Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki is surprised when an acting exercise challenges her beliefs about love and attraction.

Wendy Suzuki, Ph.D. is a Professor of Neural Science and psychology at New York University.  She received her undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from U.C. San Diego.  She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health before starting her faculty position in the Center for Neural Science at New York University in 1998.  Wendy is a recipient of numerous grants and awards for her research including the Lindsley Prize from the Society for Neuroscience, the prestigious Troland Research award from the National Academy of Sciences and NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching award. Her research has focused on understanding the patterns of brain activity underlying long-term memory and understanding how aerobic exercise affects mood, learning, memory and cognitive abilities. Her first book “Healthy Brain Happy Life” came out in paperback in March of 2016 and is an international bestseller. 

This story originally aired July 28, 2017.

Story Transcript

As a professor of neuroscience at NYU, one of the favorite things that I get to do is teach undergraduates. I’m always trying to motivate them, saying that neuroscience is so cool because, by studying neuroscience, you get to understand yourself, your unique self, how your brain cells are connected that allows you to see and feel and remember and pay attention to the world in the unique way that you do.

So in that vein, one of my most popular lectures that I give is called The Neurobiology of Love. It has to do with these hamster-like critters called prairie voles. They live out on the plains somewhere in Montana. These prairie voles are unique because they're one of the few animals that form lifelong sexual pair bonds. Yes, they are the Disney of animals out there. They're one of the only ones that actually do that.

They live in big, happy Brady Bunch-style family units out there on the plains, and you might wonder how a new pair bond forms if they're living in these family units. Well, let’s say you're a female juvenile prairie vole and you're walking down the path. Suddenly, you smell this intoxicating odor. That odor is the urine of a male prairie vole that’s not in your family unit. It’s not intoxicating if the urine is from a male in your family unit. But if it’s from a male outside of your family unit, it becomes intoxicating.

If the depositor of that intoxicating urine is around, a pair bond can form. How it forms is that that juvenile male and female then mate for forty hours straight. Let me say that again. The male and female mate for forty hours straight. After that, voila, they have formed a lifelong pair bond.

And neuroscientists saw that and said, “Wait a second. I need to find out what’s happening in their brains.” It turns out that it has to do with two key hormones. In the female prairie vole, during that forty-hour mating period, she releases a hormone called oxytocin. If you go to Amazon.com now, you can get snortable oxytocin that’s called Companion. Love potion. It doesn’t quite work that way.

In the males, during that forty-hour mating period, they have to release vasopressin. If the males don’t release vasopressin and the females don’t release oxytocin, those pair bonds don’t form. So it is a fascinating scenario and just, for those of you thinking, it doesn’t quite work exactly the same way in people, but still, it’s a fascinating system to study.

So I was so excited to develop this lecture. I finished all the slides and, really excited to be able to give this lecture, and I took a walk. I’m walking down Washington Square Park right down the street from my office and then I see him, the homeless man peeing against a tree. I realized that if I was a prairie vole, my life would be so convenient because that would be my Prince Charming. No more swiping, no more filling out little boxes. I thought for a moment and I was a little disappointed I wasn’t a prairie vole, because it would be so easy.

The other great thing about being at NYU is that I get to collaborate with all the other cool professors at NYU. I came together with the director of the graduate acting program of the world-famous Tisch School of Performing Arts. We decided to do a seminar for my neuroscience majors. So I’m the director of undergraduate studies. This was a special seminar. It was going to be called Inside the Actor’s Brain.

Of course I was going to talk about the emotion that all the sonnets, all movies, all the plays are about: love and attachment. So I was going to tell my prairie vole story. And then he was going to bring all of the graduate actors in the graduate acting program and demonstrate how actors bring emotions and practice their own emotions. You have to realize, these are the actors that are going to win the Academy Award in the next ten to twenty years.

So very excited, it was really popular. Full house. We get there. I stand up, give my prairie vole talk, and then they call up all the graduate actors to the stage. It happens that one of the acting coaches that I know was going to do the exercise. I had done an exercise with him and, spontaneously -- I didn’t decide I was going to do this -- I raised my hand and said, “Well, I want to do the exercise too.” I helped organize this so I can do whatever I want.

So I go up on the stage, I get up on the stage with all of the graduate actors. I quickly realize this was nothing like the other acting exercise that I did. We got in two rows facing each other, so I had a partner and was facing him. The first instruction from the coach was, “You're looking at somebody that you love deeply, this person that’s been in your life for years, through good times, through bad times. This is a deep love that you feel.”

Now, it was very intense. These were all serious students. And I decided to interpret it like general love. So my strategy was to project all the different kinds of loves that I feel onto this guy. Family love, romantic love, friendship love, love for people that I've lost and I no longer have in my life anymore. It was so easy to do because when I looked at this handsome, young graduate student with these beautiful dark eyes, he looked like he loved me deeply. So it was a very easy exercise.

I don't know how long we did it, but then came the next command. He was giving commands to different rows. So the first command was to the other row that I was facing. The command was “Take one step away from your partner.” Nobody moved. He thought nobody heard him and he said, “Hey, you, row, please step one step back.” Still nobody. It took five times to actually get them to move like half a step back because we were bonded and we didn’t want to move away.

Then the next command came to us and he said, “Okay, my row, you can either step forward and say ‘I’m sorry,’ or you can take one step away from your partner and say ‘I love you’.

This was easy. I took one step away and I said, “I love you.” Other people did whatever they wanted at different times.

We did these exercises until the big question came. So sometime in the middle of the exercise, he told our row, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you, but the person that you're looking at right now has deceived you badly. Just, at the bottom of your heart, your heart is broken because this person has deceived you.”

You could have heard a pin drop in that auditorium. Then suddenly everybody in my row started crying. I felt like crying too, and I’m a group crier, so I started crying. Forget the fact that all my undergraduates were in the audience watching me on stage cry. I wasn’t thinking about them.

We went on through these different exercises. We had different choices after this big reveal of the deception and suddenly -- it felt like just five minutes later -- the exercise ended. The coach did debriefings with some of the graduate actors. He was fielding questions, lots of questions from the audience.

Suddenly, he said, “Well, Wendy, you're the only non-actor up on the stage. What did you go through? What was your experience?”

And I said, “When you told me that my partner deceived me, I knew you were wrong.” I could see it in his eyes. I mean, it was so clear he was just telling me he didn’t do it.

Then the exercise was over and he leaves the stage. And I’m like, But we had something. Where are you going?

Of course the exercise was over. I left the stage. We had this last part of the event. It was a big success. It was thirty minutes over. Everybody stayed and students started coming up to me asking questions, but I’m like, I’m going to go meet my guy. I mean, I don't even know his name.

Finally, the questions stopped and I go into the hallway and I see him eating pizza. So I go over and very casual, “Hey, great doing the exercise with you.” I introduce myself and we give each other a hug, and I left the building.

I left the building thinking, Thank God I am not an actor because that was so emotional. I don't think I could do that every day.

So I happily went back to my own building and went and started designing experiments and teaching and got into my work again. I didn’t think about this exercise and this experience for a whole month. Until one day, this was in February, the end of February I was walking south down Broadway away from my building. It was one of those really beautiful, bright winter days, kind of like today where the light is very metallic looking.

And I’m walking down the street. I could picture exactly where I was, and I saw him. He was walking towards me and he was deep in conversation with another guy that I recognized from the graduate acting program. It was like everything went in slow motion. We started walking and my hair was bouncy. And he was walking, and I even heard background music in my ears. I mean, he just passed and I was just in awe. I thought this was amazing, this five-minute kind of exercise, and a month later, I’m still deeply in love.

Here’s the problem. Nobody told me how to act. I just fell in love with this guy. And I thought, Oh, my God, we have just blown the prairie voles out of the water because, I’m sorry, you cannot understand what happened in that situation just by studying prairie voles. But I also knew how you could. Let’s get those actors into a brain scanner and have them cycle through all of their emotions. Because if they were as real as emotions that I felt, we could understand deeply and much more deeply than we understand now this range of emotions, including love.

Then I thought, Well, I always said it. Neuroscience is cool because it helps you understand yourself. And usually by that I think about vision and memory, but it helps you understand what makes you most unique: how you love other people. It’s practical too because you have to understand that, the next time I want to fall in love with somebody, I have some powerful tricks up my sleeve.

Thank you very much.