Helen Fisher – LeWeb 2008 interview

Posted on December 6, 2008 under blog, Podcast Interviews ,

 

 

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[Back to the overview of all LeWeb08 interviews]

Doctor Helen Fisher is a biological anthropology professor at Rutgers University, major researcher in the field of romantic interpersonal attraction, considered as the world’s leading expert in the topic of love, is involved of creation in the dating websites chemistry.com and match.com and the author of four books. Most famously for Leweb though she is the inspiration for this years theme: Love. As she says in the interview

Love is a very powerful drive. People live for it, they kill for it and they die for it.

We talk about

  • The different kinds of love that exist and about the brain systems that are involved with them
  • Her brain scanning experiments and the notion, that love is a primitive drive, not an emotion
  • The sophisticated structures of attachment
  • Studies she has conducted and some results of them
  • The concept of marriage and why it is not a natural law
  • The non existing cultural differences when it comes to feelings involved with love
  • How the fact, that she is an identical twin, created her interest for the love subject
  • How genes determinate behavior
  • The rules of nature that make people fall in love with a specific person
  • About the four different basic types of character and the genes and chemicals that define them
  • The types of Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, Gordon Brown, John McCain, Bill Clinton and Nicolas Sarkozy
  • How Helen stumbled into Mother Nature’s kitchen and found the recipe for love
  • How these different kinds of personality influence history and the course of the world, shown on the examples of Yeltsin and Gandhi
  • How the four types were expressed in archaic times and how they types evolved to organize group life
  • The types most bloggers belong to

Download MP3 (32 min, 29.3 MB)

 

Her books:

Also thanks to Markus Roder for pointing out that Helen also did Ted:

 

Additional links

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listening to Helen Fisher about LOVE http://tr.im/ctbk090 #leweb #interview

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