Lizard brains

What makes us sexually attracted to another person?

The not-so-romantic answer is that it's the limbic system of our brains — the hypothalamus and amygdala — that calls the shots. This part of our brain is commonly — if inaccurately — known as the lizard brain, and lights up when we meet someone we find sexually desirable.

However, our lizard brains have two inconvenient drawbacks.

They doesn't listen

First, our lizard brains don't pay attention to our conscious minds. The heart wants what the heart wants, and our conscious minds don't get a say in the matter.

For example, consider a religious conservative who is born gay but believes that homosexuality is a sin that will send them to hell. They will desperately want to be straight. And a pedophile will surely know that acting on their desires will get them arrested. But their lizard brains don't care. They want what they want, and won't be told otherwise, consequences be damned.

They don't explain their actions

Second, our lizard brains don't explain their actions. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said: I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. He was talking about pornography, but could just as easily have been describing people we're attracted to.

This is a problem when filling in the "preferred partner" section of an online dating profile. Who are we attracted to? Our lizard brain won't tell us its criteria, so we can't know for sure. All we can do is guess, based on the people we've been attracted to — and not attracted to — in the past, and try to infer a pattern.

And we often guess wrong. It turns out that the characteristics we say we want — and often enforce using dating app filters — rarely describe the people we actually fall in love with. Speed dating experiments show similar results.

Learning by example

Predicting who we'll be attracted to relies on extrapolating from past decisions made by our lizard brains, and we don't seem to be very good at it.

However, inferring patterns from positive and negative examples is exactly what machine learning is good at. Maybe it could do a better job than our conscious mind at predicting who we'll be attracted to.

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