In the final part of my series on Hollywood and mate selection, I’m going to focus on some ways you can "reprogram" your brain to better select the love of your life. As you’ll remember from part 1, I believe that, for most people, television has had a profound impact on the traits they consider valuable in a mate.

I actually believe that in your brain, there are probably as many as f1,500 relationship dimensions. That’s how many we found in the most careful research we’ve done so far—1,500 dimensions on which you have a preference about what you would like in a person with whom you’d spend the rest of your life.

Years and years of watching television have communicated to your brain that the things television finds attractive, namely appearance and money, are more important than the rest of the 1,500 dimensions.

I think that most people have a filter group of qualities that allow them to sample, in a very limited way, from the 1,500 dimensions to only look at 12 to 15 dimensions and make a determination about all the others. For instance, when you say "Hi, I’m Doug," and she says "Hi, I’m Linda," you probably could come up with 15 dimensions that you’re looking at. You know how tall she is. You know what her body proportions are. You know how she’s dressed. You know what her facial features are. You know what her mouth looks like. You know whether she’s attentive to you are not. You know the color of her eyes, and so on—12 to 15 dimensions. Now you are going to make an assessment about an ultimate match between you and her on the basis of these 12 to 15 dimensions.

Unfortunately, most people are dead wrong in the prediction they make in the early phases of a relationship; dead wrong when it comes to determining whether a relationship will be a good one or not in the long term. I want to suggest to you that many times you make a negative evaluation about the long term match between you and another person when indeed, if you got involved with this person, you would discover that you would have a great relationship with them.

The fact is that Hollywood has so encouraged us to place our emphasis on external things, that when you don’t find what you’re looking for in the facial features of the other person, or their height, or their body type, that you simply go right on by. If indeed there are 1,500 dimensions, it is possible that you are passing up a person with whom you would have 1,490 dimensions in common.

You’re predicting that everything is going to be negative because these superficial dimensions are negative. That’s why we say to you that Hollywood has engaged in a great hoax. If you take part in that hoax, you’ll likely end up with a candidate pool that is so small that you will eventually give up the task of trying to find the right person.