Arthur Brooks

Unless you stay drunk.

What's the ladder of love?

So Diotima of Mantinea was this prophetess that Socrates sought out.

So Socrates sought out Diotima of Mantinea, and she described to him that the way to find the meaning of life starts with this ladder.

And each rung of the ladder gets you closer to the meaning of life.

And the first rung of the ladder is falling in love.

The first rung of the ladder is actually attraction toward the beautiful other.

romantic attraction not just like you know chris is awesome he's so smart he's got such a great show it's such a great conversation such a good friend thank you thank you but it's it's like that spark that you can't quite understand no actually we do understand neurochemically what's happening when you're falling in love we know how the sex hormones start and then we get the the catecholamines actually involved along the way and then we get

a really dramatic drop in serotonin, and then we get the neuropeptides in the sequence.

We know when the sequence is off between two people is why they don't actually succeed in a relationship.

There's all kinds of really fascinating neuroscience of falling in love, but it's still a mystery.

I tell you, the neuroscientists who are doing this cutting-edge research, they can fall hard in love just like anybody else.

They can be like, I don't know what happened.

I don't know what happened.

Yes, you do.

You wrote that paper.

Right?

But still, I mean, it's like, I teach this stuff to my students at the Harvard Business School about the neuroscience of falling in love, but I don't understand this relationship with my wife.

I just love her.

You know, I just, it's like, okay, yeah, a lot of oxytocin and vasopressin and, you know, and there's some amount of dopamine and norepinephrine involved and there are drops of serotonin when you're fighting.