Reply to comment

There were so many things that were brought up last class that I was interested in hearing what everyone else thought about tht I figured I would actually post early (a rare occurence!) in order to get responses.

One thing that was really interesting to me was the whole idea of "falling out of love." if love is truly a biological thing, as combined with a sociocultural phenomenon, then my correct number of receptors needed to fall in love should be enough to stay in love. the point was brought up here that though the research was good, it doesnt really address all the neuronal connections that go on to regulate hormones and receptor levels etc to create the "neural capacity" to love. I think these factors, and their relationship to the environment, is interesting. Can we really, with enough study, figure out the exact neural pathways for such a complex emotion? And, to somewhat address Professor Grobstein's point, would we really want to expend the time and energy? For exmaple, we talked about perception of alternatives as being one of the greatest indicators of commitment (Professor Le's research). Could we find out exactly how the brain decides when it perceives alternatives, which, assuming the other research we read was correct, would then go on to change our "receptors of love"? And if we find all of this out (admittedly far into the future), what do we then do with teh information? This information would become a very interesting, and potentially dangerous, societal phenomenon. If we could make people love each other neurochemically we would have a whole SLEW of issues to deal with.

The other thing that I really wanted to comment on was the question that kept being raised by the presenters: "Romantic love as an addiction" because it acts throught the same reward pathways. First, like I mentioned in class, I'm not sure I agree with the whole reverse engineering an evolutionary reason for soemthing. We have no proof that just because it makes sense that love might be rewarding in order to pass on our genetic material (ex. more copulation, better support for the offspring in a 2 parent system), we have no actual proof that evolution acted as such. Evolution is a RANDOM event, and the selective pressures at the time our theorized "monogamy gene" (if we are even monogamous, which was brought into question) could be far different than those we hypothesize about today. Also, in terms of ideaological process, I somewhat question the idea that just because the same area is activated we can conclusively decide that the pathways are linked. It just seems liek a stretch to me, considering how little we know about the actual neural circuitry, and the lack of highly specific imaging techniques. Also, the possibility to create a theory around the results is worrisome: had different brain areas lit up, say the match the areas for something like analysis, I think we would have found a quite different yet also plausible theory, say about how true romantic love requires our higher order thinking to be activated. i think love as an addiction is an interesting idea, but I was somewhat unconvinced by the research behind it.

Sorry for such a long post, im interested to hear what you all thought!

Emily