I finally listened to the Radiolab episode “This is Your Brain On Love” on my bus ride to Connecticut this morning. In it, they referenced a hilarious story from Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher’s 2006 TED talk about what can happen when you take the chemicals of love into your own hands.

There was a graduate student and this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student. And…she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love. So he decided he’d put science to work and he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And, sure enough, I’ve never been in one but apparently they go all around the buses and trucks and it’s crazy and noisy and exciting and he figured it would drive up the dopamine and she’d fall in love with him. So off they go and she squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw and she throws her hands up and she says “Wasn’t that wonderful? And wasn’t that rickshaw driver handsome?”