The Science of Love
Helen Fisher is an anthropology professor at Rutgers University who has studied love in ways that most of us would possibly consider a little excessive. But in science, someone has to do it. Someone has to take all of these lovelorn people and scan their brains in MRIs to see exactly what is going on. I hope that counts towards their health plans.
Click to viewOkay, if you have watched any part of the video, you get the impression that Fisher gets awfully squishy when talking about love as "the most wonderful thing in the world." But I will give her credit for making this magical process a little more analytical. In particular, she isolates the romantic drive into several brain-chemical systems: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone. Yes, I know some of those are neurotransmitters and some are hormones, but I'll give it a pass.
Here's where it gets interesting: When someone falls in love, two things that happen are that dopamine levels rise (that cocaine feeling!) and serotonin levels fall (obsessive thinking). Of course, serotonin gets discussed in many circles these days, since it is a key actor in Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs. These are used to treat a number of ailments, including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. How does it do this? By preventing serotonin levels from falling too low. Hmmm.
Helen Fisher worries that these prescriptions may be dampening the ability to fall in love, but I want to turn the whole thing around and look at it from the other end. If intense love feelings do cause serotonin levels to crash, and if these are also responsible for the maladies described above, what does that say for someone who is prone to major depression, or extreme anxiety? Falling in love could then be a very dangerous thing. If this step could be skipped or at least minimized, it would certainly be preferable for some people. I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has thought about studying it, since it would be a pretty big find.
Good luck trying to convince Dr. Fisher of that, though.