaning our sweating, pupil size, it's the aspect of our nervous system that makes us more alert or more calm. It's the so-called sympathetic,
meaning for alertness, or parasympathetic branch of
the autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic for
more calming responses. Now what Dr. Schore's work and the work of others is now showing, is that early infant-parent, in particular infant-mother attachment involves a coordination or synchronization of these right brain circuits and these left brain circuits, as they relate, excuse me, to the autonomic nervous system. How does this play out? Well, it plays out where
early on as an infant, when you're born, you're truly helpless, you can't feed yourself, you can't warm yourself,
you can't change yourself, and you certainly can't
emulate walk anywhere to get the things that you need. All of those functions, all of those needs rather are
met by your primary caretaker. Typically that's the mother. Fathers of course play a role also, but because of breastfeeding
or even bottle feeding, typically mothers play
a more prominent role. I realized there are exceptions, but that's the general rule. There are now brain imaging studies examining the brains of infants and the brains of mothers as they interact and showing that the physical
contact between the two, the breathing of the mother and child, the heart rate of the mother and child, and indeed the pupil size
of the mother and child are actually actively getting coordinated. In other words, the mother is regulating the infant's autonomic
nervous system primarily, and the infant is also regulating the mother's autonomic nervous system, a small coup from a baby or a cry, which is a stress cry from a baby will definitely regulate
the autonomic nervous system of the mother. This whole right brain
system is directly tapped into the so-called oxytocin system, and we'll talk more about
oxytocin in a moment. Oxytocin again, being this peptide hormone that is involved in
social bonds of all kinds, but that at least in early childhood is very closely associated
with milk let down and milk production. There's actually a lot of stimulation of oxytocin release in the
mother by nursing itself, so physical contact with the nipple, and by the contact of skin
between baby and mother and their specificity there, it's not just any baby that can evoke the most amount of oxytocin
release from the mother. Now, however, there are examples where just holding a child
will evoke oxytocin release in the non-parent or somebody
other than the parent, I think most people experience that. That's the new puppy
or new baby phenomenon 'cause indeed puppies can
invoke oxytocin release as well. The point is not that
oxytocin is only released in response to the primary relationship, or the mother and their child, but rather that the amount of oxytocin scales with how closely related one is to that particular child and vice versa. So there's oxytocin release occurring in both the child and the mother. So this right brain system is an emotional but autonomic system, it is below our conscious detection. Now, as we get older, there's another system that
starts to come into play in parent-child interactions, and this also comes into play in sibling interactions and so forth, and that's the left brain system as described by Allan Schore. Now, again, this isn't about
emotion versus rationality, this is about autonomic versus more conscious forms of bonding. So on the left brain circuit side, there is evidence for based
on neuroimaging studies, but also animal studies
to support the idea that on the left brain side of things, there is a processing more of narratives that are very concrete,
logical narratives, okay. And again, I have to zoom out and just really tamped down the idea that it's not that one side
of the brain is emotional and the other side is rational, but rather that these two things
are happening in parallel. And that there's a bit of a dominance for the left brain circuitry to be involved in the kinds of bonding that are associated with
prediction and reward. So good example would be
reading to a child every night, sitting there and reading, you know, I can recall reading to my niece and seeing her parents read to her. And she had no clue whatsoever
with what they were saying because she, well, at least, I don't know, but she certainly couldn't speak, but she liked looking at the pictures, and it was a very predictable
sort of interaction. It was okay, out come the books, it was usually here's the bath, then there's the pajamas, then there's the lights go down, then out comes the book, and then there's the interaction
between parent and child, which of course usually also
involves physical contact. So it's not like the right brain system and the left brain system
are operating separately, they're operating in parallel. But that sort of prediction and reward kids like to be read to, is generally mediated by
this left brain system. And this carries on as children get older and as parents take on and
evolve their parenting roles. It's very apparent that
healthy social bonding between children and caretaker relies on the fact that
both this right brain system and the left brain system are engaged, that there's a synchronization
of autonomic function, meaning a joining together
in actual somatic feeling, and that there's a
synchronization of experience that's more about some
outward or external stimulus, like reading a book or
watching a show together or enjoying some common
experience of a meal together. And of course, as children get older, they're able to access
more and more cognitively sophisticated things. You can watch a movie with them and they'll make predictions
about which characters are going to show up for instance, or you can take to a concert and they can appreciate the
concert or play in that concert, and they appreciate that
they're being appreciated. Okay, so there are a million different, there's infinite number of examples here, but the idea is that there
are two parallel circuits that are important for establishing bonds, and that this is set up
very early on in childhood. And that it's neither emotional
nor rational, but both. Now both of these circuits
tap into the circuitry that we talked about earlier, where dopamine is released
and molecules like serotonin, which again is a neuromodulator more associated with
feelings of warmth, comfort, and satisfaction with our
immediate surroundings and possessions rather
than seeking of things and motivation and drive
to go look for things, as is the case with dopamine. So there's still interactions
with those systems, but the work of Allan
Schore has stimulated a lot of interest in what are the circuits that underlie this autonomic bonding, this matching of heart rate and breathing, and what are the neural circuits that underlie this bonding
or this synchronization of experience on the
kind of left brain side. And the reason I find
this model so attractive is that it's very clear that
healthy child-parent bonds are established, but
not by one or the other of these right brainer left
brain systems, but by both. And there isn't enough time
to go into it right now, but some of you are probably
familiar with this idea of anxious attached
versus avoidant attached versus there's a kind
of dissociative attached model of infant parent
bonding, just briefly. What's becoming clear
from the neuro-biological imaging studies is that as people start to
advance into adolescence and adulthood and well
into their elderly years, the same circuits that were active and established in childhood are repurposed for other
forms of attachment. And that to have truly complete bonds with other individuals, but in particular with romantic partners, it's important that there
be both synchronization of physiology and
synchronization of these more, I guess we could call them more rational or predictive type circuits. So we can leverage this information, we can start to think
about what sorts of bonds to us feel very enriching
and very complete. We know that we can have, for instance, an emotional
connection with somebody, but we can also have a cognitive
connection with somebody. I have many colleagues with
whom I have deep intellectual connection and convergence with. I won't say that I have
deep emotional connection with most of them, a few of them, yes, but most of them no. Others in my life, for instance, I have a deep emotional connection to, but not a lot of deep
cognitive connection to. A good example would be the connection that I had with my bulldog, who unfortunately passed away. But Costello, we had a very close, emotional connection, right? It was based on touch, it
was based on our walks, it was based on fun,
it was very autonomic. We rarely discussed if
ever what we were doing, we had a felt relationship as opposed to a cognitive relationship. And while I'm sort of
half kidding about that, as an example, it's a really good example, it was a very real bond. And in fact, just as a brief anecdote, I can remember when Costello was a puppy and I was entirely responsible
for his well-being, like any parent of any infant, I lost my appetite for those few weeks when I was house training him and I seem to lose all ability to process any cognitive information. Now I was also sleep deprived, but I was entirely focused
on the autonomic bond that we were forming. And now, thankfully, that eventually was
established pretty quickly. Basically I went on to
just basically feed him, walk him and do everything for him, and we had a wonderful relationship. Now it's very clear that
what we're talking about here is a form of empathy. Empathy is the ability to feel, or at least think we
feel what others feel. Because again, as my colleague
and the great bioengineer and psychiatrist at Stanford,
Karl Deisseroth has said, and he was a guest on this podcast. We really don't know
how other people feel, we just get the sense that
perhaps we are feeling the same thing or we're feeling something
different and we infer, or we project what they might be thinking. Empathy is this sense that we are sensing what other people are sensing, okay. And there's no real way to verify that except if you're measuring physiologies, you could get some insight into that. In the clinical psychology and in the neuro-biological
literature now, it's understood that there
is both emotional empathy, like actually feeling
what somebody is feeling and what is now called cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy is this idea that we both see and experience something the same way at a mental level, emotional empathy is this idea that yes, I can feel what you feel at a visceral sematic or autonomic level. And it's absolutely clear
that strong social bonds between children and caretaker involve both emotional empathy, this autonomic function
and cognitive empathy, that there's a mutual understanding of how the other person feels and how the other person thinks in order to be able to make predictions about what they're going to do. It's also very clear based
on the emerging literature, that romantic relationships, and to some extent, friendships, although friendships have
been explored a bit less in the literature, that emotional empathy
and cognitive empathy are both required in order to establish what we call a trusting social bond. And there's some
beautiful experiments done using neuroimaging of two
individuals playing a trust game, essentially a game where
you're trying to predict the other person's behavior, whether or not they will
behave in a trustworthy way. And these experiments
tend to use real money, so there's actually something at stake, and you can more or less predict whether or not somebody feels a lot of trust for somebody else and whether or not they believe they will act in a trustworthy manner based on whether or not
they have high levels of both cognitive empathy
and emotional empathy. So for those of you that are seeking to establish deeper bonds
or bonds of any kind, it's important that you think about synchronization of bodily states, we talked about that earlier, and synchronization of cognitive states. Now that doesn't mean you
have to agree on everything. In fact, oftentimes
people who feel very close to one another cognitively and emotionally argue about all sorts of things and disagree about a lot of things. In fact, we probably know, I certainly know people and couples that seem to bond through arguing, which is an interesting
phenotype in itself. But the point isn't that
there'd be total convergence of opinion or stance, but rather that we understand
how the other feels and we believe that they
understand how we feel, that we understand how
the other person thinks and that they think that we
understand how they think. So it's a reciprocal
loop between two people that involves this cognition
and involves emotion, and it's grounded as Dr.
Schore has pointed out in our earliest forms of attachment. And that makes perfect sense because the same sorts of circuits that are responsible
for social homeostasis, the kind of right brain
and left brain circuits that are responsible for
infant-mother attachment, and then later for more intellectual or predictive type attachments between child and caregiver, are the exact same circuits
that we superimpose into all other types of relationships throughout the rest of our life. And I should just mention
that for those of you that might be thinking that you
had a less than satisfactory infant-caretaker interaction
or form of attachment, you are not alone. And in fact, much of the work
that Dr Schore focuses on is about how those early circumstances can be understood and rewired toward the development of
healthy adult attachment. And if you want to check out his work, he's actually got a few
YouTube videos out there, again, it's Allan Schore,
spelled S-C-H-O-R-E, I'd love to get him as
a guest on the podcast. He also has a book it's called
"Right Brain Psychotherapy." And it's an excellent book, it's actually pretty accessible even if you don't have a background in biology or psychology, I found it to be very interesting, there are a lot of excellent references. And again, if you're listening Dr. Schore or, you know, Allan Schore, we'd love to get you on the podcast. One of the key themes to understand about biological processes is that they often work
on short timescales and longer timescales. And up until now, we've
mainly been talking about the stuff that
happens on short timescales. So the kind of
synchronization of heart rate or activation of a given set of neurons that dumps some dopamine and causes us to seek out
more social interaction or less for instance. But every biological circuit and function needs to have longstanding
effects as well. And typically when you're thinking about longstanding effects
in the brain and body, you start looking towards
the hormone system. It's not always the case, but more often than not neuro-transmitters and
neuromodulators are pretty quick, whereas hormones have
longer lasting effects. In fact, a lot of hormones
can actually travel to the nucleus of a cell and actually change which
genes are expressed. So if ever there was a hormone
or hormone-like molecule that's associated with social
bonding, it's oxytocin, and oxytocin has gotten a ton of interest in the popular press. I don't know why that is, but perhaps it's because of
all the incredible things that oxytocin is associated with. And it is indeed a lot of things. So for instance, oxytocin
is released in the brain and binds to receptors in
different locations in the body, and the moment you hear
different locations in the body receptors, you should think, well, it's going to have
lots of different effects. And indeed it does. Oxytocin is involved in orgasm, it's involved in social recognition. That's right, when you see people that you consider your people, your team, your group, your
friends, oxytocin is released. Even if you don't come into
physical contact with them. Oxytocin is also associated
with pair bonding, the feeling that they are your person, and that you are their person, is the common language people use. It's also associated with honesty. Believe it or not, there are experiments that show that if people receive oxytocin through an inhalation spray, that they will be more honest and forthcoming about certain things. And the oxytocin system and
variants in the oxytocin system have also been associated with autism and various autism spectrum disorders. So there's a huge range of behaviors that's involved in
because you have receptors for oxytocin in lots of
different brain structures and areas of the body
that do different things. However, there's some very
consistent effects of oxytocin that are worth just listing off, and then I'm going to talk
about two separate pathways by which oxytocin can
manifest its effects, and how you can actually regulate oxytocin in ways that are interesting
and perhaps useful as well. First of all, oxytocin
is involved in the milk, let down reflex, lactation. This makes perfect sense, there needs to be a cue by which the suckling on the nipple of the infant causes the release or let down of milk, and milk let down and lactation is controlled by
prolactin, another hormone, but also oxytocin. Oxytocin is also involved
in uterine contraction during childbirth, it's involved in cervical dilation to allow the baby to pass
out of the birth canal. So it's involved in induction
of breastfeeding and of labor, which is remarkable and
especially remarkable given that in males or at
least in some male animals and in some male humans, and I do want to say some,
and I'll get back to this, it can be involved in
the erection response, it can be involved in the orgasm response in both males and females. Although there there's a
very interesting difference. There's a little bit of
controversy about this, but it does appear that in females, sexual and orgasm cause
the release of oxytocin, whereas in males, sexual stimulation does not cause the release of oxytocin, but rather a different
molecule vasopressin is triggered by sexual stimulation, but orgasm does trigger the
release of oxytocin in males, but with a delay of about 30 minutes. Why that is in the specific
function of that is not clear, but it does seem the oxytocin is involved in the sexual response in
both males and females. The main types of interactions
that release oxytocin at high levels are first of all, that the interaction between individuals that see each other as very
closely associated, right? So a infant and mother are
very closely associated whether or not it's an
adopted infant or not. Oftentimes they are in close contact, oftentimes they are from
the very body of the other. And so the amount or the
amplitude of oxytocin released tends to scale with how closely
associated individuals are just the sight of one's
baby or smell of one's baby can evoke oxytocin release and
vice versa from the mother. Physical contact, even more
so in romantic partners. Physical contact, even the sight of a picture of a partner can evoke oxytocin release
and sexual desire also trust. So there's this whole
collection of psychological and physiological things that are packaged into the oxytocin system. It's not just a one way system. Now, a lot of people out there have written to me asking
about inhaling oxytocin, asking whether or not
that can actually increase the depth or rate of pair bonding. And there does seem to be
some evidence for that. Now, I think in most places,
oxytocin is prescription, although it might be
over-the-counter and others, I don't know, you have
to check where you are as far as I know you can't just go out and buy oxytocin nasal spray, although you may be able to, forgive me, I'm naive to that point. But it's interesting
to note that some drugs that are being used in clinical trials for things like trauma, and are also used in
clinical therapeutic settings for increasing bonding,
in particular MDMA, also called ecstasy, increase dopamine and
serotonin, we know this, dopamine and serotonin have
a vast number of effects throughout the brain and body that I've talked about some of them today and another podcast. But one of the lesser
appreciated effects of MDMA is that it causes huge increases, massive increases in
the amount of oxytocin that's released into the brain and body. And MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
while still illegal, as far as I know, certainly in the United States, but in most places throughout the world, is being explored in clinical trials, not just for trauma, not just for depression, not
just for eating disorders, but also for reestablishing what seemed to be fractured
or challenged bonds between romantic partners. And while most of the
attention has been focused on the dopaminergic and serotonergic aspects of the MDMA response, it's clear to me, based on
my read of the literature, that the enormously elevated oxytocin that occurs during the consumption of MDMA is part of the reason why people experience during the MDMA
session and post MDMA session, a much greater degree and depth of kinship or feeling of connection with that person. And it's important to point out that that feeling of connection
is of the autonomic type that I was referring to
earlier, al Allan Schore's work. That it's not of the,
oh, we think about things the exact same way, we agree on everything now, it's more of that their
physiologies are synchronized. So much so that even in
individuals within a couple where one does a therapeutic
session and the other does not, they still both feel quite
more bonded to the other. Now, oftentimes in the
clinical therapeutic setting, both members of a couple
or romantic partnership, whatever form it may
take or consuming MDMA and then thereby experiencing
elevated oxytocin and this enhanced sense of bonding, and again, it's this autonomic bonding, but it's so powerful. Meaning the oxytocin
response is so powerful that it doesn't even require
that both individuals experienced this user
inflection and oxytocin, and that's because one person's physiology is influencing the other, and oxytocin is this
kind of bridging signal that occurs in both nervous systems, synchronizes things like heartbeat, obviously it's associated with touch. And so if people are touching or people are engaging
in the sorts of behaviors that I mentioned earlier, that can increase oxytocin further, that's going to further
increase the depth of the bond. But the point here is that
there's actually a hormonal glue between individuals,
okay, infant and mother, friends, teammates, romantic
partners, and so on. And that hormonal glue is oxytocin. Now people vary in the
extent to which they feel or have the capacity to
feel bonded to anyone. And it is now generally understood that some of that variation might depend on variations
in oxytocin receptors or what are called gene
polymorphisms for oxytocin. Genes can have a number of
different sequences in them, they're nucleotide sequences, we won't go into genetics right now, As and Gs and Cs and Ts
in various combinations are what make up the genes. Genes are transcribed into RNA, RNA is translated into proteins
that affect cells, okay? The oxytocin gene encodes for oxytocin and variants in that
gene change the amount and function of oxytocin. There's a really interesting study published just this last year
in a relatively new journal, the journal has a kind of a
unusual name it's Heliyon, I think it's Heliyon and not hellion, but Heliyon, H-E-L-I-Y-O-N. This is a Cell Press journal, as far as I can tell,
it's a very solid journal, certainly the Cell Press
label is very stringent. And this paper is entitled, The Relation Between Oxytocin Receptor Gene Polymorphisms, which just means changes in
genes or variations in genes, Adult Attachment and
Instagram Sociability, and Exploratory Analysis. This is a really wild study, but I liked the study, It's very thorough. First author, last name,
Carollo, C-A-R-O-L-L-O. And what they found was that by analyzing the genetics of different individuals who are on social media, and looking at how many people
those individuals follow and how many people follow them, and what they come up with is a so-called social desirability index, they were able to correlate
in a very straightforward way that people that carry certain
variants in the oxytocin and oxytocin receptor genes
actually seek out more online, social Instagram interactions. So some people I know, I
won't name their names, only follow, you know, anywhere
from zero to six accounts, other people follow thousands of accounts and they take the ratio of how
many accounts people follow versus how many followers they have, arguably not a perfect measure, but a nice one in the
sense that you can do this in a completely unbiased way with many, many thousands of subjects. And then they were able
to get genomic analysis from a number of these subjects. And it turns out that people who have, let's say higher levels
of oxytocin function or potential levels of oxytocin function, actively seek out more social
interactions on social media. So this, I think represents
an important first in the area of how social media
and data from social media are starting to merge with biological data in terms of predicting how
avidly people will seek out social interactions of an online type. And nowadays, we hear
a lot about how online, we are connected but we're not really... What is it? We're communicating but we're not connected or the connections aren't real. I think we're going to
need to revisit that. While I'm certainly a believer in the idea that face-to-face communication and common interactions with people standing in the same space or playing sports together,
enjoying music together, enjoying meals together
is vitally important, there's an entire generation, or several generations of people that are coming up who
much of their social interaction has been online. And if you think about it, all of the things that
we've spelled out earlier about common mental narrative, this left-brain system al Allan Schore, or autonomic bonding or
synchronization of heartbeats according to common stories, all that is happening in
online social interactions. When a thousand of us look at the exact same Instagram post, yes, we will have a thousand
independent responses to that, but chances are many of us
have a similar or same response based on the data that
we talked about earlier in synchronization of heartbeats. And so we are socially
bonded with other people through social media, and it's very apparent
that the oxytocin system is playing some role in that. And this, if we zoom
out makes perfect sense, because again, dopamine,
serotonin, prolactin, oxytocin, none of these systems were placed in us or are organized within us in
order to encourage specific and only specific types
of social interactions. The one that we can say
is absolutely critical is the child-parent interaction, right? Because children simply can't
take care of themselves, they need a caretaker. I should have said caretaker, not parent. But infants, if they're
not taken care of will die. But beyond that, we have evolved or come to realize many different types of social interactions, and online interactions
nowadays are very, very common. I'm certainly involved in them, I'm guessing you're
involved in them as well, we're involved in one
right now, for example. The oxytocin system is
absolutely threaded through and largely responsible for those types of social bonds as well. And incidentally, "Oxytocin" is the name of the fifth song on Billie Eilish's second album, "Happier Than Ever." So we've covered a lot about the biology and indeed the neural
circuitry and neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology of social bonding. I want to make sure that I
highlight the key features that go into any and all
of your social bonds. First of all, all social
bonds have the potential to include both what we
call emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. And so if you are
interested in establishing and deepening social bonds of any kind, it's important that you put some effort towards this thing that
we call emotional empathy, which is really about
sharing autonomic experience. Now, depending on the relationship that will take on different contexts, what's appropriate in one type of bond is not going to be appropriate
in another type of bond. Physical contact for instance, is appropriate for certain types of bonds and not for others. Nonetheless, emotional empathy and the synchronization
of autonomic function, heart rate breathing, et cetera, can be best accomplished
by paying attention to external events in
particular narrative story music and perhaps sports or
other types of experience as an external stimulus to drive synchrony of those internal states. The other aspect of forming
deep bonds is cognitive empathy. Again, cognitive empathy is
not about agreeing on things or viewing things the exact same way, it's about really gaining understanding of how somebody else
thinks about something, really paying attention to that, and then paying attention
to how you think about and feel about something. So that's what cognitive empathy is. So emotional and
cognitive empathy together are what make up these really
robust bonds of various kinds. Now we also talked about
introversion and extroversion, and I'd like to try and dismantle
the common misperceptions about introversion extroversion because when we look at the
neural circuitry, as you recall, introverts are not people that don't like social interaction, it's just that they
feel filled up or sated by less social interaction
than would be an extrovert. And that's because at least
according to the social homeostasis circuit model, they actually get more dopamine from less social interaction. Okay, it's like somebody who is sated by less amount of food. Okay, it doesn't mean they
don't have the same appetite, it just means that they
get more from less. Whereas extroverts get
less dopamine release from an equivalent amount
of social interaction. And of course these aren't
precise measurements, but on the whole extroverts
need more social interaction, more frequent, more
long-lasting, et cetera, in order to achieve
that dopamine threshold, because again, dopamine is driving that craving of social interaction. And once it's met, then people don't feel like they have to seek
social interaction as much. So for those of you that feel
as if you're an introvert or extrovert or that know
introverts and extroverts, it's not about how verbal people are, it's not about how much they seek out social interactions per se, it's about how much social interaction is enough for the given person. Now, the whole reason for
providing this framework, this biological circuitry, et cetera, is not to simply put a reductionist view on things that you
already realized and knew, but rather to give you
some leverage points to understand how is it
that you form social bonds? How is it that you might be challenged in forming certain types of social bonds? And to think about entry points, to both establishing and reinforcing social
bonds of different kinds. Hopefully it will also give
you insight into why breakups, whether it be between
friendships or romantic partners can be so painful. A breakup of any kind
involves both a breaking of that emotional empathy
and that cognitive empathy. And indeed it has a neuro-biological and hormonal underpinning, right? We go into some sense, a social isolation, even if we're surrounded
by other types of people, if one of our major sources of oxytocin or one of our major sources of dopamine suddenly is not around, that is incredibly devastating
to a nervous system. And to borrow from the great psychologist and neurobiologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who says, you know, we
are not just individuals, we are nervous systems
influencing other nervous systems and their nervous systems
are influencing us. I think that's the right
way to think about it. So it should come as no surprise that breakups of various
kinds are very challenging regardless of what underlied that breakup, whether or not somebody's moving or an actual decision of one person to leave the relationship
or both, et cetera. On the more positive
side, largely biological, but to some extent, psychological
view of social bonding will also allow you to
orient in this vast landscape that we call social bonds. To understand why it is
perhaps that you seek out so many online interactions. Maybe you have the oxytocin polymorphism that causes you to want
more, follow more accounts, or interact more with
people and comment more, respond to comments, who knows? I'm also hoping that it
will allow you to get a lens into how you can
strengthen the social bonds that you want to strengthen, and to establish new social bonds that you want to establish. None of this has meant to manipulate or leverage social bonds
that wouldn't otherwise form, to the contrary, it's about identifying what are the specific routes by which social bonds are created and allowing you, I
hope, to work with people that you feel challenged in
forming social bonds with, or maybe deciding to completely divorce from those social bonds entirely because there's absolutely no hope of ever forming emotional
or cognitive empathy. I certainly acknowledge that
that could be the case too. So there's both a light
and a dark and a gray zone to this entire thing that
we call social bonding. What is not graded, but
is absolute, as they say, is that social bonds are vitally important to us as a species, whether or not they are at a
distance over social media, whether or not they
are in close proximity, actual physical contact. Today, what I've really
tried to illustrate is that there are a common set
of biological, neurochemical and hormonal underpinnings to
what we call social bonding. And so while it is complex
and it is subjective, it involves the hierarchies, it involves our previous upbringing, it involves our goals, et cetera, it is not infinitely complex, and in that sense, it is tractable. Hopefully I've offered you some leavers or some entry points under
which you can both understand and move towards social bonds that would be more satisfying
and more gratifying for you. That's certainly one of the goals. The other one is that hopefully
if you are a clinician or simply the friend that people go to, or the family member that people go to when they are challenged through various challenges
and social bonds, that you can start to perhaps pass along some of the information as a
way of people understanding what they're going through
as they are breaking up, but also as they are falling in love, as they are forming attachments, and as they are being
challenged with attachments. That's my hope, and especially as you head into the holidays and end of year, but also as it continues into 2022, I would hope that you
would take this knowledge and apply it in any of the ways that you feel are meaningful
and adaptive for you. If you're learning from
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