Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
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Recall, too, that positive connections with others create neural coupling, or synchronous brain activity between people. With repetition, positivity resonance also produces structural changes in the brain, for instance, rendering the threat-detecting amygdala more sensitive to the calming influence of oxytocin. While much of the work on neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change with experience—comes from research on nonhuman animals, tantalizing evidence has also recently emerged from studies of humans. Becoming a parent, for instance, not only opens the door for parent-infant positivity resonance but also appears to usher in structural changes in brain regions that facilitate positivity resonance. This research shows how love reroutes the neural wiring of your brain, making it more likely that you’ll have healthy habits and healthy social bonds in the future. Through brain plasticity, too, then, love begets love.
Plasticity, or openness to change, characterizes your body’s cells as well. New cells are born within you all the time. Even now, as you take time to read this book, new cells are coming online within you, taking their predetermined place within the massive orchestra of communication and mutual influence that you call your body. Yet not everything about the birth of your new cells is scripted in advance by your DNA. Some aspects are open to contextual influences signaled by the changing biochemicals that course through you. If you feel lonely and disconnected from others, for instance, your circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol will rise. Your cortisol levels, in turn, signal your immune system to alter the way your genes are expressed in your next-generation white blood cells, specifically making them less sensitive to cortisol. When this happens, studies show, your inflammatory response becomes more chronic, less responsive to cues that a crises situation has subsided. This is how, over time, chronic feelings of loneliness can weaken people’s immune systems and open the door to inflammation-based chronic illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and arthritis. The data go further to suggest that feeling isolated or unconnected to others does more bodily damage than actual isolation, suggesting that painful emotions drive the bodily systems that in turn steer you toward dire health outcomes. By tracking how your emotions—and the biochemical changes they trigger—alter gene expression within your immune system, the tools of molecular biology now show how a lack of love compromises your immunity and your health.
Even so, there is ample reason for hope. In countless social exchanges each day, your potential to alleviate loneliness with love is enormous. Your biology, as we have seen in this chapter, enacts your experiences of love. Even so, you have more control over your biology than you realize. Once you grasp the pathways and common obstacles to love, you gain a measure of control over the biochemicals that bathe your cells. To a considerable extent, you orchestrate the messages that your cells hear, the messages that tell your cells whether to grow toward health or toward illness. My collaborators and I are just beginning to chart the ways that oxytocin and other ingredients that make up love’s biochemistry trigger healthy changes in gene expression that may foster physical and mental well-being. Also through the plasticity of your cells, we hypothesize, love begets love.
All of love’s unseen biological transformations—in your brain rhythms, your blood stream, your vagus nerve, and your cells—in turn ready you to become even more attuned to love, better equipped, biologically, to cultivate moments of positivity resonance with others. This latent biological upward spiral is a powerful force: Love can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters your destiny for further loving moments. With each micro-moment of love, then, as I feature in chapter 4, you climb another rung on the spiraling ladder that lifts you up to your higher ground, to richer and more compassionate social relationships, to greater resilience and wisdom, and to better physical health.
Love 2.0: The View from Here
Put simply, your body was designed for love, and to benefit from loving. Human bodies become healthier when repeatedly nourished by positivity resonance with others, with the result that human communities become more harmonious and loving. This clear win-win arrangement is written into our DNA.
Everyday micro-moments of positivity resonance add up and ultimately transform your life for the better. You become healthier, happier, and more socially integrated. Your wisdom and resilience grow as well. Having more resources like these in turn equips you to experience micro-moments of love more readily and more often, with further broaden-and-build benefits. Your body, as biology has it, energizes and sustains this upward spiral. The unseen and heretofore unsung biology of love affects everything you feel, think, do, and become.
This isn’t all about you, though. Love, as we’ve seen, is not a solo act. The benefits that unfold from love for you, then, also unfold for all those who are party to positivity resonance. Seen from this vantage point, emotional and physical health are contagious. Indeed, studies of actual social networks show that, over time, happiness spreads through whole communities. Your friend’s coworker’s sister’s happiness actually stands to elevate your own happiness.
The new science of love makes it clear that your body acts as a verb. Sure enough, some aspects of your body remain relatively constant day in and day out, like your DNA or your eye color. But your brain continually registers your ever-changing circumstances and in turn orchestrates the flux of biochemicals that reshape your body and brain from the inside out, at the cellular level. Your body takes action. Most notably, it broadcasts everything you feel—your moments of positivity resonance or their lack—to every part of you, readying you for either health or illness and rendering you either more or less equipped for loving connection.
I hope you’ve found it mind-opening to zoom in on the biology of love in action—the ways positivity resonance can synchronize your brain and oxytocin waves with those of another, and how, over time, it can build the capacity of your vagus nerve, which points you toward physical health, social skill, and overall well-being. Touring love’s biology, I’ve found, can help ground an otherwise nebulous concept, a concept all too often draped in a gauze of rainbows, unicorns, and cupids taking aim at cartoon hearts. Even so, a fully upgraded view of love can’t stop with biology. It demands that you zoom out as well, to appreciate the ways that love also infuses all that lies beyond your physical body, its effects on your actions and relationships, your wisdom and your spiritual potential. For it is these more encompassing changes that spring up in love’s path that can motivate you to create a better life for yourself. Before moving on to part II, then, in which I offer practical guidance on how to seed love more readily, I want to show you what’s new in the bigger picture that is emerging from the science of love—a picture that shows exactly how creating more positivity resonance in your life influences all that you feel, think, do, and become.
CHAPTER 4
Love’s Ripples
YOU ARE MADE IN THE IMAGE OF WHAT YOU DESIRE.
—Thomas Merton
So far I have urged you to look at love differently, to envision and appreciate it from your body’s perspective, as micro-moments of positivity resonance. In this chapter, we’ll continue to unwrap love’s many gifts as I take you deeper into the science of love. You’ll come away with an appreciation for love’s mind-set and actions, as well as the long-term growth it nourishes.
Learning to see love’s ripple effects can be a lifeline. The signs of love, which for your ancestors were perhaps among the most enticing objects in the landscape, can be so subtle by modern standards that you can miss them completely. If you rush through your morning routine, for instance, inhale breakfast and brush your teeth while driving to work, plow through your in-box and mushrooming to-do list, run to meeting after meeting right up to the end of your workday, race through the grocery store, fix a quick dinner for your kids, send them off to bed, only to collapse in your own bed to fret about the marathon day you face tomorrow, how do you find the time or the energy to kindle those fragile states of positivity resonance?<
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Thinking
Nearly sixty years ago, a decade before the counterculture of the 1960s erupted throughout the United States and beyond, Aldous Huxley famously described his first experience with psychedelic drugs, in his controversial 1954 book, The Doors of Perception. The book’s title cast back to the metaphorical language of English poet and printmaker William Blake’s 1790 book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and inspired the name of the 1960s American rock band the Doors. Blake wrote:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
Building on Blake’s metaphor, Huxley likened the human brain to a reducing valve. It functions to limit your awareness to only those perceptions, ideas, and memories that might be useful for your survival at any given moment, eliminating all else. Although narrowed awareness prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by a flood of images and impressions, to some extent, it can become an overlearned habit, a self-limiting cavern. By comparing—through the use of language—your own reduced experiences of the world to the reduced experiences of others, you can become convinced that your limited awareness represents the reality of the world. Huxley writes:
Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs.
Huxley’s hypothesis that the doors of perception can temporarily swing open wider than usual—even seemingly spontaneously—is now confirmed by brain imaging experiments. Importantly, however, you don’t need drugs, hypnosis, or lofty spiritual experiences to open those doors. Sometimes all it takes is a little positivity.
Through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we can track dynamic changes in blood flow within people’s brains as they perform various mental tasks. Ample past work of this sort pinpoints a distinct brain area that reacts to human faces (the extrastriate fusiform face area, or FFA) as well as a separate brain area that reacts to places (the parahippocampal place area, or PPA). A clever experiment capitalized on this knowledge of brain specificity by asking study participants to decide whether each successive face, shown to them in a central location across a series of slides, was male or female, and to ignore all else. This task was simple; the right answer was always abundantly clear. What made the study more interesting was that each face was embedded within a larger picture of a place, specifically the curb shot of a house, much like you might see in a real estate ad. In theory, if the doors of perception were opened wide, the conjoint images used in this task (that is, the faces nested within houses) would excite both the face (FFA) and the place (PPA) areas of the brain. If the doors of perception were largely closed, however, perhaps only the face area of the brain would become activated.
At random, blocks of these conjoint images were preceded by positive, neutral, or negative images, all rather mild. The images used to create positive emotions, for instance, showed cute puppies or delecable desserts. By tracking blood flow within the FFA and PPA, the researchers could thus compare how wide or narrow each participant’s perceptual field of view was under the influence of different emotional states. The results were clear. Negative emotions narrowed people’s perception, reflected by significantly reduced blood flow within the PPA. Put differently, when feeling bad, people were great at following the task instructions—they ignored all that surrounded the faces so thoroughly that their brains barely registered the presence of the houses. The results for neutral states were much the same. By contrast, positive emotions broadened perception, as reflected by increased blood flow within the PPA. In other words, on the heels of seeing puppies or cake, people’s brains registered both the faces and the houses that encircled them. When feeling good, these data suggest, you can’t help but pick up more of the contextual information that surrounds you. In Huxley’s terms, positive emotions provide a temporary bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. This brain imaging study provides solid evidence that your doors of perception open wider than usual under positivity’s influence.
A related and fascinating series of studies tested stroke patients beset with brain lesions that produce visual neglect, or the inability to perceive and act on information presented within the visual field opposite the brain lesion. A patient with lesions in his right parietal cortex, for instance, is literally unaware of images and words presented within his left visual field. Using both controlled behavioral tasks as well as brain imaging, researchers discovered that when such patients listen to pleasant music, they overcome their loss of awareness. That is, they are temporarily able to see and act on information that simply doesn’t register for them while not listening to music, or when listening to music they don’t like.
One point I wish to make here is that your experiences of love and other positive emotions need not bowl you over to bust open your perceptual gates. Studies like these show that far less intense positive emotional experiences—like taking in inspiring images or listening to upbeat music—open those same doors. What Huxley described as temporary and spontaneous bypasses that circumvent the reducing valve turn out to be the orderly perceptual byproducts of commonplace positive emotions. Indeed, with the emotional know-how I offer you in part II, you’ll be able to infuse any day or activity with expanded modes of consciousness.
As positive emotions open your doors of perception, you become better equipped to connect with others. Your mind’s typical modus operandi, after all, is to be rather self-centered. Your thoughts tend to revolve around what you yourself need and want, and your own concerns. Self-absorption can become ever more extreme when you feel threatened in some manner. By contrast, my collaborators and I have conducted experiments that show how when you feel good, you see beyond your cocoon of self-interest to become more aware of others, more likely to focus on their needs, wants, and concerns, and to see things from their perspective.
Once you actually forge a connection with someone else to create a shared moment of positivity resonance, the doors of perception widen further, in unique ways. First and foremost, you come to view one another as part of a unified whole—a single “us” rather than two separate “me’s.” And compared to other positive emotions, love stretches your circle of concern to include others to a greater degree. Love carries its characteristic care and concern for others, a warmth and genuine interest that inspire you to extend your trust and compassion to them. In fact, a recent attempt to pinpoint the most essential feature of love—a feature that spans all varieties of love, from romantic to parental to platonic—identifies such care and concern, expressed abstractly as your “investment in the well-being of another, for his or her own sake,” as an essential, always-present fingerprint of love. Love’s characteristic care and concern drive you to attend more closely to other people’s needs and help you vigilantly take in and evaluate incoming information so that you can protect them from harm. Love also leaves you with more positive automatic reactions to the persons with whom you’ve shared micro-moments of positivity resonance the next time you meet, an implicit goodwill that paves the way for future experiences of positivity resonance with them. Indeed, studies show that as you learn to cultivate micro-moments of love more readily, your everyday interactions with friends and coworkers become more lighthearted and enjoyable.
Simply put, love changes your mind.
Doing
If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, odds are you tend to see the mind and body as rather separate. “Thinking” seems like one thing, and “doing” quite another. Yet this sharp distinction is only an illusion. New science makes clear that each is cut from the same cloth. Knowing then that love alters your mind’s modus operandi, swinging open your door
s of perception wider, allowing you to recognize your unity with others, care for them, and capitalize on your combined strengths, should make it easier to understand how love alters your gestures and actions. For just as neuroscientific studies show that positive emotions open your perceptual awareness, kinematic studies by my collaborator Melissa Gross show that they also open your torso, literally expanding the (rib) cage in which your heart sits. When your mind and body are infused with good feelings, those feelings lift and expand your chest, a subtle nonverbal gesture that makes you more inviting to others, more open for connection.
Genuine good feelings also open up your face, as your lips stretch up and open into a smile, raising your cheeks to create (or deepen) the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes.
Any positive emotion can draw you to smile and carry yourself with a more open posture. And so any positive emotion can be taken by those around you as a sign to relax and connect. When someone feels safe enough to accept that invitation and joins you with his or her own heartfelt good feelings, love’s positivity resonance fires up. The nonverbal gestures unique to these shared micro-moments of love eluded scientists for decades. In part, this reflected early methodological choices, like overreliance on posed expressions and still photographs. More recently, scientists have taken a more holistic and dynamic look at the spontaneous nonverbal expressions that flow between two people engaged in ordinary conversations infused with mutual positivity. Widening their approach has enabled scientists to uncover the unique nonverbal fingerprint of love.