One of my favorite articles about the neurobiology of love, from
February 27, 2000 but still so interesting.
Three psychiatrists explore the neurobiology of love.
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By LIESL SCHILLINGER
 A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE By Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon. Illustrated. 274 pp. New York: Random House. $23.95.  |
hat is it that makes a long-legged, lynx-eyed young editrix leave a dinner at midnight in New York on an evening when whipping winds take the temperature to 20 below zero to drag her lean, leather-clad frame to a bar where a man with bad intentions may or may not appear? It's neurons, willful neurons, which have programmed her body, heart and mind, in defiance of anything her logic would recommend, to propel her to a place where they can get the electrochemical fix they call love, which her intellect and her friends would call folly. Why do smart neurons make such foolish choices? Because, in the refrain of cads immemorial, it's beyond their control.
Three centuries ago, the French physicist Blaise Pascal wrote that ''the heart has reasons that reason cannot comprehend.'' And for 300 years all that scientists, in common with lust-maddened suitors and bereft jiltees, could do with that insight was to agree with it, embroider it on sofa cushions and write it in spidery script on Dear John letters. But after the introduction of Prozac in 1988, which proved that the brain's emotional chemistry could be swayed more reliably by serotonin than by Jack Daniels, psychoanalysis and the advice of despairing friends, three psychiatrists from the University of California, San Francisco, banded together to tackle the question of whether Pascal was right -- in other words, to see if it is true that the emotions obey different rules from the intellect. The doctors -- Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, all of them male, as it happens -- suspected that it is; after all, everyone from their mothers to Hippocrates said so. But with new neurological and pharmacological data at their disposal, they decided to double-check. The result of their research is a book called ''A General Theory of Love,'' in which they declare at the outset, with some swagger, that they have the answer: ''Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why.'' As a scientific premise, this lacks gravitas; indeed, on first airing, their thesis seems to have less in common with the typical scrupulous, multiauthored report in The New England Journal of Medicine on, say, permissive hypercapnia, than with the typical whimsical, unanswerable Oxford Union debate on the topic of, say, ''All's Fair in Love and War.''
The opening chapter, ''The Heart's Castle,'' prolongs the playful mood; the doctors talk liltingly of love, meditate on heartbreak, invoke Greek myth and recite soupy poetry because ''the adventure itself demands it.'' But just as you begin to imagine them as spoiled New Age sages, forgathered in the courtyard of a rented Tuscan villa, spinning a modern Symposium as they dip biscotti in vinsanto -- they slug back double espressos and stride through the doors of the villa into a state-of-the-art love lab. Pascal was right, they explain, because ''the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives.'' You cannot choose who lures you any more than you can will yourself to speak Pashto or play flamenco guitar, because ''the requisite neural framework for performing these activities does not coalesce on command.'' Like it or not, all of us know only how to play the kind of love our brains have already practiced. In the manner of the best popularizers of science -- like Daniel Dennett, author of ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea,'' or Stephen Pinker, untangler of linguistic mysteries -- the authors break a path that lay readers can safely follow.
Neuroscience confirms what women have long believed: men have reptilian brains. Before anyone starts feeling insulted: so do women. The reptilian brain is the one that makes your heart beat and your blood flow, the brain that still lives when somebody is brain dead, the brain whose death guarantees yours. It is very important, but alone it will not make you a good dinner guest. Every human also has a neocortex, the showoffy portion of the brain that allows us to write, speak, scheme and, if we are very lucky, win a million dollars on a quiz show. A quasi adjunct of the neocortex is the hippocampus, which stores and facilitates explicit memory: numbers, dates, facts and names.
But there is yet another brain, the limbic brain, which lizards lack but all mammals share, which cuddles between the reptilian brain and the neocortex and is the repository of emotions, instincts and hormones, and of implicit memories of nurturance, grievance and deep preference. It is the limbic brain, with its attendant chemicals -- serotonin, opiates and oxytocin -- that make mothers rear their young and croon to them rather than deposit them in a sandbank and slither off. It is the limbic brain that makes children want puppies, and puppies want children, and allows mammals to form attachment bonds with one another. Diotima, the ''wise woman'' friend of Socrates to whom Plato gave star billing in his ''Symposium,'' explained more than 2,000 years ago that ''one part of love is separated off and receives the name of the whole,'' Today we can name all the parts; the neocortex does the thinking, the reptilian brain does the breathing, but love is definitely limbic.
This schema is known as the triune brain, and although it is somewhat controversial, as all theories that explain things too neatly tend to be, it is considered sound science. But the question of how, exactly, the three parts commingle is up for grabs. In the opinion of Lewis, Amini and Lannon, the tender emotions and impressions of the limbic system are besieged by the hard facts of the neocortex. In the mind's explicit memory banks, neurons constantly fire and forge connections. Over time, certain links are reinforced through repetition. This code-writing habit of the brain is so well established by now that it its patterns are imitated by computer search engines and by smart machines that can diagnose human health conditions and learn from their own mistakes. But the limbic brain does not diagnose, or self-correct; all it does is feel.
To illustrate: if you read the sentence, ''THE cht MEOWED AND PURRED,'' your mind will correct ''cht,'' both because the brain knows ''cht'' is anomalous and because it remembers that it has seen the word ''cat'' near the words ''meow'' and ''purr'' thousands of times. The implicit limbic memory of stroking a cat or having it twine between your ankles is awakened every time you read the word. By the same token, a woman (call her Lady X) who habitually indulges the memory of a certain dark and brooding man (call him Man X, whose glance was, to her, electric, who had crooked teeth, liked a certain kind of food and listened to Josh White) burns thousands of links to him into her brain. Long after he's gone, the neurons in her neocortex will forge a new connection every time she sees crooked teeth, hears ''Careless Love'' or smells Indian food -- and these neocortical facts will rain down on her limbic system, irrigating the trench of memory where Man X resides. Anyone she meets who resonates with Man X registers as warmly and familiarly as ''cat.'' Anyone else is ''cht,'' anomalous, a mistake -- depending on his context.
E. M. Forster beseeched his readers, ''Only connect.'' ''A General Theory of Love'' holds that in matters of the heart one has no other choice: ''No individual can think his way around his own attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought.'' That is why, when Lady X hooks up with someone blithe and cheery who has straight teeth and prefers bossa nova to blues, cheese steak to vindaloo, she generally finds she can't make her heart take note. The doctors explain that ''a relationship that strays from one's prototype is limbically equivalent to isolation'' and add: ''Most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a 'nice' relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect.''
But there is still hope; the heart cannot be reasoned with, but it can be tricked, at least sometimes. Once Lady X tires of rejecting sincere suitors in favor of ne'er-do-wells at dive bars, she can retune her limbic resonance through prolonged contact with a caring, wise, responsive person who, over time, can implant a healthy neural network in her neocortex that will eventually light up her limbically challenged heart. Lewis, Amini and Lannon write: ''One mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision; the power to remodel the emotional parts of people we love.'' Where oh where can the limbically lovelorn go to get revised? Try the Yellow Pages, under ''Psychiatrists.'' And don't forget to take your Prozac.
Liesl Schillinger is on the staff of The New Yorker.
Justin Bateman's marvelous pebble art
This sounds like a very good idea for the terminally ill.
Sarco suicide capsule ‘passes legal review’ in Switzerland
The capsule is sitting on a piece of equipment that will flood the interior with nitrogen, rapidly reducing the oxygen level to 1 per cent from 21 per cent. The person will feel a little disoriented and may feel slightly euphoric before they lose consciousness. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds. Death takes place through hypoxia and hypocapnia, oxygen and carbon dioxide deprivation, respectively. There is no panic, no choking feeling.
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| The Sarco capsule device |
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