Additional Expertise
About Dr. Lucy Brown, PhD & Dr. Helen Fisher
Lucy Brown, PhD, and Helen Fisher, PhD, are best friends, researchers and scientific collaborators.
They talk endlessly together about the science methods they use and results they get from brain scanning (functional MRI).
More than ten years ago, they discovered that in the early stages of romance, when a person can’t think of anything else, a primitive brain reward system is active. It is at a non-verbal, reflex level and drives people toward the person they are in love with. After all their studies, they call romance and love a natural addiction. Love is like thirst, and your lover is water. It helps to know that. It helps to explain why romantic love is so hard to control. It helps to know that nature gave us these romance and attachment systems for our pleasure and survival.
They have written many scientific papers about love since that first discovery, and decided to start a project— a website— that would explain all of the studies and their thinking in a clear way to non-scientists.