Dateline, Love,
Sex and Science
Transcript
What IS love? Humans have been asking this question for centuries. Even
today, it's one of the most common searches, every year on Google. But is it a
question that science can answer? Can the mystery of love be unravelled in a
lab?
EMILY SOUKAS, SINGLE GIRL: Hello.
Emily Soukas has been hunting for love for 3.5
years in one of the most competitive dating markets in the world, New York
City. We're here to kind of spot someone who might be your type.
EMILY SOUKAS: Now and now and now. Definitely
not.
REPORTER: No, no, no, no. Is it hard being a single woman in New
York?
EMILY SOUKAS: It's SO challenging. I just - like don't even
bother. Like why? Just why?
In the interests of finding her match, she's willing to put herself and
her heart to the test.
REPORTER: What is your type?
EMILY SOUKAS: Oh... That is like the multimillion-dollar question.
I'd be surprised if most people are, like, self-aware enough to actually know what their type is.
But self-awareness may be only one part of the equation. Modern advancements
in science claim to be able to foresee who she's most likely to fall for, based
on her genetic make-up. Could this be the missing link for Emily to find her
perfect match?
EMILY SOUKAS: You might know what your type is but also know
what's not your type and you still actively go to pursue what's not your type.
REPORTER: Right.
EMILY SOUKAS: In this weird, crazy, messed-up world of...
REPORTER: You want what you can't have?
EMILY SOUKAS: Yeah, exactly.
Technology is also supposedly making love matches easier.
REPORTER: Let's do it! What did you put into your description?
EMILY SOUKAS: I'm like the lovechild of Lesley Knope
and Julia Child. I'm make you cookies and bust your balls.
REPORTER: OK!
Tinder is one of the most popular on-line dating sites in the world
right now, according to 1.4 billion swipes daily. They
indicate interest in potential love matches with a simple swipe. Right for
"yes", left for "no".
EMILY SOUKAS: Justin. Nice back. Like, leave something up to the
imagination. Thomas, 38. I'm confused by you. Jonathan, I'm even more confused
by you.
REPORTER: Tinder is all about first impressions.
EMILY SOUKAS: David! Oh look at you in
front of all the hearts! Oh! You love life! Kind of feel like I would chew him
up and spit him out.
But this starts to frustrate Emily. After all, everyone knows that true
love is more than skin-deep.
EMILY SOUKAS: What am I trying to get as a reaction from someone
else, from a total stranger, who knows nothing about me except for this picture
and 500 characters? It just felt so - just so unnatural to me and it's like you
had to figure out what the game was in order to know
how to play it.
Whether she likes it or not, it's a game her brain is designed to play.
EMILY SOUKAS: Michael, I'm gonna say
"no". No. How picky am I being though? That's the question.
REPORTER: Swipe right on him for sure.
EMILY SOUKAS: Okay.
Scientists are offering a different set of rules to the game of love,
asking us to change our perceptions by ignoring our hearts and listening to our
brains.
DR LUCY BROWN, NEUROSCIENTIST: Hello.
DR HELEN FISHER, ANTHROPOLOGIST: Hi! I'm good.
DR LUCY BROWN: Meet Aaron.
REPORTER: Hello.
DR LUCY BROWN: Aaron, this is Dr Helen Fisher.
Anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher and neuroscientist Dr Lucy Brown have
dedicated their careers to finding the magic ingredients for love.
DR HELEN FISHER: You know, this is a brain system that's like a sleeping
cat. It can be awakened at any time. It can be awakened the moment you see
somebody. If you are ready to fall in love, they say the right thing at the
right moment, and boom, that brain circuitry can be ignited.
Their ground-breaking research was able to map
the flow of romantic love through the brain.
DR HELEN FISHER: You know, we were the first in the world to do this
brain scanning. Mapping love is something that, you know, in prior generations
was really taboo. I mean, people thought love was part
of the supernatural, that you shouldn't touch it - that was magic.
People in love had their brains scanned. The scientists wanted to see
which parts lit up when they saw their partners. The results took them by
surprise.
DR HELEN FISHER: I really came into this thinking that it was an
emotion, that it was a whole series of emotions from high to low. It's got all
kinds of cognitive thinking parts too but what we really ended up finding was
that it's also and predominantly a drive.
In other words, love is not only an emotional reaction, it's
involuntary, a drive, like hunger or thirst. It sits in the same part of the
brain as our survival systems.
DR LUCY BROWN: That drive to love is simple, it's almost like a
reflex, it's almost like the reflex of swallowing, it's that level of the
brain. Part of our survival system, like hunger or thirst.
What's more, love affects our brain in a similar way to drug addiction.
They both release a whole set of chemicals to form a deep attachment.
DR LUCY BROWN: One of the things that's most important about this
work is the realisation that romantic love is a natural addiction. It's the
system that nature gave us that laid down there for attaching to another
person, and drugs of abuse jump onto that system. And that's why we have drug
addictions, because we have this natural addiction system for other people. The
drive to love is totally knowable and it's quite simple. The thing that's
complex is who we love. That's the problem.
Why do we fall for one person rather than another? This is where things
get complicated. Science says that who we are attracted to is influenced by the
balance of chemicals in our brain.
DR HELEN FISHER: Maybe when people say we have chemistry, there's
basic body chemistry that will naturally draw you to one person rather than
another.
All of us have our own unique formula and they believe that knowing your
chemical make-up can help you find true love.
DR HELEN FISHER: There are four brain systems, each linked with a
constellation of personality traits, the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and
oestrogen systems. Those people who are very expressive of the dopamine system
– curious, creative, spontaneous, and energetic - they go for people like
themselves. People very expressive of the serotonin system, traditional,
conventional, follow the rules, respect authority - they go for people like
themselves. In those two cases similarity attracts.
In the other two cases, opposites attract, for example, Hillary and Bill
Clinton. She's the high testosterone. She's get to the point kind of person
there is a reason Americans are not fond of her. Her husband is very highest
oestrogen. The whole world knows that Bill can't stop talking. He cries easily.
He feels everybody's pain. He's the high oestrogen one and she's the high
testosterone one.
So, knowing the basic aspects of your personality could help you narrow
down the field.
DR LUCY BROWN: As a neuroscientist doing these studies over the
past 20 years the conclusion I'm coming to is, you know, your soul mate isn't
out there. It's got much more to do with who you are. And what your brain is
like.
Fisher and Brown use FMRI scans to help identify these different brain
systems and how they determine personality traits.
GIRL: It was great! It was really cool!
But other scientists are taking this theory a step further, and looking
at our DNA as a way to reveal our core personalities.
I'm going to get Emily to test this theory out.
REPORTER: Hello!
EMILY SOUKAS: Hello?
REPORTER: I have brought you a bag.
EMILY SOUKAS: Excellent. Are we ready for this?
REPORTER: I think so.
EMILY SOUKAS: OK, come on in.
Emily has agreed to test her DNA against an ex-boyfriend to see whether
they were genetically doomed from the start. She broke up with her first real
love, Marcus, a few years ago, because of a long-distance relationship. They're
still friends and in the interests of science, Marcus agreed to take this test.
EMILY SOUKAS: OK, how much saliva to do I need?
REPORTER: It's hard to reconcile this with anything remotely
romantic.
EMILY SOUKAS: I mean, what's sexier than spitting into a tube?!
The test is an intimate assessment of her genetic capacity to love. And
what kind of person she's most compatible with.
EMILY SOUKAS: If anything, that just gives me more knowledge, to
understand what works for me and what doesn't and how I can make sure that my
future relationships are as healthy and happy and successful as possible.
REPORTER: How you want your test results to come back?
EMILY SOUKAS: Oh my goodness, that I'm horribly
incompatible with my ex-boyfriend?
REPORTER: Send it off to the lab!
I'm travelling to Toronto, where a lab is testing couples' DNA for how
they're matched for love. As well as analysing Emily and her ex, I've agreed to
put my own relationship to the test. The timing is a little nerve racking. My fiancee Taylor and I are getting married in a week. The
only thing I'm nervous about it I hope that there's nothing crazy that shows
up! What differences, if any, will the test show between a couple who has
broken up and a couple who is about to commit to marriage?
SARA SEABROOKE, SCIENTIST, INSTANT CHEMISTRY: Hi! Come on in.
REPORTER: Hello!
Scientists Ron Gonzalez and Sara Seabrooke
have taken the love science theory and make it into a business called Instant
Chemistry. Hundreds of couples have paid to test their genetic pre-disposition
to love.
SARA SEABROOKE: So the results give you some insight about your
genetic pre-dispositions and gives you insight into
your partner and their genetic pre-dispositions. It gives you
insight into how your relationship ticks, where there might be strong points
and where there might be weak points you can work on.
These two believe that your DNA will let you know what strengths and
weaknesses you may take into a relationship. First, they'll study emotional
compatibility by looking at genes that can affect neurotransmitters, the
chemical messages sent out by our brain.
SARA SEABROOKE: So we look at genes that can affect serotonin,
dopamine and oxytocin, and so neurotransmitters are just chemicals that can act
in your brain and they basically affect how our brain is functioning and how we
respond to stimuli.
For example, serotonin genes have a long and a short variation. Short
means you are passionate and long means you're practical. Two people with the
short gene can experience a decline in marital satisfaction over time.
SARA SEABROOKE: If you have two passionate people come together and they
are married, over 13 years, their marital satisfaction can start to decrease.
That's because in relationships there's good and there's bad but over time, the
bad can start to outweigh the good.
But this is all starting to sound too technical for matters of the
heart, Ron and Sara have good reasons for using science.
RON GONZALEZ, SCIENTIST: An interesting result?
SARA SEABROOKE: I do have an interesting.
They are married and their own results prove that it's not always love
at first sight.
SARA SEABROOKE: I know when I first met Ron, I didn't particularly
want to have much interaction with him, until I started to talk to him and then
I realised, wow, we get along really, really well,
actually. So I don't know if I would've - what I
would've swiped if I had seen his picture on Tinder only without actually
interacting with minimum.
In Tinder, you're swiping past people that you should be spending a
lifetime with?
DR RON GONZALEZ: That’s right! Potentially, yeah.
You're saying that you guys...
DR RON GONZALEZ: I know a lot of couples who when they first met,
they didn't want anything to do with one another. There's no exception here
with myself and Sara.
With the DNA tests under way, it's a waiting game for myself and my fiancee and for Emily and her ex. But in the meantime,
she's decided to ditch Tinder and test out a dating technique called 36
Questions to Fall in Love. To someone she's just met.
EMILY SOUKAS: Lachy? Given the choice of
anyone in the world, who would you like to have as a dinner guest?
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: Off the top of my head I’m going to pick Noam
Chomsky and Sir David Attenborough.
EMILY SOUKAS: Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse
what you are going to say?
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: Ummm, no.
EMILY SOUKAS: I had a really great first
date! It was kind of wild! It really was. I still kind of feel like even if a
few hours later that I'm... I go to replay it in my head and I'm like: what
just happened?
Emily's questions were designed to help fast-track the process of
getting to know someone.
EMILY SOUKAS: It was strange to, like, to have such - I guess an
intimate conversation with a total stranger and for that connection to happen
so quickly.
It also had quite an effect on her date, Lachy.
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: I still feel a little bit of excitement, you
know, because I don't know whether we were already suited to each other but it
felt like it might've done its job.
That quickly led to a second date.
EMILY SOUKAS: Look at those knife skills.
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: Sexy? This is like some sort of modern
interpretation of the scene in Ghost where they're doing the clay-spinning?
EMILY SOUKAS: Sure!
REPORTER: You two went out dancing yesterday?
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: Yes. We went out dancing the night away.
EMILY SOUKAS: Dance machines!
REPORTER: Was it fun?
EMILY SOUKAS: It was so much fun!
LACHLAN “LACHY” MAJOR: Yeah, it was great. I think we ended up having a
kiss, but we somehow managed to be up on some sort of raised platform, and for
a brief moment, it was just the two of us and the
crowd started cheering and clapping and cheering us.
They're showing all the signs of a growing connection. I wonder whether
genetic-based dating might ruin in kind of magic?
REPORTER: Do you think it's inevitable that people will use their
genetic information in their dating lives and in your future?
EMILY SOUKAS: I think we're probably going down that path, which
probably isn't a bad thing.
At the Instant Chemistry lab I'm about to find
out if science thinks my fiancee Taylor and I are
scientifically meant for each other.
REPORTER: All my compatibility results, this is sort of it isn’t it?
SARA SEABROOKE: Yeah.
I'm given a score based on a combination of our emotional compatibility
and potential physical attraction based on our pheromones or hormones that we
can smell.
SARA SEABROOKE: So your overall score was 73. You scored a very
average to what long-term couples did. So it's a good
sign for your relationship.
REPORTER: That's comforting!
But my test also reveals something I'm not so comfortable about. According to Ron and Sara's test results my genetics
pre-dispose me to having a highly analytical nature, the opposite of Taylor's
empathetic disposition, which is strange because I've always thought of myself
as a highly empathetic person.
DR RON GONZALEZ: She has one line which means that she carries the
listener version or the more empathetic version of that gene and then you have
the A version, which is the more the thinker version.
REPORTER: I'm a double?
DR RON GONZALEZ: You're a double thinker, yes. It is rare. You can
see here that it really only pops up one in every 10
people.
REPORTER: Taylor and I seem to have fallen into a pretty normal bandwidth. What does normal mean?
DR RON GONZALEZ: Right. It's extremely hard to get 100% on
everyone. Most people aren't willing to wait hundreds of years before they find
that person. Most people generally make that trade-off and have that 70 to 80%
window that everything just clicks.
Now I need to share the results with my fiancee.
TAYLOR: Hey hon.
REPORTER: I'm calling because I got our test results back. Do you
think that I have a normal amount of empathy?
TAYLOR: I think you are incredibly empathetic.
REPORTER: They're saying I have the least empathy genetically
possible, that the relationship report is concerned that I might not understand
your feelings, I think.
TAYLOR: I would not agree.
REPORTER: They said we have a very normal, healthy relationship.
That we're in like the really - well within the really
healthy normal, these are just some of their findings. The other one was
apparently I have to be concerned with your
risk-taking behaviour or your tendency to risk-taking behaviour. Hmmm. I
told them that we would still decide to get married but obviously
it will be partly up to you.
TAYLOR: I say we should go ahead with it.
REPORTER: I will see you at the aisle next weekend. OK, love
you, bye.
TAYLOR: Love you, bye.
I feel much better. It surprised me that almost all couples' results
cluster within a very small range, around 70%. That includes Emily and her
ex-boyfriend.
EMILY SOUKAS: Hello? How are you?
REPORTER: I'm good.
EMILY SOUKAS: Come on in.
REPORTER: Finally here.
EMILY SOUKAS: Finally here. I'm a little nervous.
REPORTER: Don't be nervous.
EMILY SOUKAS: Well, knowledge is power.
REPORTER: It's fun, though. I think you will be surprised.
EMILY SOUKAS: OK, here we go. Emily's love manual.
REPORTER: Right!
EMILY SOUKAS: Let's see if I can follow it. OK, my compatibility
results were scientifically determined to have a compatibility score of 71
percent.
REPORTER: You know that's not far off Taylor's and mine.
EMILY SOUKAS: Really?
REPORTER: Yep!
EMILY SOUKAS: This is a C score. Wow, that makes a lot of sense.
We both carry the A version of the oxytocin receptor. As a couple, we may both
sometimes feel that though your partner doesn't understand you or doesn't care
you, about this is likely not the case and communicating your emotions in a
more direct matter can help mitigate those feelings. Yeah, I definitely
am like very challenged in communicating my emotions.
Emily and her ex-boyfriend scored highly on physical attraction, but lower
than average in emotional compatibility.
REPORTER: Is it like the science in there confirmed or unconfirmed
the reasons for your break-up?
EMILY SOUKAS: I think it confirmed. Yeah. Everything I read in
there seemed quite spot-on, to describe myself and to describe Marcus. And
that's crazy. I literally spat into a cup and then somehow
they knew my entire relationship make-up in fabric.
Emily put her heart in the hands of science, it gave her answers about
her past but she does remain sceptical. She's learned that there's much more to
love than lust and fantasy.
EMILY SOUKAS: Each relationship that you have, your definition of
love changes, so you can't really rely on love, that that's not anything that
has a ground to stand on, everyone defines that differently. But if you can
shift toward the science part of things and think about compatibility, which
does have a grounds and does have a way in which to
measure it, I think you start to have tools in your toolbox to find more
successful relationships.
Unfortunately, things didn't work out with Lachy.
They had a few dates but they decided to remain friends. She's still looking
for love, New York, like millions of others.
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