Love 2.0 (9 page)

For it was those study participants who had been assigned at random to learn loving-kindness meditation who changed the most. They devoted scarcely more than an hour of their time each week to the practice. Yet within a matter of months, completely unbeknownst to them, their vagus nerves began to respond more readily to the rhythms of their breathing, emitting more of that healthy arrhythmia that is the fingerprint of high vagal tone. Breath by breath—loving moment by loving moment—their capacity for positivity resonance matured. Moreover, through painstaking statistical analyses, we pinpointed that those who experienced the most frequent positivity resonance in connection with others showed the biggest increases in vagal tone. Love literally made people healthier.

Upward Spirals Unleashed

It’s time now to step back from isolated scientific findings and take in the big picture. Recall that your body’s positivity resonance operates within a much larger system. Along with love and all the other positive emotions, this system also includes your enduring resources—your physical health, your social bonds, your personality traits, and your resilience. Having assets like these certainly makes life easier, and more satisfying. In addition, though, such resources also serve as booster shots that increase the frequency and intensity of your micro-moments of positivity resonance. Love built those resources in you, and those resources in turn boost your experiences of love. This is not a simple case of cause and effect. The causal arrow instead runs in both
directions at once, creating the dynamic and reciprocal causality that drives self-sustaining trajectories of growth. Through love, you become a better version of yourself. And as your better self, you experience love more readily. It is in this dance between your enduring resources and your micro-moments of love that life-giving upward spirals are born.

Looking out from this more encompassing vantage point, let’s revisit the scientific findings I shared with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. By learning how to self-generate love, you can raise your vagal tone. And with higher vagal tone, your attention and actions become more agile, more attuned to the people in your midst. You become better able to forge the interpersonal connections that give rise to positivity resonance. Through vagal tone, then, love begets love.

Likewise, evidence suggests that positivity resonance raises your oxytocin levels. And under the influence of oxytocin, you grow calmer, more attuned to others, friendlier, and more open. Here, too, your skills for forging connections sharpen, which increases your ability to cultivate positivity resonance. Through oxytocin as well then, love begets love.

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

S
o 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?

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:

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:

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.