Live at the Bell House: “The Space Between Your Ears” (Part 2)

Part 2 of our brainy show at the Bell House explores the psychology of astronauts and the chemistry of love.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio!

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. And I've got two neuroscientists on the stage with me. We've been talking about the brain. And, right now, I want to talk about the mental health of astronauts. Why? Why did you gasp? Oh my god, they could have problems? No, no, think this through, alright? Yeah. If there is ever a mission to Mars, and I'm working desperately on that right now... Yeah, just don't...

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a mission to Mars, in the way we would do it, would take nine months. Then you gotta hang out there a year or two until Earth and Mars line up again, and then you come back. So a round trip is like, three or four years. This is less time than it takes to make Chinese Democracy.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  If that's really if a return mission is possible.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, no, but let's assume it is. So I want to ask the two of you. I've got some set of astronauts, let's say seven. They're in the same space for nine months, and they're together for three years. Is that recipe for disaster? Ask 90210.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ask Gilligan.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Ask the men that were on the Mars 500 mission.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was that?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  There was a mission that just took place in Russia, right? And it was, you know, a crew of men who-

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In isolation.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, in isolation for like, it wasn't 500, it was like 560 days or whatever. Trying to see if you could have a group of people together-

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what happened?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  And not kill each other. Well, I think it's hard to say, because they came out-

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they either killed each other, or they didn't. Well, one man ended up pregnant.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  They did not kill themselves.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Or each other.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, do you make it more interesting and have men and women?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Well, some-

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Assuming heterosexuality.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  You know, I think that this is a big part of the space program is bringing in psychologists and trying to figure out what is the best situation. And some people have proposed to have actual couples or families be the first explorers.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that...

• 2:27Speaker 02

  They can do it in space. And not burn each other with a fire.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah, Heather.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  With knives.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Going into space is a very, in terms of evolution, it's a very abnormal circumstance for people to be in isolation for so long, for those lengths of time.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Not just isolation, I mean, there are a lot of things about space that are abnormal.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  And people could freak out.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  So, I think what's really important is you have to seriously select people who have what it takes to withstand such extraordinary circumstances.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you flip out in space, you can't just get rid of them.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  I'm sure they're carrying Xanax with them.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  No, you can't get rid of them.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  I'm just saying. You can sedate them. But you have to do a lot of serious psychological testing because it's a very abnormal circumstance.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Practically every sci-fi movie in the 60s, 70s, and 80s with long voyages, somebody goes berserk.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Which is normal.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even when it's not a human, in 2001, the computer went berserk.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  And now, on Bravo, all the Real Housewives go berserk.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  But what Heather just said, I think, is really important. She said, "That's normal." And I think that sometimes my fear is that when we look for astronauts or cosmonauts with the right stuff, what we're really testing for is people's ability to suppress the crazy and to not show the crazy on the test. And really, is somebody who doesn't feel things and somebody who's actually very comfortable being in isolation for nine months and going into space, is that normal? Or isn't it more normal to process those emotions? Maybe we should be sending a shrink on the mission. I'll go. That might actually be quite helpful.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you haven't seen 2001, the computer becomes a homicidal maniac, basically. HAL.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Like they do.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  HAL. These are the letters that precede IBM in the alphabet, in case you didn't know that.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  That mind blown.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know that the HAL font in 2001 is the same as the IBM font? It has these sort of lines through it.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  You didn't know what it's like?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Mind informed.

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how about this, if you're in space where no one can hear you scream, if you're in space where you turn out the lights, it is as dark as it gets. That's a kind of a sensory deprivation. And I read all about people going crazy or altering their mind state in sensory deprivation chambers. Is this a good thing, a bad thing? What is gonna keep them going for the nine months?

• 4:59Speaker 03

  What happens is our brain, it's made to take in stimuli and process it. And when it's devoid of external stimuli, it will create its own. And that's where these internal thoughts. And what's really interesting is that whether you actually see something physically out there or imagine it, it actually stimulates the same parts of the brain. It's very hard to distinguish whether a percept is being generated internally or externally.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you judge then, if it's stimulating the same part of the brain, whether you imagine it yourself or whether it's an external stimulus? If you have a few set of people on a voyage, at what point who's gonna say what is real and what is not?

• 5:34Speaker 03

  This is the problem also with schizophrenic-

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if we have a hundred people, we can just take a vote.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  We should send seven schizophrenics into space with audio and visual hallucinations and make it a reality show. The Real Housewives of Outer Space. Schizo to the death.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  But schizophrenics believe their hallucinations. With a person, let's say an astronaut who's in space and who might, let's say, be having a visual auditory hallucination. The way to distinguish it is that if it was actually something external and real, everybody should be able to agree upon it. If it's an individual percept that's being developed in the own person's mind, only he would see it and the others wouldn't. That would be the reality check.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd have to convince the person that they're the ones hallucinating.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, and hopefully they're rational enough to think that I trust my fellow colleagues to tell me that this thing is not actually there.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And hopefully multiple crew members aren't experiencing auditory-

• 6:22Speaker 03

  But the thing is, you wouldn't be experiencing the same thing.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same one, okay.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  The guys on the International Space Station, you know, I interviewed two of the guys on the ISS about a month ago.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Braggart.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It was actually really cool. They were like floating in the interview.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Well, I was in a space shuttle.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  You were?

• 6:37Speaker 04

  I was, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  That's so cool.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Earth?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I went inside, uh-

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be an Earth shuttle, yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Well, but it was, I got to go in Discovery.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Very cool.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Suck it!

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While it was on the ground.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Once they shut the door, I don't know what happened.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  You know what?

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they were floating around, what happened?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  They were floating around, and I asked my readers to give me questions, to ask them. And a bunch of people asked, "When you dream in space, is the content of your dreams any different?" And what's funny is, I asked, I think, Donald Pettit this question, and he was like, "No."

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Science really is answering all the questions that 18-year-olds ask as they're caught, is when they're hot.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That is all of science.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  This is why I'm a neuroscientist. When I was five, I asked my dad, "Where do my thoughts come from?" And, you know, he said, "They come from your brain." And I said, "Well, can I keep them when I die?" And of course, he had no answer for me, but I said, "Well, how do they come from my brain? How can I keep them?" And this really motivated me to become a neuroscientist.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was an episode of The Twilight Zone, where the daughter, at age 18, asked the parents, "Mom, Dad, how come there are no pictures of me as a young child?" And she would later learn that they manufactured her. And so, when you say to your father, "Where do my thoughts come from?", I imagine him saying, "We hand them to you." That would have just been, just a totally mess with you.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Wait, so Dad is God? That's very Freudian.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, back to 2001: Space Odyssey. So first Hal goes crazy, kills everybody, then Dave, at the end, he's tripping! There's no other explanation for what's going on there. There's like, colors? Remember, it is the 1960s that this film was made. And so, is there a state of mind where you're just tripping because your brain is creating its own chemicals to do that?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yes, it's a natural reaction. Actually, that would be what we would predict what would happen if somebody has been so sensory deprived and socially deprived for so long. The brain's innate response will be to create its own stimulation, and that will look something like along the lines of a trip. And even just thinking about here on Earth, the concept of the universe, it gets really trippy after a while. And you have to kind of then say, "I can't think about that. I'm gonna refocus on, you know, what's the latest thing on, you know, E! News," for example.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I'm gonna just listen to Pink Floyd.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You know, I need to distract myself because it's so outside the realm of our innate experience, or even thinking about the concept of immortality. It gets too freaky that you need to say, "Oh, I'm gonna play Xbox now." So, the brain's reaction is to do something else to distract itself.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, forgive my persistent reference to the Twilight Zone, but there are other episodes where they show an astronaut alone, then he starts freaking out because he was deprived of human interaction. Since then, I have come to find people who don't want any human interaction at all. They're perfectly happy not saying anything to anybody forever.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Well, they'd be great going to MIT or being an astronaut.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I'm saying, so since they exist...

• 9:38Speaker 03

  I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding, I love MIT.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't exist.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  She's not kidding.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are not kidding!

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Truth is, this is the hyperbolic view, these people don't exist. It's very rare for somebody to never have any interaction. Not with the mailman, not with, you know, somebody at a store nearby. Even people who kind of have agoraphobia and don't leave their houses very often are often obsessive about doing things online. You see it in prisons when you put people in isolation.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Well, that was gonna be my question, in prison...

• 10:08Speaker 01

  And that happens, what we were just talking about happens.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Do they, like, if you're thrown in the hole, do you have those, like, hallucinations?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  A lot of them attempt suicide in that situation, and they do it in a very violent way because they don't have anything to attempt suicide with because it's just that frustrating to lose the sense of who you are.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Well, this is why isolation chambers or in prison are the worst form of punishment. The worst thing you can do to a person is not put them behind bars, but put them in solitary confinement. I mean, Paris Hilton went crazy, right? They put her in prison and they had to, like, let her go crazy.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Or had she already been?

• 10:42Speaker 03

  That's a very good question. But the worst thing you could do to a person is isolate them from other people.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so getting back to astronauts then. There's a famous astronaut case, Lisa Novak, okay? She was an astronaut on STS-121. Space shuttle to the International Space Station, July 2006. She was a mission flight engineer. So she was 13 days in space, okay? Another astronaut was her lover, who she went to return to, but he then fell in love with somebody else. An engineer from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Astronauts live in Houston, by the way. So...

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Did the same thing not happen with the band Fleetwood Mac?

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So she comes back from her mission.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  We're technically on Earth.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drives 900 miles from Houston to Orlando. Why? Well...

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Disney World?

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, perhaps. She wore a diaper. That's how desperate she was to not stop. So now, is she up to no good? Let's find out what she was in possession of. She had a black wig, a tan trench coat, a BB pistol, ammunition...

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So far, all stuff I have.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pepper spray, a two-pound drilling hammer, an eight-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, latex gloves, and plastic garbage bags.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  And a Fergie album.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Just on repeat. The secret member of the A-team.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She waited for her ex-boyfriend's lover to show up at the airport parking lot and was not able to do whatever she planned to do with that assortment of materials.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Make an installation?

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's going on in her head? She's homicidal, derived from love, presumably. It's love, I guess.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  I think it's like-like.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I'm getting at is, people fall in love, but that's kinda extreme, though. And so we wonder, is it because she was in space and something happened? This doesn't seem normal to me. What we will do is end this segment and devote segment four to the chemistry of love. When we get back to StarTalk Radio from the Bell House.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The subject is the space between our ears. Lots going on there. And we couldn't have this episode of StarTalk without some discussion about the brain chemistry of love. Yes.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kara, tell me about the chemistry of love. We learned in the previous segment that there was an astronaut who kinda went berserk by any normal measure of behavior in a breakup of a relationship.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  The only example of someone acting weird while being in love.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, question to you. Is that normal? Is that exotic? Is it because she was in space? What's going on here?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  So, I think that everybody in this room, everybody listening in their own homes right now, who has experienced love, or however they choose to define love, has done something bat crazy in the name of love.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I like the person who just went, "Hell yeah!"

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait, bat crazy while being in love, or bat crazy when they lose their love?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Either way. I think that love is a very intense emotion for a lot of people. And people have very intense behavioral experiences linked to it. And her brand of crazy...

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the astronaut, Lisa Nowak.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Is probably more deeply based in mental illness than somebody else's brand of crazy. But you know, love does mimic these certain brain pathways that involve a lot of different neurochemicals. And it really mimics, in many ways, a brain pathway that's similar to the one in addiction. And we find sometimes... That during an intense breakup, that mimics the symptoms of withdrawal. So it's not that we want the person, or that we miss the person. It's that we physically need that person, the same way.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can track the chemical.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  You need the methadone of love.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The methadone of love, yeah.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm the methadone of love. You gotta say it with the Barry White.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Methadone of love.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The methadone of love.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Which is why.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  I'm flirting with you, Neil.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  No, which is why, you know, a lot of people, when you're trying to get over a breakup, your good friends recommend that you kinda get out there a little, you know? Distract yourself. Because sometimes, yes, you do need the methadone of love.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  What better way to get off heroin than cocaine? In short bursts with no commitment.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  As long as you're a bitch. Or methadone, which actually does help you get off of heroin.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  We study people with these behavioral addictions, like pathological gambling, or compulsive shopping, which are behavioral addictions that are devoid of any ingestion.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have to ask, in the world of the study of people who are addicted to shopping, what percent are men?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Ah, that's really interesting. It's actually more prevalent in women, but more prevalent in men to be pathological gamblers. So you can choose.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want a number. How many pathological shoppers are men?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  I cannot give you an exact number at this time.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Society's rules make women shop and men gamble, so it's 60% is the answer for both.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, go on.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I did a study last night as I was falling asleep.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  So devoid of any chemical ingestion, people can be addicted to certain behaviors, to certain highs that they get.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your brain is making the chemicals itself.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Exactly. The brain is making them themselves. So you win a lot of money in a gamble, and you get a high from that. You get a kiss from your lover, and you get a high from that.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, I've been on mountaintops.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is dark. I am above the clouds.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Are you an astronaut?

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. One does not need to go into orbit to get above the clouds. I and the telescope are alone, in the dark of night, drinking in the cosmos.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I don't wanna hear the rest of the story. You know what? Keep it to yourself.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel a cosmic passion that is not equaled in any other activity. Am I in love with the universe?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yes, you are. You are.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  You're addicted to the universe.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  No, but there's some people who are in love with what they do. They're in love with the universe. They're in love with studying neuroscience. And that's an addiction. If you can't do it, if I said you cannot study space for the next year, you might go through withdrawal.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this love chemical, it doesn't have to be human. It could be objects.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It could be an object. And it actually harks back to psychoanalytic ideas, that you can fall in love with the object. It might be a person. It might be a parent. It might be a thing.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  A really cool hat.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a chemical. So now, we were chatting earlier, and you were telling me that there's the chemical that is raging when there's just lust.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? That's not love. That's just sex.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's an anthropologist, an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher, who's also studied the neurobiology of love. And she claims that there are three stages to love. There's the lust stage. There's the attachment stage. And there's the commitment stage. And what we see is that what's happening in the brains of people when they're first falling in love, when they're very sexually active, when they're lusting after one another, is very different than what we see in the brains of people who have been together.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Given up. And are married.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  And the funny thing is, is that what we see is that there are similarities in this lust stage to drug addiction. And there are similarities in this commitment stage to what you would see between like mother and child, which is an intense bonding, which involves hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin. Whereas earlier, we're seeing hormones like dopamine, which is involved in the reward pathway.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and the breakup is the withdrawal.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Is the withdrawal from this.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  So what if you lust after somebody while you're on drugs?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  You know what's pretty interesting? Is Helen Fisher claims that people who are taking SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna say that, yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  People who are taking SSRI, she feels don't have the neural capacity to fall as deeply in love than those who aren't. I completely disagree with this statement, by the way.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  But it's a powerful tool to make someone feel terrible in a relationship. No, your problem is you can't feel love, I'm right.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  But we do know that if you're going through a breakup and you take an SSRI for a short period of time, it can actually help relieve.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Help recover.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yes, some of those symptoms that are making you very depressed. And by the way, this isn't just about sexual love. We joke about losing the one that you love and it's sending you into a feeling of withdrawal, but how many of us have lost a parent or a sibling? You very much have experienced.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Or a TV show.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Or a television show. You, I mean, and you have this feeling like, I need them back, or it, back in my life.

• 20:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we distinguish love that involves sensuality from love that involves caring? Is it just that we happen to use the same word and we just need a different word for it?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  No, I think that all love involves caring, if we're going to classify it as love.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, I think it's in Spanish where there's a different word for the love of a god that you would have for the love of a person.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  I think it's Greek. It's Greek, it's agape.

• 20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's the Greek word agape is like the love for a god.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is it just because we don't have enough vocabulary to distinguish these different kinds of affection?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Well, also, you know, something that...

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we just call it love?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  This is interesting because around Valentine's Day, I had some people getting in contact with me. I had written a whole series about love a few months ago in my column, and they were asking, you know, what are the chemical components of love and what's exactly happening in the brain and where does it light up? But does this really tell the whole story of what love is? I mean, trying to discuss these things scientifically, does it really take the poetry out of love? And I think that this is a very subjective experience, love, and all of the research that's done on love is done on people who claim that they are in love. There's really no way to measure what love is.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there might be. Kara's asserting that we can't measure love, but I'm gonna assert...

• 21:15Speaker 01

  I did not say that.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, no, no. Different people say they're in love.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you hook them up. I mean, electrodally, yes, okay? If each of them believes they're in love.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And then you analyze their brain. If the same part of every person's brain is lit with the same kind of chemistry, then we can say, yes, they're in love.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  So there are certain experiments would show that, for example, you take a man and you put him on a very high bridge. It's very exciting, he's maybe nervous, you know, it's a suspension bridge. And he's walking along and he meets a woman. The chances are if he meets her on this very high, exciting bridge, that he'll be more attracted to the woman than if he meets her on the ground.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  It's like the movie Speed. That's why I opened a nightclub on the Verrazano Bridge.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  It's why when strangers hold hands and jump off a bridge, they fall in love. It's very exciting.

• 22:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Are you saying that the man who is stimulated in some kind of extreme setting

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  will find other women more attractive than would otherwise be the case?

• 22:19Speaker 04

  There was like a dating show on network television that the whole thing was like, they would send people on dates and make them like bungee jump or something like that.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  And it was like, try to figure out like, will they work it out? Or will they just wait six weeks until they can go back to California and go on audition?

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it the only the man who feels this way?

• 22:37Speaker 03

  No, no. It's both the man and the woman. So people are, for example, more likely to think they fall in love like if they meet at the gym. So the point is this, that if you're aroused, whether it be for any external stimulus, whether it's because you're on a high bridge or you're physically exercising and all your endorphins are sort of pumped up, you'll rationalize, you'll come up with explanations. If you want to attribute this to what's happening in your environment, so you say, "I feel excited. It must be because I'm attracted to this woman or man."

• 22:59Speaker 04

  So it sounds like the best way to set up, like if you want to match make some people, is to like put them in a room together and then mug them?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, yes, yes.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  But you know what's actually really interesting about this? Is you're speaking to that neurologically. But when we compare kind of statistical data of people who have fallen in love and actually stayed in love over the long term, some of the highest predictors of long-term love are things like proximity. We are most likely to fall in love with somebody who we see all of the time. It's most common that people fall in love with somebody who lives in their neighborhood or works in their work. And also, people who look like ourselves or look like our parents.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't say that. Yeah, you can't say that.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Transference.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, people have invested a lot of brain energy in trying to figure this out. Are this, the dating services do this now?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Helen Fisher actually does work with Match.com.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So consults with them?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Well, because she can use their data. There's so much data out there of these people and these experiences, and she does a lot of studies using that.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  There's one more element that's just a bit outside of the brain. There's something called the amino histocompatibility complex. They do studies of long-term relationships that find that people who are attracted to each other, when they look at their immune system, have complementary immune systems.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there is a chemistry of love?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  There is a chemistry of love.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Wait, what does that mean, complementary immune system?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  That means like, what makes me get sick doesn't make what you get sick, and what makes you get sick doesn't make me get sick. And so if we combine our...

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can tongue kiss and not injure each other?

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Well, when you kiss, one idea is that you're actually exchanging genetic information. So a lot of motivating us is this sort of underlying if our genes are compatible.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is it true then, based on what you just said, that other than that kind of opposite element, it's not otherwise true that opposites attract?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I think that's...

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Opposite immune systems attract.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Opposite immune systems attract.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  That's the famous, whoa.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, "The Space Between Your Ears," recorded live at The Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, on February 17th, 2012. Along with my co-host Eugene Mirman, joining us onstage that night were Professor of Psychology Heather Berlin, and science blogger Kara Santa Maria, and the comedian Wyatt Sinak.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that Heather, you know, when she was talking about this idea of people falling in love on the bridge, she was saying they fall in love because of this heightened experience. Are these people really falling in love, Heather, or are they...

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're fake!

• 25:41Speaker 01

  ...mistakening this intense kind of neurochemical experience for love?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  So there's a difference between, as you said, the immediate lust, the passion, which you might describe or label as love. Your physiology... is all excited and you might label that, oh, I must be in love with this person. And this is between that and then the long-term commitment, when all those sort of exciting, immediate feelings die down.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you go to phase two.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Phase two, commitment, that's a different type of thing.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And it's a totally different part of the brain.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what about the stereotype that guys never commit? Are they missing these chemicals?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Actually, I just talked to Helen Fisher and she said that it seems like, based on the data, that women have a harder time committing.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  That guys are more likely to want to get married early on than women.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And girls are more likely to insist.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not sure what I'm saying?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  I don't know if you've heard his science, he's like, nah.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  The difference here is that women tend to be more selective than men. So when you say, not true, not true, women want to commit and men don't, it's because women are finding the person that they want to commit to. Like, it's most likely when you ask a woman, she's got like four guys that have, at some point in their lives, wanted to marry her, but she didn't want to marry them back. So she was waiting until she found the one who she really wanted to marry.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then that's where she goes in for the commitment.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's the guy...

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Always wants to commit and just always says he doesn't. I don't know what the control groups are in this, but I think they're faulty.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  But one really interesting, one really interesting statistic is that the highest rate of divorce is either in the first year of marriage, meaning...

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Or the last.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  I'm just guessing.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  True.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's nothing you can say.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Is there another answer? There's no way I'm wrong. Whatever the answer is, it's a version of what I said.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  The highest rate of divorce is in the first year of marriage, meaning when that lust phase wears off and you realize, what am I doing with this person? Or in the 25th year of marriage, meaning when the children that you have leave the house.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Empty nest.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so, people are together initially for this lust, they stay together with children, and it's actually really a rarity that it lasts beyond the point in which the children leave.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  The nest and those are the exceptions rather than the rule, which makes a bit of sense.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Well, that makes sense, yeah, cuz you're meeting that person for the first time again without children.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Like, you'd spent all your time focused on like, "Uh, we gotta get this hungry, awful person out of this house so we can relax again." You're gonna make a great dad.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me bring it back to Amara's mission. So, you say proximity. Proximity breeds lust and love.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you say complementary immune systems breed chemical compatibility. So, I got my seven astronauts, put men and women, heterosexual, homosexual, doesn't matter. Some of them are gonna fall in love, they're gonna wanna have sex.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine, zero G sex.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a COG the whole way.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  Fun!

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have to like brush up on your laws of physics to do that.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  I think they have like a suit that they've developed.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, cuz otherwise you're careen off the walls.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Does Viagra work in outer space?

• 28:59Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say yes.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  I was just asking.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's mostly on the inside, I believe.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, now it turns out that if you got on board the fastest spaceship we have ever launched and aimed it towards the next star system, it would take you 50,000 years to get there. So, if you wanna send people to the next star, they have to be really fertile.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay, so you have to start making babies, they get raised, they become the next generation, and it just continues, and 30 generations down the line, they land. If they undergo normal sort of relational activities, there's a chance that-

• 29:37Speaker 02

  The word is sex, right?

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Doing it.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That a chance you can sustain this, is that what you think it would need in order to sustain stability of this crew for the four years?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I think at this point it becomes a situation where you're, it's an apocalyptic situation. You're talking about populating this new area. You're not talking about love and commitment. I'm just, I'm gonna disagree, I'm going to disagree.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  I believe, if I'm not wrong, what you're saying is the only way we could effectively get to another star system is to send an orgy into space.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes!

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and here's another interesting thing. You can ask, perhaps you can make a machine that would incubate the human embryo from conception to birth. And you would do it because it's more efficient and you'd save on weight. But then you weigh the machine and you find that the machine weighs like 120 pounds, right? Well, that's what the woman weighs.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  So women are baby machines.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Sex machines.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  That's what's happening.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Scottish sex machines.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you cannot make an incubator that weighs less than the woman that would have incubated the child, there's no use for a machine to do so.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Wait, but there might be.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Finally replacing machines with women.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  I would prefer to incubate a child in a machine than in my body any day. I think there is still a use for the machine.

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your tattoos would take on a whole other geometry.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  I think what you're forgetting is that the woman might not want to be physically carrying a child in space. She might want to be doing work.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, at zero G, you're not carrying it, it's just floating there.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  It's true, still.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And you would be just throwing up in the morning in a way that would be fine.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, zero G vomit is not a problem at all.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero G vomit, that's really bad.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really bad. So right there, that's your reason for the machine.

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had an objection, what was it?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, women...

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know, Neil, what could be objected to?

• 31:25Speaker 03

  First of all, it takes nine months, right, to make a baby, and so it's gonna be really...

• 31:29Speaker 02

  It only takes two seconds to make a baby.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Boom, everything I learned in sex ed.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  But the whole rationale was not about having sex for pleasure, but really just to populate this new place. You want to economize, and now with new technology, you can harvest eggs, you can have artificial insemination, so you can do a process where you have a bunch of just surrogates.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A farm, just a farm.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, a farm, surrogates on board, you know, maybe there's certain genes you want to breed for, so you get, you know, whatever it is, musicians or whatever it is.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, a spaceship full of musicians. No, that's...

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really useful stuff.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  All fighting about who's the drummer.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  I mean just-

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Maybe some could be food for the robot harvesters.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Just the sperm of musicians or scientists, or whoever it is, whatever trade it is you want. You take that sperm, you take those eggs, and then you have surrogates or carriers that can inseminate, you know, multiple women at the same time.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  And...

• 32:30Speaker 02

  It's famous.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  And then by the time they get there, there's gonna be a whole new population.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, here's my concern, because what started this is the psychological stability of human beings. If this is the conduct on the ship, and that's not going on on Earth, that's a neurological experiment.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  So let's try it on Earth first, and then we can bring it to outer space.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  We know what happens when you put a band together.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think we're going to another star system 50,000 years, it's longer than civilization has been around, and that's an experiment I don't think anyone is gonna do. Going to Mars, that's four years, Russians have set records for being in space. Not quite that long, but a large fraction of that time, so there's some hope that you don't go completely crazy. And Mars has 40% of Earth's gravity, so you don't have the zero-g long-term problem once you get there. 40%, it's fine. And so, the issue then is, do you set up a mini-Earth situation to sustain people's emotional stability? Or do you allow them to create some other world for themselves?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  As long as it's effective. Like, you can't send seven people having their own dreams into space, because they have to operate stuff.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they gotta do, yeah, they gotta push buttons and stuff.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  But I think if you look at the time it took for us to evolve to where we are now, and really, compared to that very short time it is that you'll be sending people into outer space, you're going to have to simulate things that we're comfortable with here on Earth.

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and that's the psychologist's job in that role, to advise on this.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the future of NASA needs psychiatrists, psychologists.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Definitely, definitely. They're not gonna have time enough to develop a whole new psyche that's gonna evolve to adapt to what it feels like to be in outer space. There's not gonna be enough time.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have that luxury to do that, right.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  No, they're gonna have to create environments which simulate the things that they're used to here on Earth.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and in fact, there are a few astronauts that want to maintain the comforts of home. So the food selection includes comfort foods. There's meatloaf, mashed potatoes. And so they're already kind of there, thinking about what is home-like for the astronauts.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  But if you take it down a notch, just think about international travel. If I travel to Japan, let's say, you know, I'm in a plane for 14 hours. I get to this new land. It almost feels like another planet. And the thing that makes me feel most comforted is I want a comfort food. It would be great to have a piece of pizza. That makes me feel psychologically grounded and stable.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  That's why there's so much science involved in Jersey Shore. Like, the scientists really had to figure out, like, we need to put them in a place that's comfortable for them and give them food that is comfortable to them, so they all don't ape out and just beat the crap out of them.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in fact, that is another planet, is what you're saying.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Well, we're preparing them to go to space. They're the people, they've been together for like four years now. That's who's going to Mars, is the cast of Jersey Shore.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Mars is in for a treat.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars is in for a treat. So if we bring up the house lights, it's time to go to Q and A.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sir, what do you have?

• 35:18Speaker 05

  You guys were talking earlier about can a computer essentially become conscious? What is that extra bit of...

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Once a computer wants to do it, it's alive.

• 35:28Speaker 05

  What extra, what is the extra amount of information and maybe like that spark?

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Heather.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  There's a really hot theory now in the world of the neural basis of consciousness called the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, IIT. And basically what it says is that any system, whether it be a brain or a computer, that has a high degree of integrated differentiated information will in some sense have the property of consciousness. That's a very highly debated argument, but it says, like, for example, if you look at a camera, one pixel is on or off, it won't affect the pixel next to it. But if a neuron is on or off, it will affect the neuron next to it. And that would be a high degree of integration of information. The bit is on, that means that bit is off. So the greater level of complexity and integration of information substantiated in any kind of matter would create consciousness.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're continuing the broadcast of our show, "The Space Between Your Ears," recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York on February 17th, 2012. Along with my co-host, Eugene Mirman, joining us onstage that night were Professor of Psychology Heather Berlin, science blogger Cara Santa Maria, and the comedian Wyatt Sinak.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, Q and A on our special StarTalk broadcast, our third from the Bell House.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sir, yes.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  A disturbing number of tonight's topics. We're redolent of this week's hysteria in the Congress about allowing women to serve in the military. They were talking about groups of men in relative isolation, in states of protracted arousal and agitation, and apparently the way they coped with this was through increased amounts of sexual assault on women. So, considering that it was Newt Gingrich talking about space travel now, I think the military-to-space travel analogy does not bode well.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, interesting point. Can you ladies react to this? I mean, men behaving badly.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think that...

• 37:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  May I add the word "very"? Very badly, yes.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I think that the idea here is that when we're talking about space travel, a lot of these organizations like NASA are trying to figure out how to make space travel more normal, more kind of reminiscent of what we're experiencing on Earth. And I think that the idea of sending soldiers into battle is to strip as much of that humanity out of them as possible during that training, and to make it so that these individuals are trained to be able to actually engage in combat, which we don't experience in our regular day-to-day affairs. And so, I mean, if the idea here is to bring our families along, or if it's just to bring, you know, women, and women already serve in the military, and they're in many of these areas, but specifically what we're talking about is arming them.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Well, no, I think the argument here is the idea that men who are serving are in isolation and that's going to increase their likelihood of, you know, they're sexually deprived, let's say, they're away from their families, that if you introduce women in this situation, that they're going to be more likely to act out.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but Kara's point is not simply that they're isolated, you have trained killers in a situation that's not an everyday circumstance, put into the isolated.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this isn't a controlled study.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But don't most astronauts have military backgrounds?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Some of them do.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the old days, in the old days.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  In the old days, they were fighter pilots.

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not anymore, in the old days, they were all military.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  A lot of them, they're schoolteachers now, and like, and firemen.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Really? This is not a controlled, you know, this is not a controlled scientific study, so there are confabulating variables here. Is it the aggression from the training that is causing more rape? Or is it because they are, you know, not around enough women? And the truth is, at that point, I think that we need more oversight of these men. That's the real problem. It's not, should we surround them with more women or less women?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Can I suggest this, though? When I study people with impulse control disorders, what makes us uniquely human and different from other types of animals is that we do have this large prefrontal cortex that allows us to inhibit these innate behaviors. I want to rape, I want to grab that piece of chocolate cake right now. But then you have the idea, there's long-term...

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rape chocolate cake, that was in the same sentence?

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Well, they're urges.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  This audience has done a great job not having sex with each other and watching us, and I commend you.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  The thing that makes us human, and we're able to understand long-term consequences and inhibit those innate desires, you know what? I have this urge to have the piece of chocolate cake, but I know I'm on a diet and I want to lose weight, so I won't.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're overcoming the lizard brain.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Exactly, overcoming the lizard brain, and I don't see why soldiers shouldn't be able to do the same thing that we all do every day.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go to the next question, yes.

• 40:08Speaker 07

  Could you look at what happened with our crazed astronaut, maybe falling in love with another astronaut, arguably one of the most, maybe not dangerous anymore, but very high-risk, high-reward type job, and that really affecting her psyche and why she believed she loved this man the way she did?

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, if the, if the question is, could we imagine that affected her psyche? Yeah.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, we compel you to keep looking out.