Can we choose to fall out of love? | Dessa | TEDxWanChai

The singer and rapper Dessa had been writing songs about heartbreak for years as she waded through a volatile relationship and a protracted breakup. One night, inspired by a TED Talk, she decided to design a case study in which she'd be the only participant. With the help of an fMRI machine, a team of willing scientists and a neuro-feedback practitioner, she turned to neuroscience to see if it could help her, finally, fall out of love. In this talk, she shares the journey and results of this unique endeavour. Dessa’s project may not be an official scientific study, but it is a lens for examining the big questions on love and loss, mind and body, art and science.

Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations—her resume as a musician includes performances at Lollapalooza, Glastonbury and the Minnesota Orchestra, co-compositions for a hundred-voice choir and a top-200 entry on the Billboard charts for her album Parts of Speech. As a writer, she’s been published by The New York Times Magazine and broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio. She has self-published two literary collections of her own and is set to release her first hardcover collection with Dutton Books in the fall of 2018. On the stage and on the page, her style is defined by a ferocity, wit, tenderness and candor.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http:/ted.com/tedx

Hello, my name is Dessa, and I'm a member
of a hip-hop collective called Doomtree.

I'm the one in the tank top.

(Laughter)

And I make my living as a performing
and touring rapper and singer.

When we perform as a collective,
this is what our shows look like.

I'm the one in the boots.

There's a lot of jumping;
there's a lot of sweating.

It's loud; it's very high-energy.

Sometimes there are
unintentional body checks on stage.

Sometimes there are completely
intentional body checks on stage.

It's kind of a hybrid between
an intramural hockey game and a concert.

However, when I perform
my own music as a solo artist,

I tend to gravitate
towards more melancholy sounds.

A few years ago, I gave my mom
the rough mixes of a new album,

and she said, "Baby, it's beautiful,
but why is it always so sad?

You always make music to bleed out to."

And I thought,

Who are you hanging out with
that you know that phrase?

(Laughter)

But over the course of my career,

I'd written so many sad love songs
that I got messages like this from fans:

"Release new music or a book;
I need help with my break-up."

(Laughter)

And after performing and recording
and touring those songs for a long time,

I found myself in a position

in which my professional niche
was essentially romantic devastation.

What I hadn't been public about, however,

was the fact that most of these songs
had been written about the same guy.

And for two years
we tried to sort ourselves out.

And then for five,

and on and off for ten.

And I was not only heartbroken,

but I was kind of embarrassed
that I couldn't rebound

from what other people
seemed to recover from so regularly.

And even though I knew
it wasn't doing either of us any good,

I just couldn't figure out
how to put the love down.

Then, drinking white wine one night,

I saw a TED Talk by a woman
named Dr. Helen Fisher.

And she said that in her work,

she'd been able to map
the coordinates of love

in the human brain.

And I thought, well,

if I could find my love in my brain,
maybe I could get it out.

So I went to Twitter.

"Anybody got access to an fMRI lab,
like at midnight or something?

I'll trade for backstage
passes and whiskey."

(Laughter)

And that's Dr. Cheryl Olman,

who works at the University of Minnesota's
Center for Magnetic Resonance Research.

She took me up on it.

I explained Dr. Fisher's protocol.

And we decided to recreate it
with a sample size of one - me.

So I got decked out
in a pair of forest-green scrubs,

and I was laid on a gurney
and wheeled into an fMRI machine.

If you're unfamiliar with that technology,

essentially, an fMRI machine
is a big tubular magnet

that tracks the progress
of deoxygenated iron in your blood.

So it's essentially figuring out
what parts of your brain

are making the biggest metabolic demand
at any given moment.

And in that way,

it can figure out which structures
are associated with a task.

Like tapping your finger, for example,
always lights up the same region.

Or in my case, looking at pictures
of your ex-boyfriend,

and then looking at pictures of a dude

who just sort of resembled
my ex-boyfriend,

but for whom I had no strong feelings.

He was the control.

And when I left the machine,

we had these really high-resolution
images of my brain.

We could cleave the two halves apart.

We could inflate the cortex to see inside
all of the wrinkles, essentially,

in a view that Dr. Cheryl Olman
called "the brain skin rug."

And we could see how my brain had behaved
when I looked at images of both men.

And this was important.

We could track all of the activity

when I looked at the control
and when I looked at my ex.

And it was in comparing these data sets
that we'd be able to find the love alone,

In the same way that if I were to step
on a scale, fully dressed,

and then step on it again, naked,

the difference between those numbers
would be the weight of my clothing.

So when we did that data comparison,

we subtracted one from the other.

We found activity in exactly the regions
that Dr. Fisher would have predicted.

That's me.

And that's my brain in love.

There was activity
in that little orange dot,

the ventral tegmental area.

That kind of loop of red
is the anterior cingulate.

And that golden set of horns
is the caudate.

After she'd had time to analyze the data

with her team and a couple
of partners, Andrew and Phil,

Cheryl sent me an image, a single slide.

It was my brain, in cross section,

with one bright dot of activity

that represented
my feelings for this dude.

And I knew - I'd known I was in love,

and that's the whole reason
I was going to these outrageous lengths.

But having an image that proved it
felt like such a vindication,

like, yeah, it's all in my head,
but now I know exactly where.

(Laughter)

And I also felt like an assassin
who had her mark:

that was what I had to annihilate.

So I decided to embark on a course
of treatment called neural feedback.

That's a technique that's sometimes used

with epileptics or with veterans
who were suffering from PTSD,

or maybe someone
who's on an autism spectrum

and is working through
behavioural problems.

I worked with a woman
named Penijean Gracefire,

and she explained that what we'd be doing
was training my brain;

we're not lobotomizing anything.

We're training it in the way
that we would train a muscle.

So that it would be flexible enough
and resilient enough

to respond appropriately
to my circumstances.

So, when we're on the treadmill,

we would anticipate
that our heart would beat and pound.

And when we're asleep,
we would ask that that muscle slow.

Similarly, when I'm in a long-term,
viable, loving, romantic relationship,

the emotional centers
of my brain should engage.

And when I'm not in a long-term,
viable, emotional, loving relationship,

they should eventually chill out.

So ...

Penijean and I decided
to work at my dad's house

because we knew that we wanted
to spend several evenings together

to do some intensive
brain-training sessions,

and my dad had room to put us up.

So she came over

with a set of electrodes
just smaller than a dime

that were sensitive enough
to detect my brainwaves

through my bone and hair and scalp.

And when she rigged me up,
I could see my brain working in real time.

And in another view that she showed me,

I could see exactly
which parts of my brain

were hyperactive, here displayed in red,

hypoactive, here displayed in blue.

And the healthy threshold of behaviour:

the green zone, the Goldilocks zone,

which is where I wanted to go.

And we can in fact isolate
just those parts of my brain

that were associated
with the romantic regulation

that were identified in the Fisher study.

So Penijean, several times,
hooked me up with all her electrodes,

and she explained

that I didn't have to do
or think anything.

I just essentially
had to hold pretty still,

and stay awake

and watch.

(Harp sounds)

So I did.

And every time my brain
operated in that healthy threshold,

I got a little run of harp
or vibraphone music.

(Harp sounds)

And I just watched my brain,

rotated roughly the speed
of a [inaudible] machine,

on my dad's flat screen TV.

And that was counterintuitive;

she said the learning
would be essentially unconscious.

But then I thought about
other things I'd learned

without actively engaging
my conscious mind.

When you ride a bike,

I don't really know what,
like, my left calf muscle's doing

or how my latissimus dorsi knows
to engage when I wobble to the right;

the body just learns.

And similarly, like, Pavlov's dogs

probably don't know a lot
about, like, protein structures

or the waveform of a ringing bell,

but they salivate nonetheless
because the body paired the stimuli.

Halfway through the training sessions,

my dad said, "Well,
like, what do you think?

Do you feel different?"

And I said I didn't want
to think about it yet.

I just wanted to finish
the training sessions

and then I wanted to go back
to the fMRI lab, get scanned again,

get my after picture

and see if there was any difference.

I didn't want to think about it

in like open the oven door on the soufflé
and risk ruining the whole thing.

And my dad said,

"That's crazy; I can tell
you're different right away."

Which stunned me because
my dad is a crazy skeptic;

he doesn't think my allergies are real.

Finished the sessions, went back
Dr. Cheryl Olman's fMRI machine,

and we repeated the protocol:

the same images,
of the ex, of the control,

and in the interest of scientific rigor,

Cheryl and her team
didn't know who was who

so that they couldn't
influence the results.

And after she had time
to analyze that second set of data,

she sent me that image.

She said, "Dude A's
dominance of your brain

seems to essentially have been eradicated.

I think this is the desired result, comma.

Yes? question mark.

(Laughter)

And that was exactly the desired result.

And finally I allowed myself
a moment to introspect,

like how did I feel?

And in one way it felt like ...

it was the same inventory of feelings
that I had had at the outset.

This isn't eternal sunshine
of the spotless mind;

the dude wasn't a stranger,

But ...

I'd had love and jealousy
and amity and attraction and respect

and all those complicated feelings
that you amass after a long-term love.

But it felt like the benevolent feelings
had risen to the surface.

And the feelings of fixation
and the less generous feelings

weren't quite so present.

It sounds like a small thing in some way,
like this re-sequencing of feelings,

but to me it felt like the biggest thing.

Like if I told you
I'm going to anesthetize you,

and I'm also going to take out
your wisdom teeth,

it would really matter to you
the sequence in which I did those to you.

(Laughter)

And I also felt like

I'd had this really unusual, philosophical
privilege to understand love.

The lab offered to 3D print my caudate.

I got to hold love in my hand.

(Cheering)

And then I bronzed it,

and I made it into a necklace and sold it
at the merch table at my shows.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

And then, with the help of a couple
of friends back in Minneapolis -

one of them Becky -

we made an enormous disco ball of it

(Laughter)

that could descend
from the ceiling at my big shows.

And I felt like I'd had the opportunity
to better understand love,

even the compulsive parts.

It isn't a neat, symmetrical
Valentine's heart.

It's bodily; it's systemic;

it is a hideous pair of ram's horns
buried somewhere deep within your skull.

And when that special boy
walks by, it lights up.

And if he likes you back,
and you make each other happy,

then you fan the flames,

and if he doesn't,

then you assemble
a team of neuroscientists

to snuff him out by force.

(Laughter)

Thanks.

(Applause)