Dr Helen Fisher, MRI maven who showed just how love works, dies at 79

It's all about your chemistry

Noted anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who lead groundbreaking research into how the brain deals with love and passion, has died at the age of 79 after suffering endometrial cancer.

Across a career spanning more than 50 years, Fisher was fascinated with brain function and its reflection in human behavior. She rose to fame in 2004 after a series of pioneering brain scans that showed how that organ deals with sexual attraction, love and rejection.

"After all, if you casually ask someone to go to bed with you and they refuse, you don't slip into a depression, or commit suicide or homicide; but around the world people suffer terribly from rejection in love," she wrote.

In 1968 Fisher graduated from New York University with a BA in Anthropology and Psychology. She earned her PhD in 1975 in Physical Anthropology: Human Evolution, Primatology, and Human Sexual Behavior, and set about studying how sexual and other selection mechanisms affected human evolution.

In 1982 her first book, "The sex contract: the evolution of human behavior," was well received and she began to focus her research on both past and contemporary human relationships and how they work – or don't. Then around the turn of the century she began exploring the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to take a peek at what was actually going on behind the cranium.

Fisher took 17 test subjects – ten women and seven men – between 18 and 26, who professed to be "intensely in love" and showed them images of their beloved and strangers while in an fMRI machine, taking around 2,500 brain scans.

This work led to the 2005 paper "The Drive to Love," in which she posited that feelings of love could be pinpointed to the parts of the brain associated with such feelings. The conclusion was that romantic love isn't a specific emotion as such, but linked to the dopamine reward system contained in the brain's ventral tegmental zone.

Dr Fisher and two humans engaging in an area of her research. Source: Dr Helen Fisher – Click to enlarge

"I distrust about 95 percent of the MRI literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love," Dr Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, told The New York Times after the publication.

"The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."

Shortly after the 2005 research was published, dating site Match.com hired her as a chief scientific advisor for a new site – dubbed Chemistry.com – and developed the Fisher Temperament Inventory (FTI). This used brain chemistry and identified four key character types: Curious/Energetic, Cautious/Social Norm Compliant, Analytical/Tough-minded, and Prosocial/Empathetic. It linked these to the body's use of dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen/oxytocin.

The FTI is now seen as a far more effective personality test than the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator still in common use. Unlike the Myers-Briggs test, the FTI was backed up by evidential testing – again using fMRI. In 2010 Dr Fisher co-founded the start-up Neurocolor to apply the technique to the business world.

She carried on with research, however. After scanning 15 volunteers who had been romantically rejected, she concluded in a 2010 paper that many of the same parts of the brain were involved in processing such emotions – but also activated forebrain functions linked with gain/loss, cocaine craving, addiction, and emotion regulation.

Another fMRI study of 17 subjects who professed to still be in love after over 20 years together concluded that romantic love was a stronger motivating force in the human brain than physical attraction.

Fisher went on to publicize her research in a series of TED talks, garnering over 21 million viewers, and writing a total of six books on the subject. She served as a senior research fellow at The Kinsey Institute until her death.

After being diagnosed with cancer she slowed down – a little bit – but was publishing papers as recently as two years ago. She died in her second husband's home on Saturday and is survived by two sisters and a stepson. ®