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Science|Helen Fisher, Who Researched the Brain's Love Circuitry, Dies
at 79
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/23/science/helen-fisher-dead.html

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Helen Fisher, Who Researched the Brain's Love Circuitry, Dies at 79

A biological anthropologist, she worked with colleagues to confirm
for the first time that love is hard-wired in the brain.

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Helen Fisher, a woman in a skirt and blazer over a white buttoned
shirt, sits in an armchair in an office, with a desk and a full
bookshelf behind her.
Helen Fisher in her office in Manhattan in 2005. Her research was
driven by a belief that there was an untapped scientific basis for
the intense, often irrational, human mating drive.Credit...Michael
Falco for The New York Times
Richard Sandomir

By Richard Sandomir

Aug. 23, 2024

Helen E. Fisher, a biological anthropologist who went looking for
love in the brain circuitry of people who were besotted as well as
people who were rejected, and whose research into love led to a role
as the chief science adviser to the dating service Match.com, died on
Saturday at her husband's home in the Bronx. She was 79.

John Tierney, her husband, said the cause was endometrial cancer. Dr.
Fisher split her time between her husband's apartment and hers in
Manhattan.

"Around the world, people love," Dr. Fisher said in a 2008 TED Talk.
"They sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and
stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine
for love, they live for love, they kill for love and they die for
love."

Dr. Fisher had already been studying sexual behavior formore than 20
years, but she believed that there was an undiscovered scientific
basis for love, an intense, often irrational, human mating drive.

"People have resisted thinking that romantic love actually is a brain
system," she said on the NPR program "TED Radio Hour" in 2014.
"They're scared that it will break the magic. They want romantic love
to be part of the supernatural." She added: "Why do we want to feel
that it's supernatural? 'Cause it feels so good."

She and two collaborators used magnetic resonance scanners to detect
increases and decreases in blood flow -- indications of neural
activity -- in the brains of 17 college students in the throes of new
love. Their research confirmed for the first time that love is
hard-wired in the brain.

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