The Social Animal (32 page)

Harold was experiencing what Stendhal called “crystalization.” In his essay, “Love,” Stendhal described a salt mine near Salzburg, where workers would throw leafless branches into one of the abandoned parts of the mine. Then, when they would retrieve the branches two or three months later, they would find them covered with shimmering, diamondlike crystals, beautiful beyond all reckoning. “What I have called crystalization,” Stendhal wrote, “is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.”

This is what the unconscious scouts do: They coat people, places, and objects with emotional significance. They coat the objects of our love with shimmering and irresistible light. They induced Harold to love Erica even more. It meant he had no interest in other women. It meant he had no dreams but her.

If you had asked Harold how Erica made him feel, he would have told you he felt as if some superior force from outside had taken over his life. He could now understand why the pagans had conceived of love as a god. It really did feel as if some supernatural entity had entered his mind, reorganized everything, and lifted him to some higher realm.

And the odd thing is if you had looked inside Harold’s brain while he was in this enchanted state, you would not have found some separate and magical part aflame. Helen Fisher’s research into the brain activity of people who are deeply and madly in love reveals that it’s some of the prosaic, furnacelike parts of the brain that are actually most active at moments of intense romantic feeling—parts like the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area (
VTA
). The caudate nucleus, for example, helps us perform extremely mundane tasks. It preserves muscle memory, so we remember how to type or ride a bike. It integrates huge amounts of information, including childhood memories.

But the caudate nucleus and the
VTA
are also parts of something else, the reward system of the mind. They produce powerful chemicals like dopamine, which can lead to focused attention, exploratory longings, and strong, frantic desire. Norepinephrine, a chemical derived from dopamine, can stimulate feelings of exhilaration, energy, sleeplessness, and loss of appetite. Phenylethylamine is a natural amphetamine that produces feelings of sexual excitement and emotional uplift.

As Fisher wrote in her book
Why We Love
, “The caudate helps us detect and perceive a reward, discriminate between rewards,
prefer
a particular reward, anticipate a reward, and expect a reward. It produces motivation to acquire a reward and plans specific movements to obtain a reward. The caudate is also associated with the acts of paying attention and learning.”

In other words, love isn’t separate from everyday life. It is a member of a larger family of desires. Arthur Aron of Stony Brook University argues that on an fMRI machine, the brain of a person experiencing the first burst of love looks, in some ways, like the brain of a person in the midst of a cocaine rush. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp argues that the experience of opiate addiction mimics the pleasure lovers feel being around each other. In each case, people are gripped by a desire that takes over their lives. Inhibitions fall. The object of desire becomes the object of an obsession.

Aron argues that love is not an emotion like happiness or sadness. Love is a motivational state, which leads to various emotions ranging from euphoria to misery. A person in love has the keenest possible ambition to achieve a goal. A person in love is in a state of need.

Harold had not been notably ambitious so far, but now he was in the grip of some deep and monumental force. In
The Symposium
, Plato treats love as the attempt to reunite two halves of a single being. And indeed, Harold’s love made him feel incomplete. Even when they fought, it was better to be with Erica in misery than to be without her in happiness. Even if he did nothing else, he had to erase the boundaries between them and meld their souls together.

Wolfram Schultz is a neuroscientist at Cambridge University who did research on monkeys in hopes of understanding Parkinson’s disease. He would squirt apple juice in their mouths and observe a little surge in the dopamine neurons in their brains. After a few squirts, he noticed that the dopamine neurons began to fire just before the juice arrived. He set up an experiment in which he sounded a tone and then delivered the juice. After just a few rounds, the monkeys figured out that the tone preceded the juice. Their neurons begin to fire at the sound of the tone, not with the delivery of the juice. Schultz and his colleagues were baffled. Why didn’t these neurons simply respond to the actual reward, the juice?

A crucial answer came from Read Montague, Peter Dayan, and Terrence Sejnowski. The mental system is geared more toward predicting rewards than in the rewards themselves. The mind creates predictive models all day long—for example, that tone will lead to this juice. When one of the models accurately anticipates reality, then the mind experiences a little surge of reward, or at least a reassuring feeling of tranquility. When the model contradicts reality, then there’s tension and concern.

The main business of the brain is modeling, Montague argues. We are continually constructing little anticipatory patterns in our brain to help us predict the future: If I put my hand here, then this will happen. If I smile, then she’ll smile. If our model meshes with what actually happens, we experience a little drip of sweet affirmation. If it doesn’t, then there’s a problem, and the brain has to learn what the glitch is and adjust the model.

This function is one of the fundamental structures of desire. As we go through our days, the mind generates anticipatory patterns, based on the working models stored inside it. Often there’s tension between the inner models and the outer world. So we try to come up with concepts that will help us understand the world, or changes in behavior that will help us live in harmony with it. When we grasp some situation, or master some task, there’s a surge of pleasure. It’s not living in perpetual harmony that produces the surge. If that were so, we’d be happy living on the beach all our lives. It’s the moment when some tension is erased. So a happy life has its recurring set of rhythms: difficulty to harmony, difficulty to harmony. And it is all propelled by the desire for limerence, the desire for the moment when the inner and outer patterns mesh.

This yearning for harmony, or limerence, can manifest itself in small mundane ways. People experience a small spark of pleasure when they solve a crossword puzzle or when they sit down and find a perfectly set table that meets their standard of “just so.”

The desire for limerence can also manifest itself in odd ways. People are instinctively drawn to the familiar. For example, Brett Pelham of the State University of New York at Buffalo has shown that people named Dennis and Denise are disproportionately likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence and Laurie are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. People named Louis are disproportionately likely to move to Saint Louis, and people named George disproportionately move to Georgia. These are some of the most important choices in people’s lives, and they are influenced, if only a bit, by the sound of the name they happen to be given at birth and the attraction to the familiar.

The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding. A carpenter merges with the tool in his hands. A mathematician loses herself in the problem she is solving. In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.

The desire for limerence propels us intellectually. We all like to be told how right we are (some radio and cable-TV pundits make millions reinforcing their audience’s inner models). We all feel a surge of pleasure when some clarifying theory clicks into place. We all like to feel in harmony with our surroundings. As Bruce Wexler argues in
Brain and Culture
, we spend much of the first halves of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last halves trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models. Much late-night barroom conversation involves someone trying to get other people to see the world as we do. Nations don’t clash only over land, wealth, and interests; they fight to compel others to see the world as they do. One of the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so stubbornly unresolved is that each side wants the other to accept its historical narrative.

Most people are deeply moved when they return to their childhood home, to the place where their mental models were first forged. When we return to the town where we grew up, it is the details that matter most—the way the drugstore is in the same place as it was when we were young, the same fence around the park, the angle of the sun in the winter, the crosswalk we used to traverse. We don’t love these things for their merits, because the crosswalk is the best of all possible crosswalks. The mind coats home with a special layer of affection because these are the patterns we know. “The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every attempt to win its regard,” C. S. Lewis once observed. “But it must be an
old
gardener, one who has ‘always’ been there—the short but seemingly immemorial ‘always’ of childhood.”

The desire for limerence is at its most profound during those transcendent moments when people feel themselves fused with nature and with God, when the soul lifts up and a feeling of oneness with the universe pervades their being.

Most important, people seek limerence with one another. Within two weeks of being born, babies will cry if they hear another baby in distress, but not if they hear a recording of their own crying. In 1945 the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an American orphanage. The orphanage itself was meticulously clean. There was a nurse for every eight babies. The babies were well fed, but they were left alone all day, in theory to reduce their exposure to germs. Sheets were hung between the cribs for the same reason. Despite all the sanitary precautions, 37 percent of the babies in the orphanage died before reaching age two. They were missing one essential thing they needed to live—empathetic contact.

People gravitate toward people like themselves. When we meet new people, we instantly start matching our behavior to theirs. It took Muhammad Ali, who was just about as quick as anybody ever, 190 milliseconds to detect an opening in his opponent’s defenses and begin throwing a punch into it. It takes the average college student 21 milliseconds to begin synchronizing her movement unconsciously with her friends.

Friends who are locked in conversation begin to replicate each other’s breathing patterns. People who are told to observe a conversation begin to mimic the physiology of the people having the conversation, and the more closely they mimic the body language, the more perceptive they are about the relationship they are observing. At the deeper level of pheromones, women who are living together often share the same menstrual cycles.

As the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni notes, “Vicarious” is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mental processes. When we sense another’s joy, we begin to share that person’s laughter as if it were our own. When we see agony, even up on a movie screen, that agony is reflected in our brains, in paler form, as if it were our own.

“When your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity,” C. S. Lewis writes. A friend’s love, Lewis continues, “free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.”

Once people feel themselves within a group, there is a strong intuitional pressure to conform to its norms. Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment in which he showed people three different lines of obviously different length. Then he surrounded the test subjects with a group of people (secretly working for Asch) who insisted that the lines were the same length. Faced with this group pressure, 70 percent of the research subjects conformed at least once, reporting that the lines were the same length. Only 20 percent refused to conform to this obvious falsehood.

We don’t teach this ability in school—to harmonize patterns, to seek limerence, to make friends. But the happy life is defined by these sorts of connections, and the unhappy life is defined by a lack of them.

Emile Durkheim demonstrated that people with few social connections are much more likely to commit suicide. In
Love and Survival
, Dean Ornish surveyed research on longevity and concluded that solitary people are three to five times more likely to die prematurely than socially engaged people.

Achieving limerence, on the other hand, can produce an overwhelming feeling of elevation. When the historian William McNeill was in the U.S. Army in 1941, he was taught, in boot camp, how to march. Soon, this act of marching with his fellows began to alter his own consciousness:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.