Dr. Lucy Brown, PhD & Dr. Helen Fisher, PhD - Expert

About Dr. Lucy Brown, PhD & Dr. Helen Fisher

We are Lucy Brown, PhD and Helen Fisher PhD.  We are a neuroscientist and biological anthropologist who are best friends and scientific collaborators.  We are so lucky to be able to talk endlessly together about the science methods we use and results we get from brain scanning (functional MRI).  

More than ten years ago, we 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 our studies, we 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.  

We have written a lot of scientific papers about love since that first discovery, and we decided to start a project— a website— that would explain all of the studies and our thinking in a clear way to non-scientists.  You can see the project at www.theanatomyoflove.com and you can write to us at [email protected].