Dr. Dev Manoli

Until they meet a member of the opposite sex, they're kind of just waiting to fall in love, as it were. And then when they mate, they form this attachment. And this attachment shows up in a couple of different ways. One of the behaviors that's really sort of the most adorable is this huddling behavior. Just sort of huddling with each other. They'll sometimes groom.

Sometimes they just fall asleep because it's very calming. And that's very specific to the pair-bonded partner.

I still remember her coming into the office and, you know, she was holding a graph and just kind of sat down. She said, so we finally finished the scoring and they formed partner preferences perfectly like wild type. And I mean, we were shocked because that was really, really not what we expected.

Because of evolution, the parts of the brain and the circuitry that are responsible for pair bond formation don't really rely on oxytocin. So the way that I have been phrasing it is, you know, oxytocin might be love potion number nine, but one through eight are still in play, right? There's more there than that one entry point.