The Science of Love, Desire & Attachment

The Science of Love, Desire and Attachment, a Huberman Lab Essentials episode with Andrew Huberman. This is a 36 minute deep dive into the psychology and neurobiology of how humans form romantic bonds, what drives desire, and what makes relationships last or fall apart, drawing on decades of research from attachment theory to brain imaging studies.

Section 1. Attachment Styles Begin in Childhood

Huberman opens with one of the most robust findings in all of psychology, the concept of attachment styles. He walks through the landmark research by Mary Ainsworth from the 1980s and her famous strange situation task. In these studies, a mother brings her child into a laboratory room where there is a stranger and some toys. The mother and stranger interact, the child is allowed to explore, and then at a designated point the mother leaves. Later, she returns. What the researchers measured was how the child reacted both to the mother leaving and to her coming back.

From these experiments, Ainsworth identified four distinct attachment styles. The first is the secure attachment style, where the child engages with the stranger while the parent is present, gets visibly upset when the parent leaves, but then clearly expresses happiness when the parent returns. The interpretation is that these children feel confident their caregiver is available and will be responsive to their needs. They are also great at exploring novel environments. The second is the anxious avoidant or insecurely attached style. These children do not show distress when separated and show little joy when the parent returns. The third is anxious ambivalent or resistant insecure, where the child shows distress even before the separation happens. They are clingy and very difficult to comfort when the caregiver returns. The fourth category is the disorganized or disoriented type, where children seem to have no coherent strategy for dealing with separation and display behaviors and emotional tones not seen in other situations.

Here is the really striking finding. The attachment style categorized in toddlers is strongly predictive of their attachment style in romantic partnerships later in life. Huberman says he finds this both amazing and surprising and not surprising all at the same time. The neural circuits that develop for child to caregiver attachment are essentially repurposed for romantic attachment in adulthood. But the good news, Huberman emphasizes, is that these templates can shift over time. One of the most powerful ways to shift them is simply through knowledge that they exist and understanding that they are malleable.

Section 2. The Autonomic Nervous System as the Foundation

Having established the framework of attachment styles, Huberman dives into the biology. He says it is tempting to imagine a single brain area that controls love or desire, but that is simply not how it works. Instead, multiple brain areas coordinate their activity to create what he poetically describes as a song, not a literal song, but different brain areas being active in different sequences and intensities that produce the feelings we call desire, love, or attachment.

Beneath all of this sits the autonomic nervous system. Huberman introduces a seesaw analogy that becomes central to the entire episode. We can be alert and calm, or very alert, or in a state of panic. We can be fast asleep, or just kind of sleepy but still alert. The autonomic nervous system is like a seesaw with a hinge, and that hinge defines how tight or loose the seesaw is, how readily it can tilt back and forth. Our autonomic tone is essentially how tight that hinge is.

The interactions between child and caregiver early in life take both of them from one end of the seesaw to the other. From being very alert in play to being nursed and soothed until falling asleep. And crucially, each person has their own seesaw, and these seesaws interact with each other. Huberman illustrates this with a powerful example from World War Two research. Studies of mothers and children during city bombings found that when mothers were highly stressed during the attacks, their children's physiologies became stressed too, and remained stressed long after the bombing stopped. Researchers followed these children for decades afterward. But conversely, when mothers who turned going to the bomb shelters into somewhat of a game, not trivializing it but managing their own stress, their children did not develop lasting stress or trauma either. The core finding is that children's autonomic nervous systems tend to mimic those of their primary caregiver.

Section 3. The Three Neural Circuits of Love

Huberman outlines three neural circuits that collaborate to drive desire, love, and attachment. The first is the autonomic nervous system, which he has already discussed. The second is the neural circuits for empathy, the ability to see, respond to, and match the emotional or autonomic tone of another person. The third, and this one surprised even Huberman, is the neural circuit associated with positive delusions.

On empathy, Huberman explains that it is more than just listening and understanding. True empathy means that another person's seesaw is driving your seesaw, or vice versa. It is autonomic matching. The key brain structures involved are the prefrontal cortex, which handles perception of the outside world and decision making, and the insula. The insula is a fascinating brain region that allows us to interoceptively pay attention to what is going on inside our own body while simultaneously splitting attention to what is happening outside. It is the insula that enables us to balance awareness of our own feelings with the feelings of another person.

Huberman explains that these empathy circuits, working through the insula and prefrontal cortex, allow us to assess what is happening externally and decide whether to match it autonomically. This is the biological mechanism behind that feeling of being emotionally in sync with another person.

Section 4. Positive Delusions and Why They Matter

The third neural circuit, positive delusion, turns out to be critical for relationship stability. Positive delusion is essentially the belief that only this person can make me feel this way. If you look at what predicts whether a relationship will last, many factors contribute, but they largely fall under this umbrella of positive delusions about your partner.

Huberman then pivots to the flip side, the factors that predict relationship failure, drawing on the work of John and Julie Gottman at the University of Washington in Seattle. The Gottmans identified what they call the four horsemen of the apocalypse for relationships. The first is criticism. Not that criticism has no place in relationships, it absolutely does, but the frequency and intensity of criticism matters enormously. The second is defensiveness, which Huberman interprets as a lack of ability to hear another or adopt their perspective, essentially a failure of empathy. The third is stonewalling, which is another form of empathy failure, a complete turning off of the neural circuit that is so critical for maintaining bonds. The emotional request or response of the other person is completely shut out. And the fourth, the most devastating of all, is contempt.

Contempt has been referred to as the sulfuric acid of relationships, according to the Gottmans. It is the most powerful predictor of divorce and breakups. Contempt by definition is the feeling that a person is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving of scorn. Huberman points out that contempt runs counter to all three neural circuits he has described. It is the antithesis of empathy. It is the opposite of positive delusion. And it completely dissociates the autonomic seesaws. When your partner is excited about something and you are completely unexcited by it, that is contempt in action. No wonder it is so strongly predictive of relationships ending.

Section 5. The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

Huberman then discusses a famous 2015 New York Times article about 36 questions that supposedly lead to love. The questions are divided into three sets that progressively deepen. Set one includes fairly standard questions like what would constitute a perfect day for you and what in your life do you feel most grateful for. Set two goes deeper with questions about most treasured and most terrible memories. Set three gets into genuinely vulnerable territory, asking about embarrassing moments, when you last cried in front of another person, and what is too serious to be joked about.

The viral claim was that if two people sat down, took turns asking and answering all 36 questions, they would fall in love by the end. Huberman acknowledges this sounds ridiculous on the surface, but people who go through the exercise do report feeling as if they know the other person quite well and experiencing levels of attachment or even love and desire they would not have predicted. So what is going on?

Huberman explains that recent neuroscience research has shown that when individuals listen to the same narrative, their heart rates tend to synchronize, even if they are not in the same room. The 36 questions essentially establish a deeply personal narrative that both people share. One person tells their story, the other listens closely, and their autonomic nervous systems begin to match. This is exactly the empathic attunement and autonomic synchronization that underpins attachment. So while the 36 questions exercise might seem like pop psychology, the mechanism by which it works is deeply grounded in neuroscience.

Section 6. Self Expansion and How It Shapes Perception of Others

Huberman then covers a particularly fascinating study published in Frontiers in Psychology titled Manipulation of Self Expansion Alters Responses to Attractive Alternative Partners. Self expansion is a metric that measures how much a person's perception of themselves improves through their relationship. Many people enter relationships because it makes them feel more capable and better about themselves, which Huberman sees as a form of healthy interdependence.

The study worked like this. First, they categorized participants on a self expansion scale. Some people are already topped off in terms of self regard, while others can experience much greater self expansion through praise, particularly from people they care about. Then they had participants hear self expansion narratives from their significant other, either about how the participant was terrific and the relationship was exciting, novel, and challenging, or about strong feelings of love in the relationship more generally. After being primed with these narratives, participants underwent brain imaging while rating the attractiveness of people outside their relationship.

The remarkable finding was that people who experienced self expansion showed lower activation of brain areas associated with assessing attractiveness. In other words, when their partner made them feel expanded and valued, the same set of attractive faces literally appeared less attractive to them. Their actual perception changed. Huberman emphasizes that this means the interactions with our significant others do not just affect how we feel emotionally. They shape our actual perception of the outside world, including potential alternative partners. If you are with someone who benefits from self expansion, the practical takeaway is that making them feel valued and essential to the dynamic of the relationship may literally reduce how attractive they find other people.

Section 7. Hormones, Dopamine, and the Biology of Desire

Huberman moves into the hormonal underpinnings of desire. The common stereotyped view is that testosterone drives sex drive and estrogen somehow blunts it. This is simply wrong. Yes, testosterone and its derivatives like dihydrotestosterone are strongly related to libido. But estrogen is also powerfully associated with desire and mating behavior. People with very low estrogen can experience severely diminished libido. It is the coordinated dance of both hormones in both males and females that drives sexual desire.

A critical misconception Huberman addresses is the idea that simply increasing dopamine will increase libido. While some level of dopamine is necessary, because dopamine is intimately connected to the autonomic nervous system, driving it too high puts people in states of arousal so intense that they cannot engage the parasympathetic arm needed for actual physical arousal. You want to seek sexual activity but your body cannot respond. This points back to the seesaw analogy. Sexual arousal and function require the ability to move back and forth along the autonomic spectrum, not to be pinned at one extreme.

Huberman then discusses three over the counter supplements with peer reviewed evidence for increasing libido. The first is maca root, taken at two to three grams per day. Studies across men and women, athletes and non-athletes, over 8 to 12 weeks show it increases subjective reports of sexual desire, apparently independent of hormone changes. Maca does not seem to increase testosterone based on existing research. The second is Tongkat Ali, particularly the Indonesian variety, taken at 400 milligrams per day. Huberman has previously discussed its ability to increase free unbound testosterone by lowering sex hormone binding globulin, and there are reports of it increasing libido as well. The third is Tribulus terrestris. The evidence here is more mixed. In one study of postmenopausal women taking 750 milligrams per day divided into three doses, testosterone increased but libido did not. However, a separate double blind study using six grams of tribulus root for 60 days found clear and significant increases in various aspects of sexual function. The fact that some supplements affect hormones without changing desire, while others change desire without obviously affecting hormones, underscores the complexity of the neurochemical systems involved.

Key Takeaways

First, attachment styles established in early childhood through the quality of caregiver interactions are strongly predictive of romantic attachment patterns in adulthood, but they are not fixed and can be changed through awareness and deliberate effort. Second, the autonomic nervous system is the foundation of all desire, love, and attachment, functioning like a seesaw that needs to match and coordinate between partners. Third, three neural circuits drive romantic bonds: the autonomic nervous system, empathy circuits centered on the insula and prefrontal cortex, and positive delusion circuits. Fourth, the four horsemen that predict relationship failure, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and especially contempt, all represent failures of these same three neural circuits. Fifth, self expansion, feeling more capable and valued through your partner, literally changes how attractive you perceive other people to be, pointing to a concrete mechanism for maintaining relationship fidelity. Sixth, sexual desire depends on the coordinated dance of testosterone and estrogen in both sexes, and supplements like maca, Tongkat Ali, and tribulus can influence libido through complex pathways that do not always involve obvious hormonal changes.