Cheers to that person you were thinking about while watching this talk!!

"Love is in us, It's deeply embedded in the brain, Our challenge is to understand each other." This woman speaks with such passion in her work, it's practically poetry

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love. -Neil Gaiman

My grandparents were married for 50 years. My grandpa died 20 years ago. My grandma now 93 has moderate dementia and sometimes doesn't know me, but she knew and repeated for months that for her birthday she wanted to get on a plane and go see her husband's grave. We went earlier this year and she said "This is all I've ever wanted. How did you know?"

I got dumped from my boyfriend of 6 years. His reason? "I'm not ready for this" and "you love me too much". This was about a year ago. I've been dating a guy for about 6 months now and he just dumped me too, his reason being "he has too much on his plate." I'll make it you guys, and so will you. Even with severe depression and 3 types of anxiety disorders, I've made it. And so will you.

"Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on earth." ...powerful talk on this impossible subject. Happy Valentines!

wow.... I survived stage IV metastatic cancer, under the terrible strain of dealing what we were told was a terminal illness for such a long period of time, we broke up. I instantly shifted from continuously focusing on cancer to an obsession with "getting back together." When faced w/ my own mortality & a broken heart I focused almost entirely on my broken heart and it wasn't a choice, it was instinctive & powerful beyond description. I often wonder if that actually contributed to my survival.

“Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire of my love for you. I remember what you said to me, I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I'm told you will go from here. I'm told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I said My Love Goodbye My Love, goodbye.”

Yep! I was TOTALLY in love with my boyfriend of 8 years. That break up was the worst pain ever! But he did not love me, so I just could not stay with him any more. The pain of staying was as bad as the pain of leaving. Both pain is horrible- I did not have him either way. So best to move on and at least try to find a partner where love is reciprocated. 💗💗

"all bad poetry is sincere" -oscar wilde

I’m just now realizing, I’m not alone. There are other people going through a heartbreak and have been through one and they are okay so I know for sure I will be okay😇

she makes science sound so romantic

Somebody's camping in my head...great great talk

'Almost no one gets out of love alive'...lol..I like that! And that quote from Emily Dickinson says it all too! I found this really interesting - especially that part on calculating gains and losses and risks. There is something comforting in knowing the feelings have some physiological base and are 'normal' !! I am glad to hear though that she considers 'there will always be magic to love' :) Great video - thanks to David Randall Curtis for sharing. Enjoyed this a lot! Sunbeam :)

I thin understanding each other is really the hardest challenge. When we are first in love, we discard everything else and think everything would be fine as long as there is love. But the worst pain in the end is when you found out after a few years being together, your partner knows just so little about you and never try to know more.

I love Helen Fisher's work. It's insightful, thoughtful, and supported by sound scientific studies.

My husband and I are not of the same religious, socio-economic or educational background......but maybe we bridge other commonalities. There's definitely biology/chemistry involved and simply a longing to belong and be understood.

My boyfriend has stopped talking to me so much, he said he is busy which i will not oppose and i understand but he goes to his work colleagues that I cannot go out with him and do the things he wants to do because of my strict parents. He's told them how there has become little to talk about with me etc. And most probably said I am boring which he has done 3 other times when this very same situations has happened. Learning how the brain works just really makes me want to let go of him. The brain is amazing and the way Helen explains everything is so intriguing. Everything is poetical it makes me want to do my own research and learn and understand every bit about the brain. I always adored our relationship. we were 15 now turning 18, it was a slow love and it was amazing, there is something about just growing up together and exploring love as kids which is fun. But things are becoming harder, and i just miss that once slow and non complex love we once had. I'm praying someday I will get that again

The results of tests using parent/child relationships would be interesting to see. Are the same parts of the brain/body involved as with romantic love? What about with siblings? Could it be that "love" is simply "love" and we want to qualify it according to experiences? What happens in the brain when a father holds his newborn child?

I wish Dr. Helen Fisher was my friend.

The comments are so powerful and raw on here guys...very nice...makes you feel alive doesn’t it.

wished I were a psychopath with no feelings

the person you thought about while watching this owns you.

Romantic love is your brain addicted to the chemicals produced by your brain when you are in love. How long it takes your brain chemistry to recover from the decrease of major neurotransmitters associated with being in love depends on how long your relationship has been manipulating your own brain chemistry. My own experience has been about one month for every year you have been in a loving relationship. I hope this helps.

anyone here from her WIRED video?

Just came to this video from pthe WIRED one... This lady has all my attention now. Please be my teacher

lol who wore it better? Helen fisher or Steve Jobs?

yea, romantic love is indeed the most powerful drug in the world

13:36I ask you first a series of questions 13:40to see to what degree you express these chemicals, 13:43and I'm watching who chooses who to love. 13:47And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. 13:51About 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries. 13:56I'm putting the data together now, 13:57and at some point -- there will always be magic to love, 14:01but I think I will come closer to understanding 14:04why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background, 14:08your same general level of intelligence, good looks, 14:12and you don't feel pulled towards all of them. 14:14I think there's biology to that. 14:16I think we're going to end up, in the next few years, 14:19to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms 14:21that pull us to one person rather than another. 14:24So, I will close with this. 14:27These are my older people. 14:30Faulkner said, "The past is not dead, it's not even past." 14:35Indeed, we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain. 14:40And so, there's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature, 14:48and this reminds me of it. 14:50These are two women. 14:51Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. 14:54Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. 14:57We swivel towards each other, 14:58we do what we call the "anchoring gaze" and we talk. 15:03This is intimacy to women. 15:04I think it comes from millions of years 15:06of holding that baby in front of your face, 15:08cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. 15:12Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. 15:15As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away. 15:19(Laughter) 15:20I think it comes from millions of years sitting behind the bush, 15:25looking straight ahead, trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock. 15:30I think, for millions of years, men faced their enemies, 15:33they sat side-by-side with friends. 15:35So my final statement is: love is in us. 15:40It's deeply embedded in the brain. 15:42Our challenge is to understand each other. 15:45Thank you. 15:46(Applause)

All those quotes in the beginning of Dr Fisher's speech really show us that love = pain. It's just biological that an obsession so strong leads to so much pain and grief. I'm still trying to find that sweet spot of deciding to "settle down" with the one. It was so easy for my parents to make that decision. They had an arranged marriage and just knew they wanted no one else. Why is it so difficult for me, with all the freedom of choice in the world, to get there?

drinking game: every time she says love, take a shot. trust me youll be hammered and like four bottles short

What a lovely scientist. Objective and sharp without apology. Sometimes when you are sharp as a knife people get hurt by your words!

I'm sure that's not the only thing she studies and I wouldn't say her life is wasted. I certainly find found her findings valuable and interesting. Also, most scientific phenomenons the we know of today were once also un-explainable. The hunt for knowledge is only natural.

I've Had this girl on my mind for three months. We message each other but the problem is that she rarely messages back to me (worst case was waiting a month for her answer). You would think that she's only responding for courtesy and trying to avoid an open contact with me, but the nature of her letters are kind and she is sharing events of her life without reserve. Also, she is eager to know what is going on with my life; asking a lot of questions. I feel like my heart is soaking in acid every day I don't hear from her. I try to convince myself to forget her or to think that's she is stupid in some way, so I wouldn't have even a reason to hear from her at all. Yet, still I find myself thinking her at every moment and anything I do has little to no effect to that. She is, like said in the talk, camping in my mind. I wish I could control this suffering.

she didn't tell us how to cure it

The Inverse Square Law of Attraction The strength of the attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the availability of the object.

I like very much how the speaker relates the brain science to 'fuzzier' areas of human activity like poetry.

Even though love is a complicated response of "stimuli" and experiences. It still feels like a very magical and awesome experience. :)

So live a life without emotional feeling? For all its madness I would live with the ability to love and be hurt rather than a robot of a system where the only love is money and power and the control that goes hand in hand with it.

Its impossible not to love Helen Fisher

Heart has nothing to do with love, it's the evil and passionate brain, LOL! Love the talk!

That poem was painful.

A really good talk! It surely is an addiction. I always ask these questions: Why that person? Why do they have to NOT love me and Why i still can't stop loving them? I guess Love is a science different to every person. You just can't apply general rules to everyone.

Someone is camping in my head . Brilliant

I've watched her talks many times. She's fascinating!

Yes I just realize that when liking someone so much, the feeling really feel like drugs, the high and the withdrawal systems… eve though I never tried drug…. But that feeling is intense.

Absolutely love these TED talks!

"At least you can come down from cocaine." I LOLed at that. XD

If I'd seen this when I was 17, it would have changed my life.

Now fall deeply in love with someone and your brain will give you a constant speedball. What a wonderful world.

I'm in love....Love has taken over my brain.....

This is one the best ted talks of all time

Wonderful stuff. I liked the general humanity of Helen's lecture. The quotes from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman reminded me that art and science should snuggle up together under the duvet more often. I guess, it's all part of using our wonderful minds, as is falling in love. Thanks for posting this, Regards, Peter

I've been dumped three times but I never dumped somebody.

The core: Our challenge is understanding each other.

her observations are quite revealing but there is much she missed...what happens when you dis-enthrall yourself from the myth of romantic love? you can no longer love another the same way again

you, sir, have a problem. I hope one day you get over that girl who chose a richer, better looking man over you. or perhaps find a girl who loves you for who you are, without minding the superficial rest.

Hi Madam Helen thanks for this very informative message I am inspired by watching you and listening to your speech

恋愛心理学を勉強しておりますが、脳科学からの観点で拝見するのも大変面白いですね！

Maybe one day we will develop a cure for a broken heart :P

Men face their enemys but stay side by side with friends !

the golden age of ted talks

GUYS I CANT BELIEVE SHE DID US DIRTY LIKE THAT AT THE END🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

this woman is brilliant. this silent audience almost does not deserve her.

I love her speech so much~

There is Love "Level Of Violence" and Love Love, compassionate love, relationship love

she got it. we all want what we can't have

I'm a man and at the end of this video, the part where she said men are intimate when they're side by side doing something is because past in our evolution the men needed to hunt and focuse straight ahead with their comrades standing side by side. That actually got to me more than the women and their intimacy with their babies. Weird huh? This feeling of comrades showing courage and standing side by side, showing support without words, must be deeply inbedded into men.

All this talk is not about love, these people never experienced love, what they experienced is romantic love, not love

It took a long time to get there, but her last four to eight sentences really spelled out love.

As I see it...there is LOVE this is the non selfish form, unconditional, the greater love of everything...this is pure. Then there is love which is what most in society think of as love this is a necassary manifestation for the procreation of man...yes it does not require love to procreate, but for it to be succesful in rearing children this illusion tricks us into love. This love is not liberating...it focuses on falsely relying on someone else to provide you with 'love', and many also add

That was really interesting at the end about how women face each other while men sit side by side.

wow this was so informative and I feel accurately explained for once

future me- watch this when you finally are in love

THIS HELPED ME UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING,,,, Just what I was looking for. Amazing job. OUTSTANDING WORK

The funny thing about Love is ..it can never make its mind up.✨✨💕😲😱😳💕✨✨🤔😁😍✨✨🍀🍀🍀✨✨🍀🥗🍀✨✨

LOVE: the greatest of all sicknesses

When we're not aware of our projections on a person we love, romantically and more, that person becomes unmissable, it's making us believe that without that person the world will come to an end. Until we're rejected, we're given an opportunity to enter grieving for what feels like a loss and start looking into a mirror showing us the empty space within, where, until it's touched by suffering, the present may show up that is wrapped in that package. Detachment with heart can be found at some point, where the other person, who seemed to be the only one, becomes a friend whom you pass by at a crossroad, smiling.

The truth is awakening of self. Become queen king warrior where one needs no one but all about want. Attatchment isnt true love. True love is unconditional. All your points only apply to unawakened people. once enlightened its a different ball game.

You get pulled towards the same attitude, understanding of life, knowledge and personality as well. This is why it's always extremely risky to fall in love. All of that stuff changes....and quite rapidly! It might have been possible in the 1800s and before, but now the person you fall in love with will not be the same person 6 months further down!

Dear Dr. Helen Fisher, Thank you very much for Your Research, good luck in new Discoveries!!! Sincerely, Céline Dior-Libano

What about narcissists? What happens in their brain when they play they’re in love and are dumped?

Knowing why exactly someone love a personne rater than another would be extremly awesome. o,.o

I'd like a follow up with what she has found 4 years since this was posted.

This makes sense. I started sports betting in the last few days and flash backs of a brake-up that happened 6 years ago suddenly comes back. Activating the game center of my brain must have triggered this memory to be fetched. I have a question. Since most of us here have been heart broken. Do you guys think it is possible to fall in love with the same intensity as you did the first time?

"Als es an der Zeit war über Liebe zu schreiben, brach die Feder entzwei, und das Papier riß." Rumi

Great video. IMHO, like-minded is great for long lasting love. I don't believe that opposites attracts for any length of time like those who are like-minded.

Well how about that? I read the poem she quotes - I first read it in a cool book called WHY WE LOVE... and through that made the connection that the author is the speaker. I love her book, and I am excited to hear to this speech which was given to me by autoplay. Happy too that my brain is still working and made this connection :-) Thanks for sharing this speech! Thanks for the book!

We had similar studies at our University of the brain.

This is a good speech, sometimes I like good speeches:)

so interesting, revealing and inspiring

Anyone really curious about making relationships work should Just watched this after Dr. John Gottman's talk about relationships, just search for "Making Relationships Work - Part 1" and watch all 4 parts. VERY worth watching, it makes Helen's talk seem useless -that's how good it is.

hahaha I loved the end when she explained the intimacy of the genders, the men just want to hit a buffalo on the head with a rock! too funny, great talk.

Bravo from the EQ Coach who knows this ... I also do Dating Coaching. I hear about this all the time, up-close and personal.

I really wish I never found love - it has almost broken me entirely, twice. Surely I cannot be that stupid to allow this thing in ever again

what an amazing speech

Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you Consumed by fire with my love for you I remember what you said to me I am thinking of your love for me I am torn by your love for me Pain and more pain Where are you going with my love? I am told you will go from here I am told you will leave me here My body is torn with grief Remember what I said, my love Goodbye my love Goodbye.

I just happened to find this site. I enjoyed this. I find it facinating.

Atemlos durch die Nacht, sieh was liebe mit uns macht. ~Helene Fischer

Did she answer that question?