How Biology Prepares Us for Love and Connection By Summer Allen (February 24, 2022)
Summer Allen, Ph.D., is a Research/Writing Fellow with the Greater Good Science Center. A graduate of Carleton College and Brown University, Summer now writes for a variety of publications including weekly blog posts for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (This article originally appeared on “Greater Good”, the online magazine of Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley) Our brains and bodies are wired for empathy, cooperation, generosity, and connection. Humans are social creatures with a propensity to connect with others and to form relationships. Our relationships can be sources of fun, gratification, peace, well-being, obsession, love, pain, and grief. They inform the rhythms of our days, the work that we do, and how we feel about ourselves—and they add meaning to our lives.
Wired for Empathy Anyone who’s winced when they’ve watched a child skin their knee or witnessed a loved one’s intense grief knows how visceral empathy can feel. Our ability to empathize, to resonate with people’s pain and emotions, is an important driver of how we relate to others. In fact, a study by neuroscientist Tor Wager and his colleagues found that we have a brain circuit dedicated specifically to empathic care—the positive, motivating feelings that drive us to help others in order to relieve their suffering. This circuit includes the nucleus accumbens and the medial orbitofrontal cortex, brain areas involved in rewarding activities like eating and sex. By incentivizing our ability to feel warmth and care in the face of another person’s suffering, activation of this circuit encourages acts of selflessness and compassion.
But our social nature isn’t just a product of the way we are raised or the culture we live in. It’s actually visible in the design and function of our brains and the inner workings of our bodies, which have evolved to support our complex social lives. “To the extent that we can characterize evolution as designing our modern brains, this is what our brains were wired for: reaching out to and interacting with others,” writes neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. We are each equipped with biological mechanisms that underlie our ability to empathize, cooperate, give, and love. These neural circuits underpin all of our relationships, beginning at birth—and maybe even before.
Wired for Cooperation and Generosity Indeed, our brains are hardwired to encourage us to behave socially—even with strangers. This is exemplified in a study by anthropologist James Rilling and his colleagues. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 36 women while they each played a game based on the prisoner’s dilemma with one other woman. In this game, a player behaving selfishly could win $60 and their partner would win nothing. If both players cooperated, they both would win $40. While participants stood to gain more through making selfish choices, mutual cooperation was the most popular outcome. When partners had mutually cooperative interactions, brain regions involved in
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