I start to think of naughty things I want to do to Angelina Jolie. My eyes drift down to her cleavage. My neurons spit out dopamine. The machine whirs. Hmm. No good can come of this.
The Machine
A quick word about this $2 million gadget that's trying to read my mind. The MRI is to brain science what Galileo's telescope was to astronomy. At least if you believe its proponents. Skeptics — and there are quite a few — question its accuracy as a guide to brain function, especially when dealing with individuals, as opposed to populations. They say that overenthusiastic researchers tend to read too much into the results, committing the scientific equivalent of seeing Jesus in a tortilla.
The fMRI (short for functional magnetic resonance imaging) captures 3-D movies of your brain to chart where the blood is flowing. When you speak, blood flows to the language centers. When you blink your eyes, it flows to the eye-blinking centers.
After studying the results over the years, Fisher has come up with a theory that love is created by three distinct brain systems — those for sex, romance, and attachment. She has described her findings in several books, most recently Why Him? Why Her? Here, an oversimplified version:
The Sex Drive. One of the main lust factories in the brain is a peach-pit-sized lump called the hypothalamus (deep in your skull, sitting just above the brain stem). This controls hunger and thirst. It also has receptor sites for testosterone, which fuels the sex drive in both men and women. So when you're feeling horny, the hypothalamus is working overtime. You don't have to be Richard Dawkins to figure out why evolution gave us the sex drive: Its job is to spread our DNA as widely and often as possible.
The Romance System. This produces the cocaine rush you get from beginning love. And cocaine is more than an idle metaphor. The reptilian brain — one of the nervous system's most ancient parts — floods you with dopamine, just as it does after you snort a line of blow. The dopamine gives you the same high, lack of sleep, delusional optimism, and obsessive thoughts. The great poet Robert Palmer was right: You can be addicted to love. Romance evolved so that you could focus your mating energies on appropriate partners — the most fertile woman, the best providing man.
The Attachment System. This is friendship on hyperdrive. While romance is thrilling, attachment is calming. It's created by a couple of hormones: vasopressin and oxytocin (not to be confused with Rush Limbaugh's painkiller OxyContin). Attachment evolved so that we could "tolerate our partners long enough to raise a kid together," says Fisher.
The three systems are intertwined. For instance, sex boosts attachment. When you have an orgasm, your brain pumps out oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. Which is why one-night stands often last past one night. And why exhausted married couples should force themselves to have sex once in a while.
But the systems can often be distinct, Fisher believes. I will be the first human to test all three at once.
Inside the Machine
It's a few days before the experiment, and I'm busy scouring photo albums in search of three perfect photos of my wife — one to spark each of the love systems. For the sex photo, I find a picture of my wife on the beach on our honeymoon. She's got her back to me and is looking over her shoulder.
Later, Fisher tells me this is an echo of the classic "lordosis" pose favored by female animals. When female horses (or monkeys or pandas, etc.) want to mate, they raise their hips and look back over their shoulder at the male.
The attachment photo is harder. I choose one from a dinner for Julie's thirty-fifth birthday. Julie disapproves. "I have red eyes there. How can you find me attractive?"
"I think you look good."
"There are so many better ones."
"You're not allowed to argue," I tell her.
