You know, the ability to love someone, being in love with someone, it's one of my favorite topics. We've talked about it on the podcast before, once even with my wife, Rebecca.

'When I go through a challenge or when you go through a challenge, we have those decisions to make at the time. And we- we're choosing the one that keeps our relationship strong.

Anyone that knows us well knows just how lucky I am, how lucky I feel that she's in my life. And it's worth pointing out that Rebecca and I met before our lives revolved around cell phones and social media. And sometimes I do wonder, would we have actually crossed paths, started dating, gotten married if it had all been up to an algorithm?

Just look at Amazon, for example. Like you have like thousands of the same stuff, right? And so now that the game becomes how do you optimize how do you engineer your way into relationship success?

That's Skyler Wang, a visiting sociologist at Meta AI. Now he studies dating apps and social behaviors, and he's noticed this expansion of choice in lots of areas of modern life. But here's the thing. Too many options could be a problem. In fact, some dating apps only let users go so far.

You know Bumble, for example, right? There's a natural limit and then you just can't swipe anymore. I think search is ultimately all about truncating the amount of options you have, and that means having some kind of recipe.

It's a complicated recipe, though, because for some it's not as easy as simply knowing what you want. So digital dating has opened up a whole new world.

Queer people, older people, divorcees, widows and whatnot, people who don't have, you know, a lot of access to meeting people offline. Online dating has basically entirely transformed how they date and how they form relationships. And it has, you know, really provided a safe space for them, particularly for queer individuals.

Still, so much of this is a double edged sword. In fact, you know that old saying, if the service is free, then you're the product? These platforms, mine users' personal data to sell more targeted advertising, private information, including your location, could be exposed to third parties and to government tracking. Plus, there's something more subjective: the mental health drawbacks. Feelings of rejection heightened by emphasis on appearance and even skin color, the urge to compare yourself to carefully curated versions of strangers.

I think there's a lot of harm that these dating apps do, but you know all technologies are dual use, right? Like a knife, you can use it to cut fruits and vegetables, but you can also use it to stab someone. So it's more who is that bad for, who bears the brunt of the curse of technology?

Truth be told, dating online or in real life requires that we accept some level of risk, both physically and emotionally. That's why it's called putting yourself out there. But what does being out there really do to our brains? Are some more suited for it than others? And can an algorithm really tell us what we want? Well, today we're diving into the mysteries of the dating brain. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and this is Chasing Life. Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist and the chief science adviser to Match.com. She's been a guest on this show before, and she is someone who sees love as a necessity. One way or another, she says everybody is looking for it. No app or algorithm can change that. Technology may be constantly evolving, but our brains, she says, not so much.

The culture changes, but the human brain has not changed in 300,000 years. I mean, you and I could be having this conversation 300,000 years ago. Now, we'd be talking about different subjects, but we would still be talking about the neighbors who came in and killed somebodies child and somebody who's ran off with the wrong person, etc. etc. So basic things about humanity don't seem to change. That's discouraging to me to see that, you know, we've learned so much intellectually and so little emotionally.

What about when it comes to attraction and love? Has that changed over that period of time?

No, it's you know, I think we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction, sex drive being one driven largely by the testosterone system. Romantic love that obsessive thinking about a single person driven largely by the dopamine system and feelings of deep attachment associated really with the oxytocin system. And no, those have not changed around the world, Black, white, Asian, Latino, gay, straight, queer, inter, whatever it is. Whether you're from Nigeria or Beijing or Toronto or or Santiago, Chile, this is a basic brain system that evolved millions of years ago. Actually, it's a survival system. I mean, you know, I and my colleagues have put over a hundred people into the brain scanner using fMRI and studied the brain circuitry of romantic love and attachment. And it's way below the cortex where you do your thinking, way below the limbic areas with the emotions. It's in a basic brain region linked with drive, with craving, with focus, with motivation, with optimism. Romantic love drives you to form a partnership and send your DNA into tomorrow. If we're living 10,000 years ago, if we're living 10 million years ago, we will still, that brain system will still be operating.

That's fascinating. What if you don't have romantic love in your life? If if it's that primal a need, what happens?

Well, I think some people are willing to go without it. Most people are looking. I mean, I you know, I've worked with Match.com for almost 20 years now. And even today, I mean, I do an annual study called Singles in America, in which I concoct, along with my colleagues, about 200 questions. And we poll the American public. We do not poll Match members. This is a national representative sample of singles based on the U.S. Census. And I mean, the most recent data is only about 11% of singles are really not looking for anybody. There's an awful lot of people will say, well, I'm not really looking, but if the right person came along, I would go for it. So, you know, we're an animal that loves and we always will.

I am curious, you know, if the brain hasn't changed in a long time, are there evolved biological patterns that make us more attracted to some people versus others? I'm Indian. My wife is Scandinavian. Swedish. That was unusual when we got married, there weren't a lot of inter mixed marriages among the Indian community. It's it's becoming more common. And obviously, my my children are the products of my wife and I. Do you think this gets to this question of are there biological patterns, do you think, that make us more attracted to some people versus others? And there's a lot in that question, But are we more likely to seek out people that are just like us?

'Okay. So this is my whole next book, and it's one of my former books called Why Him? Why Her? Why you fall in love with one person rather than another. Okay. There's two parts of who we are. There's our culture, everything we grew up to do and believe and say. And there's our biology. And your culture is going to say, Oh, yes, you should marry an Indian girl or oh, boy, you should go try a whole different part of the world. It would be much more interesting for you. Whatever. I study your biology. This is the part that you're asking for. Why do we- are we naturally drawn, naturally drawn to some people rather than others? So what I did, as I looked into the brain looking for- I study personality. I study the biology of personality. And as it turns out, there's a lot of systems in the brain. Most of them keep the eyes blinking, know the heartbeat, and they're got nothing to do with personality. But there's four brain systems. Each one of them is linked with a constellation, a suite, a bundle of personality traits.

'After Match.com hired her in 2005, Helen created what is now known as the Fisher Temperament Inventory. It's essentially a personality test that she says has now been taken by 15 million people around the world to develop it. She had subjects complete a test and then undergo a functional MRI. She was trying to see if their answers correlated with certain activity in their brains. Even more specifically, Helen was trying to take four brain systems -- the dopamine system, the serotonin system, the estrogen system and testosterone -- and map each one to a set of characteristics or personality type. People were then sorted into being explorers, builders, directors and negotiators. I'll repeat that. Explorers, builders, directors and negotiators. The idea was that making sense of who you are might help you figure out what kind of people you're compatible with.

'People who were very high scoring on the traits in the dopamine system -- risk taking, novelty seeking, curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic, mentally flexible people -- go for people like themselves. They want that energy, curiosity, creativity. So that's one. I call these people, explorers. People were very high on the serotonin system, they tend to be traditional, conventional. Follow the rules. Respect authority. Detail oriented. Tend to be religious. Religiosity is in the serotonin system. These people also go for people like themselves. Traditional conventional people who follow rules, respect authority, detail oriented, want people like themselves.

So what Fisher found when it comes to relationships for the four different personality types is that explorers and builders tend to be attracted to people like themselves. But for directors and negotiators, it was more about opposites attract.

'High testosterone people, I call them directors, not a great term. They go for negotiators. The high estrogen. People who are very high on the testosterone -- this can be women as well as men -- analytical, logical, direct, decisive, tough minded, skeptical. Good at what scientists call rule based systems, from engineering to math to mechanics to music. These people tend to go for their opposite, the high estrogen. I call these negotiators. Negotiators tend to be verbally skilled people skills, very contextual, holistic, synthetic, long term thinkers. They're very imaginative. They're very intuitive, They're trusting. So the bottom line is we all express all four of these systems.

I'm an explorer, I think. Yeah, sure.

You're an explorer.

The inspiration for Helen's work was actually not the pursuit of romance. In fact, it was her experience as an identical twin and her quest to find out where our personalities come from.

'Even as a small child everybody asks identical twins exactly the same questions. Do you have the same cavities in your teeth? Do you have the same friends? Do you like the same food? So long before I knew there was a nature nurture controversy, I was very busy, even at age five, six and seven, figuring out how much of my behavior was cultural and how much of it was basically inherited my biology. So then when I- then when I got to graduate school, it was the days- it was in the days where they believed that everything was cultural, that the mind was an empty slate, that the culture filled it up. And I knew that wasn't true. And so when it came time to write my Ph.D. dissertation, I thought thought to myself, if there's any part of human behavior that could be inherited rather than just learned, it would be our reproductive patterns. Because as Darwin would have said, if you have four children and I have no children, you live on and I die out. There would have been selection for patterns of behavior built into your biology to make you pursue courtship, fall for individuals, form a partnership and have babies. So that's why I started to study love. And it's very interesting because when I wrote my very first academic article on romantic love as a brain system, one of the four peer reviewers of the article wrote to me and he said, You can't study this. Love is part of the supernatural. And I thought to myself, Hang on here, anger is not part of the supernatural. Fear's not part of the supernatural. Why was such a powerful feeling that ends up standing your DNA to tomorrow be part of the supernatural? I mean, 97% of mammals do not pair up to rear their young. People do. Why we- why we divorce, why we're adulterous, why we remarry. Then I started putting people in brain scanners and studied the brain circuitry of romantic love and attachment.

This is super fascinating. And I think for anyone listening, myself included, you're immediately thinking about your own relationships and does this sort of make sense. Are we at the point where you could be predictive about desire, attraction, chemistry, love, whatever you want to call it? How predictive can we be if we apply all the known science of the brain to it?

'We can't be. The only thing I can do is give you a whole lot better shot. The only real algorithm is your own brain. I don't know about your childhood. I don't know about your sense of humor. Nobody's ever been able to study sense of humor. I mean, I've tried to study it a little bit. I don't know- I mean, you know, you could be very high dopamine and spend your life going to poetry exhibits and opera. Or you could be high dopamine and get on your motorcycle and spend your day shooting the tops off tulips with your six gun. I mean, because culture does play a role. But biology plays a role, too. So, yes, I mean, I could certainly narrow the field for you. I could certainly know that, well- and by the way, you know, some very high dopamine people have been a playboy or a playgirl until their middle 40s. Now they want to settle down. And so they're not going to go for somebody like themselves. They're going to want to have a a nursery school teacher who follows the rules, who respects authority, who can raise the kinds of babies that they that they would like to have, etc. So it's so complicated. But the bottom line is we do see patterns. There's patterns to personality. There's patterns to nature. There's patterns to culture. And yes, I do think that I can at least introduce somebody to somebody who's a better possibility.

'Now when we come back, more on what attracts us to other people and how technology can figure into that equation. We're back with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. She's also the chief science adviser at Match.com and has worked with them for almost 20 years. How young- how old are the people who use Match.com? Is there a is there a typical demographic?

'I think that Match is people in their late 30s and early 40s. I think that that's their demographic. What's interesting is how many young are going on these dating sites. I mean, the young don't need to go on a dating site to meet people. You know, they've got college, they've got all these groups. But I read an academic article that a great many college kids that don't want to go off to the frat party have ten drinks and end up in bed with somebody they don't know. They'd rather go to a bar with a group of girlfriends or male friends, go through these various dating sites, read the profile. 68% of singles read- carefully read the profile. They don't just look at the picture. They read the profile and they make some initial judgments. What's interesting is so many academics don't understand a basic thing about these dating sites, and that is they're not dating sites. All they do is introduce you. That's all they do. And then you're a- you know it's incumbent on you to go out, meet the person. And it's the- the human brain is, we are built to try and figure out who somebody is. I mean, actually, there are brain regions that become active when you first look at somebody trying to decide are they are they competent, are they socially stable, are they humorous, would they be right for me? The brain is built to love. And all these dating sites, introducing sites are built for only one thing: introduce you to people so that you can then pick up the ball and and and move it down the road.

You know, I did not realize that 68%, I think you say, not only look at the picture, but actually read the profile.

Yes.

I think when you think about the quote unquote swiping brain and this is this is more dating apps like Tinder, for example, it seems to me people are just sitting there swiping quickly and making these very, very rapid determinations as to whether or not they're going to swipe one direction or the other. What do you think of that? If the brain wants to actually get more information about this person, not just what they look like, what do you think of a site like like Tinder, where it's really relying on this this reflexive swipe?

'Well, don't forget, you walk into a bar and you sweep the room right off the bat. You say, I don't think this is right. Or you go to a party or you go to the movies or you go anywhere. I mean, the brain is going to do what it's doing, whether it's on a dating site or whether it's in a park, you know. But what I actually like about Tinder and I'm not pushing it. I'm not I'm not paid to push any site, I just do science. But the bottom line is what I like about Tinder personally is that you meet that person very rapidly. That's the biggest problem with- one of the big problems on the all of these introducing sites is that you stay on it too long. And on Tinder, the average period of time, the last I read about this is that you, you you meet somebody who you swipe right on, who you want to meet within the next six days. And that's the point. Get out and meet them. As a matter of fact, Match does a whole lot to get you out there meeting the person. It's not true that they want you to stay on their site. You know, this is a business that's run by word of mouth. I've gone through about seven presidents of Match during my during my stay there. But anyway, the bottom line is they say, no, no, Helen, we don't want you staying on our site. We want you to find your sweetheart yesterday, today, tomorrow. Get off the site and tell all your friends. So they're trying to get you off the site, meeting people so you can trigger that brain circuitry of romantic love. Find what you're looking for, and then tell everybody about it.

I think you sort of addressed this earlier, but this idea that that choice is is great, but at some point it can become overwhelming. You can get sort of a cognitive overload. And I'm curious, like when you think about Match.com, do you consider the possibility of cognitive overload and how can users mitigate that?

'I am so glad you mentioned it. It is the single biggest problem. And I would imagine all of the introducing sites know that. The brain, as you know, as is built to cope with about 5 to 9 choices. And then it's cognitive overload or what's called the paradox of choice. And you choose nothing. You just get overloaded and you choose nothing. So if you're going to go on these introducing sites, the first thing is don't binge after you have met nine people and I mean met either through video chatting or in person met them, stop. Get off the site and get to know at least one of those people better. So, number one, don't binge after you've met nine people that are within the ballpark at all. I mean, you know, get off and get off the site and meet and get to know at least one more. That's number one. Number two, think of reasons to say yes instead of no. It's called negativity bias. We remember the- the brain is built to remember the negative. So you go to a party and everybody's nice and everything, and one person says, Have you gained a little weight? That's all you- you go home, that's all you remember. And it came through millions of years of being adaptive to remember the negative. And so when you go on these introducing sites and you've just met somebody, you have very little information about them. So you overweight the information and you'll say to yourself, Oh, he likes cats and I like dogs. Never work. Or, oh, she's wearing those bizarre brown shoes. I would I could never introduce her to my friends, etc. Forget it. Don't binge and think of reasons to say yes instead of no. A question that I ask every year in my singles in America study is have you ever met somebody who you initially did not find attractive and eventually fell in love with? And it's- I've been doing this questionnaire for 12 years. Every year it's gone up this past year 49% said yes. They had originally started out going out with somebody who they did not find attractive and eventually fall fell madly in love with them. You have to give the brain a chance.

That's a fascinating survey. So 49% of people who maybe did not find their partner initially did not find them attractive, ended up falling madly in love with them.

Yes.

Did you by chance ask the opposite question, which is someone you found wildly attractive you did not end up matching with or having a relationship with?

It's not quite that, but I asked things like, have you ever had the kiss of death? You know, been sort of really wildly attracted to somebody and then suddenly you kissed them and it was history. So, you know, courtship runs on messages and they have to be returned. And there are escalation points, I mean, there's there's breaking points and escalation points in all kinds of relationships and friendships and business relationships and certainly in love relationships. One of the questions I asked was, how many times have you been in love? And the average is about 1 to 3.

Really?

Yeah. It's sort of surprising. I've been in love much more than that. And obviously they all ended because I'm now happily married to somebody else.

'Did you fall out of love with those other people? Do you fall out of love and then marry somebody else or-

'Yeah, I do think that. Of course, people fall out of love. You know, a lot of these college relationships that you move on, you get a job in another city, you learn new things. You- and you meet new people and you're looking for new things in life. And and you move forward in how do you together in societies. People tended to have 2 or 3 marriages during the course of their lives. There's really nothing new about divorce. I've often wondered is, matter of fact, in writing my various books, Why did we evolve this? Why can't we just walk out without suffering so badly? And I began to think, well, you know, at the end of a relationship, I mean, you've you've lost your daily habits. You may have lost friends. You may have lost money. You may have lost the cat and the dog. But what you've really lost is the opportunity to send your DNA into tomorrow. And if you are in a longer marriage and you've already have children, you've lost a parenting partner to help you get your DNA on into life. So, you know, nobody gets out of love alive.

Nobody gets out of love alive. I have three teenage daughters and we don't we don't necessarily talk about their desire for romantic love as they get older in life. But I think their desire to have a partner and and settle down, quote unquote, not only among my daughters, but among their friends. When I listen to their conversations, that seems to be less appealing to them. Maybe. Maybe they'll change. They're just young. I don't know. But but I feel like I don't know, at least in my own anecdotal experience as a father of three teenage daughters, it seems to be shifting this idea that it's okay to to not have a partner. It's okay to be single your entire life, to be with your group of friends, but not necessaily romantic love. Do you find that?

'I am wild about Generation Z and the Millennials. They're a very serious generation. It's a remarkably serious generation. You know, every single part of the life cycle is slowing down. And so what's really going on- and I coined this- I call it slow love. And what's really going on with these teenagers is very slowly looking for love. In other words, in my day, I mean, you know, people married in their very early 20s. Now they're marrying in their very late 20s or early 30s. And so what we're seeing is a real extension of this pre-commitment stage. Trying people out.

If my daughter brings home somebody and I'm sort of, you know, checking them out, trying to figure it out, I mean, some of the things that I look for besides, you know, some of the obvious things, do they have anything in common, one of the things I've read is that do they show mutual respect for one another in their body language, their words, all that?

'That's absolutely essential. We get all this data back from this singles in America study that I do with Match and every single year we ask question number six, What are you looking for in a partner? And we give you about 30 different boxes you can check. The top five- the top one every single year is somebody who respects me. Every year. And then number two is somebody who I can trust and confide in. And then somebody who makes me laugh. And then somebody who spends enough time with me and somebody who I find physically attractive. So they that that's a it's a smart generation, you know. I mean, they're not looking for somebody to clean their clothes and cook for them anymore. They're looking for a real companion. And they're not taking second best.

My daughters watch that show on television "Indian Matchmaking," I don't know if you watch it at all. And it was fascinating to sort of watch them watch it and see their reactions to it. It's it's it's arranged introductions and then, you know, it's people would go out on dates and but just to see what they were looking for, how the brain was sort of operating, you know, the things that were important to them are not that important to them or whatever it might be was really interesting.

You know, I call it the global campfire. We're sitting around watching other people date and we're learning things, you know, and and then we're discussing it with our girlfriends. I mean, your daughters must have gone said, well, what I wouldn't have done that quite that way, or geez that was pretty cool. I never would have thought of that. And so it's the global campfire was sitting around watching other people do it and getting tips.

I'm already as soon as we're done here, I already got a couple of people I'm going to call and talk about this conversation with. So that's the best kind of conversation, I think, for sure. Thank you for your time. I really, really appreciate this. Maybe we can talk again.

Any time is a good time, kid.

All right.

Thank you. Thank you.

Kid. I really like that she calls me a kid. So what did Helen teach me? Opposites may attract, but not always. Love is constant, but maybe getting slower. Slow love. Technology has opened up the world to a global campfire. But too many options could be a problem. Don't binge and do make decisions. Bottom line, our brains haven't changed that much over the eons. And that is especially true when it comes to love. That's it for this episode of Chasing Life. Next week on the podcast, organization and the brain.

Doing tasks like laundry or dishes or picking up toys or whatever it is. It takes a lot of what's called executive functioning.

'That's next time. Got one more thing for you. As we wrap up this season of the podcast, I want to hear from you. Have you applied any of the tips we've suggested for increasing your attention span? Have you paid more attention to how much rest you get or caffeine you consume? Maybe you have more questions about the brain that we haven't answered yet. Let me know. Record your thoughts as a voice memo and email them to asksanjay@cnn.com or you can give us a call at (470) 396-0832 and leave a message. We might even include your response on an upcoming episode of the podcast. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Madeleine Thompson, David Rind and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. With support from Haley Thomas, Alex Mannasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, James Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namarow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy and Nadia Kunang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.