The Brain in Love: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life (25 page)

8. Do something a little edgy. Along the same lines as novelty, getting your partners heart rate up may make her more interested in you. She might interpret the rush as a feeling of excitement for you. One experiment showed that if people experience fear on a date, they often misinterpret that feeling as love. So dates at a theme park may be more successful than a science lecture (unless it is on the neuroscience of sex). A bungee jump might even seal your relationship for life. If you do this with an anxious partner, however, he or she may leave you behind forever to avoid the fear. It is important to individualize these suggestions to your partner. For example, being a passenger with someone who drives fast may be exciting for partners who need excitement and speed, but it may be a disaster for someone who is naturally more cautious.

9. Use every sense. Utilize all of your partner’s senses to make yourself unforgettable. Our five senses are the vehicles that bring the outside world in. They are what sees, hears, tastes, smells, and
feels so that we can know another person. A large portion of the brain is dedicated to your senses. It has been estimated, for example, that 50 percent of the brain is dedicated to vision. Use these senses to embed yourself deeply into the sensory circuits of your partner’s brain. Embedding works best if you are helping to encode good memories or feelings, rather than annoying ones. Begin by taking a look at how you emit each sense and see if there is a way to smooth out any rough edges to make yourself more desirable, more enticing. For instance, it often amazes me when I hear couples talking to each other. So often the words and voice tone are so grating that I am sure they are embedding anger and irritation day in and day out.

One way to assess your own voice is to listen to it on a tape recorder. The sound of your voice can be a powerful elixir of passion or an irritant to those around you. I used to be surprised when I heard my recorded voice. It sounded different being played back to me than it did when I heard it while I was talking. Record your voice and listen to the quality of it. Then, focus on adding a bit of richness or lower tonal quality to your voice and record it again. When you play it back, hear if your voice sounds more pleasing to you. If it does, keep working on it. Initially, it takes practice to be conscious of such aspects of your self, such as the voice, but with time it gets easier. Some people benefit from a voice coach to help smooth it out. When I started to do radio and television interviews, I used a wonderful voice coach who was ever so helpful. When a friend from Buffalo decided to lose some of her accent to do more voiceover work, it took her almost a year of conscious speaking before it became her natural sweet voice. I’m not suggesting that anyone change who he is to be more appealing, rather than to augment the natural beauty that already exists within. Just because we develop a habit or certain way of doing something doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do it. So, be open to using the natural talents that exist within you to be more of who you truly are in the world around you.

Once you have found a nice tonal quality and voice level and
speed, leave a sultry message for your mate on voice mail. By leaving a recorded message that is fun and appealing, your mate can play it back, over and over, whenever he or she needs a lift or a smile. This is a wonderful way of embedding yourself in your partner’s day-to-day life.

Next, look at the other aspects of your senses to see if they can be refined for the purpose of embedding yourself in your partner’s consciousness. For instance, it’s nice to take some time to get a manicure and pedicure, shave and groom a few extra moments, check your breath, keep your lips soft and supple for more sensual kisses, find a scent that your partner likes and wear it to embed your odor on clothing that he or she will smell throughout the day. If you like to cook or draw, make something special and send it along on his or her journey for the day. Take pictures of yourself, as well as yourself and your partner, in clothing or environments that would inspire your mate while looking at it. Frame that picture and give it as a gift or place it somewhere where it will be seen often. In feng shui, it is believed that a loved one’s picture placed in view of the bed is good for that relationship. Flowers or little knickknacks that your mate would like as gifts are nice reminders that you are near, as these items can be placed within immediate sight. Use every sense available, be it smell, sight, sound, taste or touch.

Here are more sensory specific ideas:

Vision
. Give pictures of yourself and your loved one embracing. Wear sexy clothes. Go shopping with your partner and let him or her help you pick out part of your wardrobe. Wear clothes that he or she likes on you. Take care of your appearance. Find out if there are any visual cues that upset your partner and take care of them if possible. Add candles or a fire to the environment. The light from gentle flames often enhances sensuality.

Sound
. Watch the sound and tone of your voice. Decrease distractions when you are together. Music is a wonderful way to connect
with your partner. By introducing your mate to new sounds and choosing “your song” together, a switch will be flipped to remind her of you whenever she hears it. This can be a double-edged sword if you break up. One woman I dated once made me a fabulous mix CD of my favorite songs and a few of hers. I was so touched by this gesture that every time I played the CD I had kind thoughts of her. Be conscious of your partner’s taste in music and when a new album comes out or that band comes to town that he really likes, buy tickets and experience his favorite sounds together. Learn to dance together to this music. Perhaps, even create exotic dances that you can do for your partner to melodies that are really impassioning to them. The subconscious power of music is one of the most powerful elixirs of passion that can be utilized to strengthen a long-term partnership.

Smell
. Put sweet fragrances in the environment, such as flowers or potpourri. Cook his or her favorite foods. Use some of the aphrodisiac foods and scents from Lesson Nine. Take a shower, or not, before you make love. Check with your partner to see what he or she likes best. Napoleon specifically asked Josephine not to take baths for two weeks before he came home from battle; he loved her natural scent.

Touch
. Touch is very important in the embedding process. Learn to touch your partner in subtle, pleasing ways, be it massaging while she is driving or working at the computer, placing your hand on her while you are talking, brushing your head against his body as you walk by, kissing her in places that are pleasing to her throughout the day, learning to massage him in ways that create ecstasy, and learning to sleep so that some part of you and your partner is in contact. Every sense is an entry point to embed yourself in your partner’s mind. If you take the time to do this practice, it will make all the difference in the world in your intimate encounters and longevity of your relationship.

Kisses belong under touch and taste. Remember the very
strange-looking little man, the homunculus, that represented the sensory strip in the brain that processes touch? He has very large lips, because there are millions of nerve endings in the brain dedicated to lips. Kisses are critical to bonding. Do you have lips that fit your partner’s? Learn to use your lips in ways that please him or her. Pay attention (use your prefrontal cortex) when kissing. What stimulates him or her? What causes her to moan and come back for more? Linger when you kiss. I once read a book by Ellen Kreidman called
The 10 Second Kiss
. I thought it was a brilliant embedding technique. Her premise was that rather than giving a quick peck to your partner to say hello or good-bye, spend ten seconds and make the moment last. She says that a “10-second kiss” can transform a simple act into a clear message of “I love you” each and every day. The technique takes communication to a level so deep, it’s magical. Eliminate pecks; we are not chickens.

Taste
. Avoid bad tastes and enhance great ones. Kissing someone with the taste of candy or cinnamon on their lips can be very sexy. Take care of bad breath, but see what tastes your partner loves. Someone may really think Listerine mouthwash is the sweet elixir of passion, while others might feel it reminds them of going into surgery. Check out what your partner likes. Also, keep the genital area as tasty as possible. Some people love performing oral sex on their partner after they have bathed, others prefer a more natural state. Ask. Feeding each other during meals can also be very exciting. When you taste something you love, feeding it to your partner with words like, “This is great, try it,” shows her that her pleasure is on your mind.

10. Do something great for someone your partner loves. When we take care of important people in our partner’s life, we take care of him or her. This is one of the most powerful bonding techniques I know. When you care for your partner’s children, parents, friends, employees, or even pets, the partner’s limbic brain is grateful and you become more deeply embedded in his or her consciousness.
I am often amazed at how many people do not understand this technique. Given that there are many second and third marriages in our society, dealing with a partner’s children is often an important issue. Setting up competition or conflict between a new love and his or her children almost always leads to disaster. In bonding to someone, spend time with his or her children, or help her parents and you will be much more likely to be solidified in her head.

11. Summarize and immortalize loving moments. When you have great moments with your lover, write them down and send your missive to him or her. When you experience a great moment, that by itself helps to embed it into memory; when you then take the time to write it down, it helps to further engrain it into the memory tracks of the emotional brain.

Writing loving thoughts have occurred from the beginning of recorded history.

Bridegroom, dear to my heart
,

Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet. …

Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber
.

You have captivated me
,

Let me stand tremblingly before you
.

That’s the enticing start to the oldest love known poem in the world. Scholars discovered the poem over a hundred years ago buried in the ancient sands of Iraq. The poem was written around 2030
BC
by a Sumerian scribe from the city of Ur using a reed stylus on wet clay, which was then baked, preserving the tablet of passion for forty centuries. The passion, scholars say, was part of a Mesopotamian festival ritual of fertility and power called Sacred Marriage.

12. Learn from parrots. Neurologist Barbara Wilson has trained and kept parrots for years. She says that they have taught her a lot about relationships (no kidding): Share your food with the one that you love, groom each other, sing constantly, build
nests together,
and repeat
each other’s words and actions! If people would think like parrots, all babies would be planned. Parrots don’t just randomly mate. First, they have to genuinely like the other bird. Then there has to be a constant reliable source of food, light, and stability. Then there has to be a nest box. The male inspects it first, then the female. The female waits until the male feeds her. Only then do they get frisky. If one dies, the other one in the mated pair grieves and mourns and has been known to just up and die, too.

Barbara once had a mealy Amazon parrot that she rescued from a too small cage at a breeder’s farm. Having been stolen from the wild (you can trace their import origin from the type and numbering on the band on their leg), the female bird had not seen another mealy (specific subspecies of parrot with its own squawking language) since its infancy. She was depressed and overweight from being in the confining cage. Barbara put the bird in a large cage, where the parrot got significantly better, but still she was lonely. Barbara never heard a peep out of the bird, even when she once cut her toenail too short. Barbara did some Internet parrot dating for the bird and found a single male of her subspecies in south Texas. After several e-mails, phone calls, and high-level bird trading, Barbara drove sixteen hours round-trip to get her parrot a “man.” When she brought the male back, both birds were ecstatic. They squawked for hours at loud volume. The two birds
dated
for three weeks. They would not share a cage. Barbara opened the two cages, they would meet on top, and squawk for hours. Eventually they groomed each other, then each night they would go back to their own cage. Finally, Barbara says she had a talk with them on the human facts of life: She only had room for one big cage and was tired of cleaning two cages, so like it or not, they were going to have to live together. They slept on separate perches for three more months despite genuinely loving each other. The female lost weight and looked years younger due to the affection. Then they slept together, ate together, and made a life that worked.

When you ask her about parrot behavior, she says, “It’s just
your own behavior and words repeated back to you. And if you ignore them they start to bite and pick their feathers, and you wonder why you have a mean and ugly bird.” After she achieved success with parrots (she had a flock of twelve at one time), she decided it was time to find a husband. Really cool fact, she tells me, men catch on quicker than birds.

Lesson #10: Make it last by leaving enduring impressions on your partner’s brain
.

FIX THE BRAIN ISSUES
THAT GET IN THE WAY OF SEX