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The title of Eliot's post, "Do you really want to know?" and Paul's concern about how research in a given discipline (in this case, love) is applied really prompted the following line of thought. It seems to me that the application of research for practical purposes is one of the most important and also ethically challenging, and merits a great deal of attention. What do we do with this now?

One of the most interesting parts of the readings, and also one of the most relevant parts of this discussion, centers on the dramatic effects of a pinpoint mutation on pair bonding in voles. The findings on this topic provide clear therapeutic potential for other animals, including humans. I don’t have a strong background in genetics, but if pair bonding could be enhanced through genetic manipulation, by differential transcription of proteins, that’s a potential avenue for further manipulation. Granted, I’m still unsure of how this manipulation would occur... pharmacotherapy ? deep brain stimulation ? .... but it seems possible that it could happen. In this specific example, the outcome would be enhancing pair bonding in humans, but who knows else could be included in future findings? I'm not meaning to imply that pair bonding is the same as the experience of love in humans, but there are striking similarities.

I find this possibility, even if it’s a remote one, to be worrisome and disturbing, sentiments that have been echoed in other posts. Although it might seem unscientific and sentimental of me, it totally weirds me out that something like love could be manipulated in this way. I recognize that the experience of love could be altered, enhanced, or made possible by altering mood and motivational states in other ways, but somehow I emotionally distinguish manipulating the process of falling in love with altering the experience of love. Furthermore, every way that we talk about love reflects how deeply grounded the "story of love" is in our culture. Phrases like "star crossed", "match made in heaven", and "soul mates" are pervasive and are used to explain this phenomenon that so many of us report experiencing. Questioning this culture, shaking this story, really is what I'm reacting to here when I feel uneasy about science-ifying love.

Furthermore, I feel this way about discussing love through an NBS lens, but I don't feel this way about addiction, learning, memory, emotion, or any other classic textbook topic. What is it that separates those things? Why is discussing addiction, learning, memory, emotion in this context ok, but discussing love seems untouchable? My gut reaction is that love is inherently different than those things, but my NBS background tells me that it's not love that's inherently different, it's how love is talked about and invoked within our culture that's different.

I guess that what I’m hitting on here is the major Catch-22 of neural and behavioral sciences in general. It's the "Emily Dickinson conundrum" many of us are familiar with from the Neurobiology and Behavior course. Our field tells us that consciousness, experinence, emotion, memory, everything is just "Salt running in and out of channels," as a friend put it the other day (also summarized by Francis Crick's The Astoninshing Hypothesis). How, then, can we reconcile any idea of autonomy or agency ? How can we come up with such abstract ideas such as love? How can we conceive of anything happening outside the brain?

Thank you all for an excellent topic choice!