Miguel Pita: "We need the falling in love to end"

"I am the concrete one", assures Miguel Pita, geneticist and professor at the UAM, amidst laughter. On his WhatsApp, his profile picture is a fragment of an abstract painting painted by his father, the architect and painter Juan Pita. The scientist has published El cerebro enamorado (Periférica, 2025), a popular science book about the biology of love, from the first sting to the last argument.

I started reading his book on the subway, next to a couple in love. They missed their stop.

— The brain of a person in love changes its architecture to focus attention on the signals from a single person. When one of theirs arrives, neurons fire more than if it comes from any other source.

Is there no way to fall in love without the "transient imbecility" that Ortega spoke of?

— Yes, but not without the chemistry that pushes you into it. Neurotransmitters enter the prefrontal cortex –our best control system– and block it. There will be those who have a lot of self-control, but the molecules will be released for them all the same. If they are not released, we no longer call it falling in love.

Can you be in love with two people at the same time?

— Two different relationships can be maintained with two different people. But falling in love is the obsession with a specific individual: here, there is no room for two.

And weren't our love-struck ancestors eaten by lions for being so distracted?

— We cannot know, to be honest. But I am inclined to think that a lion would sooner eat someone in love than someone who was not.

So?

— Nature plays with quantity. Establishing a partner might be a burden for one's own survival, but it is a fantastic strategy for the survival of the offspring.

Those of my generation have fewer partners and less sex than our parents. Has the strategy broken down?

— Consolidating couples for raising children has worked in very different environments and has survived all social changes. To a theoretical and non-existent designer of this strategy of love, what is happening now would make them laugh.

Laugh?

— We have survived the savannah and the Middle Ages. Are people today more individualistic and more isolated? Well. It's as if someone told me that young people today don't like water. They will end up drinking water. Falling in love is probably the strongest stimulus a human being can feel.

More than fatherhood?

— Falling in love is the change that most makes you not recognize yourself; parenthood is the greatest lasting change. The first takes you off your tracks; the second keeps you there forever.

Do you remember your first love?

— I was ten years old, in fifth grade, and I fell in love with an eighth-grade girl.

Why do we love who we love?

— Because it meets many of the requirements of an ideal partner that we have engraved somewhere in our brain.

Where do they come from?

— It is an unconscious list that accumulates over the years: from things of a social nature –someone who thinks like me, or who thinks the opposite— to a smell that drives the most primitive part of the brain crazy.

And why doesn't he love me?

— Because perhaps you do not fit into their profile.

What a comfort.

— It is better understood in the negative. Rather than a portrait of the person I will fall in love with, there is a list of people I will not fall in love with, not even by chance. There are those who have tried everything, and you know from the beginning that there will be no way.

If only two of us remain at the end of the world, will we end up falling in love?

— Most likely, but it is not certain. Perhaps that person is a square and I am a circle; a Phillips head screw and I am a flathead screwdriver. In love, it is not all about trying. We are not in charge here.

Are there people who cannot fall in love?

— Psychopaths, for example. For a person with psychopathy, a hug does not release oxytocin in the same way. They feel pleasure, but not affective pleasure: probably not even with their siblings, nor with their parents, nor with their partner.

But isn't romantic love a cultural construct?

— Love has an immense social component, but one falls in love because hormonal changes occur. What is not written is who: in that unconscious list, it does not fall the same way if you go to a religious school or a public one, if as a child you were beaten up on the street or not.

Why is it harder to fall in love as the years go by?

— A hormonal state is required that occurs less with age, and someone who meets certain requirements, which are increasingly numerous.

And at eighty years old, can you still feel the butterflies when a WhatsApp arrives?

— It is more unlikely, but not impossible: there are people who fall in love in their seventies, eighties, nineties and who knows until when.

What happens to my brain when I hear the "ping"?

— Anticipatory pleasure appears, which has a lot to do with the arrival of dopamine in areas of the brain that produce pleasure, such as the nucleus accumbens. If we fell in love with someone yesterday and today they send us a message, we feel a tremendous spike of pleasure.

Also when we fantasize about impossible loves?

— Imagination places us in a situation of success. But anticipated pleasure is much more powerful with something tangible. Imagine that you write a letter to Marlon Brando and one day you receive a reply. The sender says…

Oh!

— Here it is. You don't even need a kiss or a hug: a message, a call, a note in the diary is enough.

His other great passion is cinema. How much of what he knows about love did he learn in a movie theater?

— Cinema has influenced my way of telling stories and doing outreach, but I analyze love from the perspective of science. In any case, cinema helps you understand love in the wrong way.

Why?

— Because it stays in the moment of falling in love, as if mature love did not exist. And this is the most interesting stage of love: two people who are no longer held hostage by their biology. We need for the falling in love to end; that anxiety is not healthy. Mature love never needs to end.