The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction

by Larry Young

After a quarter century of investigation, it’s now clear that vole “love” and monogamy come down to a defined set of ingredients: a feel-good reward and a strong, emotionally salient memory of the individual one was affiliating with when the reward hit. That’s the cocktail.

Oxytocin not only nudges the brain toward positive social communication and encourages mind reading but also actually improves the precision of our internal emotion detectors.