Going The Distance

1) Dr Helen Fisher & Dr Lucy Brown. Rutgers University – New York. The brain.

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and Neuroscientist Lucy Brown conduct a functional MRI Scan of Mike and Alanna’s brains. In this way she will be able to see if the neurophysiological responses show if they are “in love”

What happened:

• fMRI, as name (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) would suggest, is one huge magnet. No metal allowed in the room at all. Bra underwire included. The puppies ran free.
• Mike up first. Wearing a pair of pyjamas, he lay down on the gurney.
• Slowly inserted into the small hole in the middle of the giant magnetic Polo mint.
• Not happy. “I’m on the edge” came a squeak from inside the tube. Claustrophia had struck our hero. Out came the gurney. Deep breaths from Michael. Reassuring words from the rest of the team.
• Alanna then deployed to keep her hand on his leg as he underwent the scan.
• Dr Fisher maintains that there are three different types of love, locatable in the brain: romance, attachment, sex. Weeks before the scan, Mike and Alanna were asked to provide photos of the other one which brought to mind those feelings, to be shown during the scan.
• Four photos were needed in total. 3 would be of the other one of us: one to inspire feelings of romance, one for attachment and one for sex. The fourth photograph needed to be of someone of the opposite sex of a similar age, who we saw often but felt neutral about. Mike chose a girl from finance at his work, Alanna for a receptionist/security guard at one of the buildings she worked at.
• (telling someone that you want a photo of them because you feel absolutely nothing for them is an interesting conversation…)
• Lucy Brown, the neurologist who works with Dr Fisher, and responsible for analysing the results of the scan, organised the scan so that we would shown the images of the other one in a carefully constructed order, while the machine took images of activity in our brain.
• So Mike went in for the actual scan. He lay down on the gurney, had his head secured with sponges into position, then had a plastic cage set over his head. A small mirror was set to the correct level above his eyes, and angled to reflect images projected onto a screen at the back of the scanner.
• The space around the head in an MRI is very small. It’s no wonder that Mike had kittens in there. The first ten minutes of the scan are set to take readings of your brain before any specific activity in the romance areas is registered.
• The noise of the MRI is a very very loud whine. We had to have earplugs and layers of sponge put beside our ears to stop us being temporarily deafened by it. Once the initial ‘control’ scan had taken place, Dr Fisher explained that she and Lucy would be analysing the different types of love in 3 different blocks. Starting with romance.
• My romantic photo of Mike appeared on the mirror in front of my eyes. His smiling face during our first dance at our wedding (a poorly but earnestly choreographed attempt at the Pogues’ Tuesday Morning). It made me smile. The MRI whirred. I tried to concentrate as hard as I could on feelings of romance. After about 10 seconds of studying that photo, the image disappeared and was replaced by a 4 figure number, and we were asked to count down in multiples of 7 from that. (6225 – 7= 6218, -7= 6211, -7=6204, etc) An exercise designed to flummox even the hardiest of number crunchers and to flush out any residual thoughts of the beloved.
• Then ‘Neutral Mug’ flashed up. Since the point of this face was to inspire oblivion, Dr Fisher said that when she has the scan, she thinks of the word “blank”. I looked at the white shirt of Jon, the South African security dude, and tried desperately not to fall asleep.
• This pattern (Mike in dance – baffling number exercise – Mr Neutral) was repeated three times, as the scanner whirred its deafening tune all the while.
• Keith’s voice would then chime in with a note of encouragement (in Mike’s case it was “Good job Mike! We’re nearly there” every time) then set up the next set of images.
• On to attachment. Mike had chosen a photo of me crying with happiness at the end of our wedding weekend, I had plumped for a photo of him (cut from one of the both of us) laughing in the backseat of a mate’s car as we drove up and down the main street on a great holiday in Beirut. The same rules applied – concentrate on the feelings of attachment inspired by the photo, then the high number, then the neutral face.
• Finally, the image we’d chosen to evoke feelings of “sex”. This was hard to choose because you couldn’t give a porny shot, but it needed to be something which turned you on. I took one of Mike’s head on the pillow. And it worked! I’d been very sceptical, but I got the raging horn when it flashed up in front of me. Though, there really is nothing like maths to douse said horn.
• Back at Mission HQ in the next door room, the MRI was taking image-slices of the brain whilst Dr Fisher, Lucy Brown and Keith watched on.
• Results to come in Ushaia…

2)  Eric Holzle, Founder of Scientific Match.com – Naples Florida. The DNA.

Geneticist Eric Holzle took DNA samples from the couple to analyse genes in the MHC region – which plays a role in the selection of potential mates.

what happened:

• We left the brainscanner and headed to meet Eric Holzle, the founder of ScientificMatch.com. It’s a dating website which measures people’s compatibility through their DNA.
• The theory stems from an experiment done by Claus Wedekind in 1995 – when a group of female college students smelled t-shirts that had been worn by male students for two nights, without deodorant, cologne or scented soaps. Overwhelmingly, the women preferred the odours of men with dissimilar “MHC” genes to their own. The findings suggested that people were attracted to members of the opposite sex with the most different immune systems from their own, the belief being that physiologically, it makes the most sense to find a mate with resistances with complement your own so that your child has the widest range of defences.
• Eric Holzle believes that three alleles hold the key to these choices, and founded ScientificMatch.com to bring people together with others who are biologically compatible with them – the first really scientific dating site, he claims.
• He’s a friendly and bright American with good hair and good teeth. And he knows that genes don’t hold all the answers – but that narrowing the field dramatically can make a real difference to finding the right person. He’s so committed to the idea that, unlike most other dating websites, ScientificMatch.com is a pay-once-only deal rather than an annual subscription.
• He brought along two tester kits (which each member of ScientificMatch.com is sent upon joining the service) for Mike and Alanna to use on themselves. Two cheek swabs are required, which are then sent, freepost, to a lab in Oklahoma where the results are analysed and the information logged on the site. Users then add to their profile to build the personality which sits alongside the science.

3) Terry Sterrenberg, a relationship therapist certified by the world-reknowned Gottman Institute – Seattle. The characters.

Terry conducted a Gottman assessment on the couple, using physiological and psychological methodology to predict if the couple will stay together for life or not.

What happened:

• Having test our brains and our bodies, it was time to test our emotions. One of the biggest names in the world in the field of relationship analysis is called Dr John Gottman, based in Seattle and founder, with his wife Dr Julie Gottman Schwartz, of the Gottman Institute, established to research and restore relationships..
• We left New York the day after the brainscan and headed westward to Seattle. Dr John Gottman is trained as a mathematician, and in the 1970s, he turned his attention to relationships. He wanted to understand the statistics of relationships – what made some work and some fail? Where there signs, when studying the interaction of couples, which would indicate the eventual outcome of the relationship?
• Gottman found an answer to these questions by putting couples into a specially created environment, filmed by his researchers, called The Love Lab. After years of filming and analysing footage of couples in the Love Lab (an apartment, overlooking the water, where the couples spent a weekend as if in a B&B), Dr Gottman could work out in three minutes, with above 90% accuracy, whether the couple would stay together (experiments were conducted over a 20 year period), simply by analysing an interaction of them discussing a fight they’d had.
• He’s the mack daddy, basically. No documentary about relationships would be complete without the involvement of Dr John Gottman. Sadly, the Love Lab is no more (my lifelong dream to be a Lab Rat killed in one swift email enquiry), so that was out. After the Love Lab had run for a while, John’s wife Julie, a trained therapist, worked with John to take his research findings and give them a practical use by applying them to couples in a way which could help them strengthen their relationships.
• Dr Gottman found hundreds of clues about relationships based on the way the couple interacts – and has written over 40 books on that knowledge. But the key, he found, to discerning whether a relationship would fail was in the presence of what he calls “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse” in a couple’s interaction. These are:
• Contempt, yadda yadda yadda. The most significant being contempt.
• There are now tens of Gottman certified therapists all over the US who can apply Gottman’s learnings when analysing a couple’s relationship, and we were lucky enough to find one on the outskirts of Seattle, called Terry Sterrenberger. We spent a (long) day with Terry where he dissected our relationship as we talked about various areas of our lives together. Once he’d found a particular problem area of ours (an age old argument about work around the home – Mike doing most of it because of an inability to stop, Alanna feeling guilty because after doing a bit, she wants to stop and rest in front of the telly), he hooked us up to a heartrate monitor and videoed the entire day’s interactions.
• Like Dr Fisher and Eric Holzle, he will seal his results in an envelope and send them to us to open at the end of our journey.
• We’ve now got leading experts in the field of relationship study to analyse our heads, faces and genes to see if we, Mike and Alanna Clear, are meant to be together. The only question is, why the hell didn’t we do this before we got married 8 months ago…?!

All three scientists will withold their results from the couple until the end of their journey.

Test 2: The Road:

The mad road trip: Anchorage to Ushaia. The top (well, just about) of the Pan-American highway, right down to the very bottom of it in Argentina. Through 16 countries, over 6 months, along 20,000 miles. We’ve collected a Ural motorbike and sidecar and set off on one of the toughest overland adventures on the planet. Along our journey, we’re meeting couples which tell bigger stories of the places we’re visiting. So we’re hoping to meet couples from different cultures, religions, geographies – mad stories of Mormons, traditions of First Nations, Hollywood divorces, hippy rituals, and shot-gun couplings in Vegas. The cast will be both extensive and diverse, ranging from the normal to the outrageous. Each of whom will have advice for the couple on the secrets of their lasting love. Already in Alaska, we’ve met a host of couples: Alaskan Natives, hippy homesteaders, Russian Old Believers, young Anchoragers, a former downhill skiier and his wife…

At the end of the road in Chile, we’ll open the envelope, to see if the scientists think we are destined to stay together.