That it seems to definitely have health benefits, not only in the functioning
of your brain, but potentially even over time, the structure of it.
So there is work now, too, that supports the idea that certain
types of meditation that benefit cultivating compassion and
loving kindness can actually increase the gray matter in your brain.
So this is the kind of more processing component of your brain.
So there's definitely volumes of evidence out there that having stable,
positive, loving social relationships benefits the brain.
>> I think what he meant was connection.
And that question of connection is your connection love.
But I wanted to have a little fun and hear what your research, and
how you came to be able to make the transition between the research you do and
the things that we've just been talking about.
>> Yeah, sure, so what I study is love in a very abstracted sense
because it's much more basic and it's studying courtship and
mating behaviors in very social fish.
>> [LAUGH] >> So unlike humans, these fish don't form
stable bonds, they don't form very complex lasting social relationships.
But they do put a very, very large amount of effort into attracting one another for
the purpose of producing offspring.
And what makes it interesting is that for whatever reason, these behaviors,
evolutionarily speaking, tend to be very unique
in the biology that's underlying them, the genes that are involved in them.
And they tend to vary greatly if you look at multiple species across species.
So two closely related species may have totally different ways of mating.
The males will build little sand castles to attract females, and
each species has its unique way of doing it.
So it could be that males in one species will make a really
large sand castle with some turrets around it.
There could be another species digs out a big pit.
And the females respond to this and they mate,
if the males make it in a way that's satisfying the females, they will mate.
And therefore, the males will be able to pass on their genes and
biologic confirmation to the next generation.
But so what we found actually is that if you go in and
look at the genomes of these fish, so if you look across all the genes that they
have, the way that they differ from each other is actually the way that
humans tend to differ when you look at neuropsychiatric disorders.
It tends to be very complex in terms of the amount of genes that are involved.
So it suggests that when you see changes in behavior,
not just necessarily reproductive behavior, but
kind of more broadly within populations or across time it tends to be similar.
Not only when you look amongst humans, but other animals as well.
So we're starting to get a kind of more general picture of what to expect when you
try to understand the biological bases of these things.
>> And one quick question and then I'd like to go back to humans and their brain.
And that is have you come to have the answers to those questions that
indeed there is this kind of diversity in human brains?
>> So you could think about pretty easily how in fish potentially
the complexity of their brain to process these kind of signals of courtship,
or even if you want to be loose with the language of love,
it could become more complex over time to that selection.
It's interesting to think about in humans then, because there are hypotheses out
there that the human brain and the more specific traits we have, such as language,
complex cognition, even consciousness are products of this process, too.
And that for whatever reason, they came about because females liked males who
were able to whisper more complex poetry [LAUGH] or handle more complex problems.
And that is actually a leading theory of why the human brain evolved so fast.
Because it was in only, as far as we can tell, maybe I think within
the last several tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years,
that we started showing this incredible behavioral complexity.
So the question is how could that happen so quickly?
One of the answers that's convenient for
that is that potentially it's sexual selection because elsewhere in nature we
know that that is an evolutionary process that can make change happen very rapidly.
So that is a neat hypothesis to think about with humans.
It'll be very interesting if more data come out to support that over time.
>> Anything else you felt like saying, particularly relating it, I hope,
to agape love?
because I don't want to get too far away from it.
>> Sure, sure.
Yeah, I think there's evidence, I mean so evolutionary biologists like to explain
altruism from a genetic relatedness perspective.
That when you see it, it tends to be because you're living in a community where
everybody is somewhat related to each other.
So it benefits you to help save some other member if they're your cousin.
And the amount of effort you'll put into it,
people theorize scales with the amount of relatedness.
So the question is, why in humans would we do that for people we're not related to?
And it seems like it is likely related to the expansion of cognitive
ability we have, that we have the ability to not only reason about
other people but somehow elicit an empathic response in us.
So it's not just necessarily hardwired that we're going to try to only save
the people in our family.
But instead for whatever reason, we tend to have kind of
a more general purpose mechanism where we're able to, not everybody does.
But at least we're capable of cultivating a sense of affiliation or agape love for
members of our community that, in kind of a strict evolutionary biological sense,
we shouldn't necessarily feel that for.
And I don't know if that's so rare.
There is increasing evidence in other primates that this can happen.
And it kind of goes against the idea that it's solely a genetic question.
And it could be more complex about social behavior.
If you are able to reason about social behavior, and
it benefits you as a community to be affiliated with each other,
to feel some sense of connection, that in itself can evolve and persist.
But yeah, definitely the question of altruism is, the jury's still out I think
scientifically [LAUGH] in that sense of- >> And the big question for
me from what you just said is it's one thing to feel empathy and
maybe be capable because of our brains or whatever to feel empathy, but it's another
thing to go the next step to compassion, which is to actually do something.
And hopefully that can be trained.
>> Yeah, yeah, because yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of interesting work is being done now with dogs.
That's actually kind of a unique area that might relate to this.
Because in a way dogs are this interesting experiment in evolution where
we've selected for traits that make them more and
more not necessarily like us, but capable of understanding us.
So there have been some recent publications showing that dogs can
recognize a very large number of human emotions.
They're very sensitive to the tone of your voice and
are pretty much constantly reading people's behavior.
And actually, so this is a really interesting case where two species have
created this relationship.
And to a certain extent, dogs almost develop the ability to feel,
using these words is kind of difficult, but something like empathy or
compassion for another species, and provide that, almost, service for us.
So that is another really interesting place to think about that.