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Inside the Machine

It's a few days before the experiment, and I'm busy scouring photo albums in search of three perfect photos of my wife — one to spark each of the love systems. For the sex photo, I find a picture of my wife on the beach on our honeymoon. She's got her back to me and is looking over her shoulder. (Yes, that's her. The one with the partially exposed boob. Thank you for letting me print that, Julie.)

Later, Fisher tells me this is an echo of the classic "lordosis" pose favored by female animals. When female horses (or monkeys or pandas, etc.) want to mate, they raise their hips and look back over their shoulder at the male.

The attachment photo is harder. I choose one from a dinner for Julie's thirty-fifth birthday. Julie disapproves. "I have red eyes there. How can you find me attractive?"

"I think you look good."

"There are so many better ones."

"You're not allowed to argue," I tell her.

This is one of the huge side benefits of this project. Fisher told me that Julie and I can't get in a big fight before the test, lest it taint the results. This is, as Blagojevich says, a golden opportunity. Like this morning, Julie wanted me to take the early shift with our kids. I said it was her turn. She started to argue. "The MRI is coming up," I said, and rolled over.

In the end, Julie wins the attachment-photo argument. (That's her choice.)

On Thursday, I e-mail all three photos to Brown. And on Monday, I show up at NYU for my scan. I lie down on the table, and Fisher strokes my hand to calm me. She's very maternal. They slide me into the tunnel.

The images flash. I've got a list of scenarios to think about, depending on which photo is up. I've got romantic scenarios, attachment scenarios (picnic with the kids, watching The Office on the couch next to Julie), and sex scenarios. (I'll spare you.)

In between the images, Brown and Fisher try to clear the blood from my brain. The cleanser is a "neutral" face — a high school friend of Julie's who elicits overpowering boredom in me. (I can't show you.)

The entire exercise is at once scientific and voyeuristic. Like they're filming the most cerebral, least sexy porno in the history of the world.

Afterward, I fill out several questionnaires about my feelings toward Julie. Do I get depressed when things don't go right with Julie? Yes. Do I think obsessively about Julie? Not really.

The Results

A few days later, Brown e-mails me some initial findings. It's a great e-mail, full of exclamation points and capital letters. ("OOOh, this is just too exciting...") It's also quite technical. I understand a good 40 percent of it. She e-mails again a few minutes later: "I just read my message over again, and I'm not sure it's that coherent. Sorry. I'm excited."

Later, I get a more polished report and do a debriefing with the scientists. It's interesting — the interpretation of the results isn't like reading a red or blue litmus paper. It requires art as well as science. (Skeptics say more of the former.) The major findings:

Romance: I'm not so addicted to love. The forty-nine human guinea pigs who went before me were all truly, madly, deeply in love. Some had just fallen in love. Some had just been dumped. (In a cruel twist of bioengineering, the romantic craving actually gets more intense post-dumping.) And seventeen belonged to the small, freakish subset of people who claim they are still madly in love after years of marriage. These long-term romantics did, in fact, show cocainelike responses. I am not in that freakish subset. In fact, I'm one of the first of the fMRI guinea pigs not to show the rush from my lizard brain. This wasn't an honor I wanted.

Now, I'm not totally devoid of romance. Julie did fire up my prefrontal cortex, which is more intellectual, less visceral. "It's a more complex picture," says Brown. "Your brain is not just seeing pure reward, the way it is in the beginning of a relationship. Your brain is seeing some difficulties."

I tell Julie I don't have head-over-heels romantic feelings toward her.

"Shocker," she says.

"Why, you aren't head over heels in love with me?" I ask.

"Uh, no."

As part of the study, we'd each filled out questionnaires about how passionately we love each other. One of the questions was Do you tremble when you see your lover?

"So you don't tremble when you see me?" I ask her.

"No. Did you say you trembled?"

"A little. Sometimes."

"You so do not tremble."

She's right. I was just worried she'd see the questionnaire and get pissed.

Attachment: I love like a rodent of the grasslands. Scientists who study sex and love are totally smitten with prairie voles, a breed of overgrown mice that lives in dry parts of the Midwest. What's so special about prairie voles? They're basically monogamous — unlike the sluts and man-whores that make up 97 percent of mammals.