“When Match first came to me in 2005, that’s the first question they asked me, you know, why do you fall in love with one person rather than another? Psychologists have long known you tend to be attracted to somebody who is the same socioeconomic and ethnic background, same degree of good looks and intelligence, same religious and social values, same economic and reproductive goals. But you know, you can walk into a room, and everybody is from your background, and same level of intelligence and good looks, and you don’t fall in love with all of them or stay in love with them, so I began to think to myself, okay… Maybe there’s some biology that naturally draws us to one person rather than another. So, I began to look in the brain, and I created a questionnaire that has now been taken by over 15 million people in 40 countries, and I’ve been able to establish there’s four brain systems, each one of them linked with a constellation of personality traits.”
Dr. Helen Fisher on the Science of Love: Romance, Lust, and Attachment
This week, THE IDEALISTS. podcast host and entrepreneur Melissa Kiguwa speaks with world-renowned Biological Anthropologist, Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Science Advisor of Match.com—one of the nation’s foremost researchers in the area of the neuroscience of love, sex, and relationships. A Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute, Helen has also conducted extensive research and written six books on the evolution and future of human sex, love, marriage, gender differences in the brain, and how your personality style shapes who you are and who you love. She is currently using her knowledge of brain chemistry to discuss the neuroscience of team building, business leadership, and innovation.
In this rich, revelatory episode, Helen and Melissa dive deep into Helen’s vast, peer-reviewed learnings around the science of romantic love, attachment, adultery, divorce, and the evolution of courtship.
in the episode:
Helen leads off the episode by painting a picture of the history of gender roles and relationship paradigms as the human race shifted from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian one, and then evolved again with the industrial age to where we are now.
Next, she discusses her broad sweeping research survey across a sample of millions. While the neurology of love is largely the same across culture, race, and sexual preference, courtship continues to evolve in new and compelling ways—from shifts in power dynamics of arranged marriages to those of video chat dates during the pandemic.
Building on that, she discusses the different relational dynamics at play with the different brain systems and chemicals involved, when it comes to romance, sexual attraction, and deep attachment. She also touches on the different personality types who tend to do better together.
Lastly, she shares her audacious wish for her work in personality science to break new ground in the business space. She believes understanding mother nature’s recipe for the brain can help in how we reach different people, build better teams, lead, innovate, and ultimately win.