A rchive Date
[ 19-02-2005 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Neuroscience ]
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[The science of love
By SANDY NAIMAN - Toronto Sun
Love is where you find it. Or is it? We all think we know what love is. Whether noun or verb, it spans the breadth of human experience. For centuries, in poetry, ballad, literature - romantics have struggled to define love.
Now, scientists are putting love under the microscope, focusing on the brain, analyzing its psychobiology and probing its chemistry in relation to matters of the heart. Not only are their investigations uncovering links between love and physical and mental health, they're clarifying the composition of loving relationships.
And guess what? Despite our pounding preoccupation with sex, it's only part of love's complex equation - a mystery we can never solve.
The main event is a brain event. "Love is a connection between two living brains," says preppy-looking California psychiatrist and author Thomas Lewis. Recently, he was here with his new book, A General Theory Of Love, and his new wife, Lisa, who sat curled up behind him on a sofa in the offices of his publisher, Random House.
"One of the reasons I brought her along is not just because she's adorable," he explains, "but because I know I won't be at my peak without her around. My brain will start to deteriorate and I'll be cranky. I won't sleep the same."
Lewis is living proof of the theory of love that he and his two senior psychiatric co-authors at the University of California in San Francisco spent five years figuring out.
Not just any two living brains can be connected by love. Reptiles lay their eggs and leave them, he explains. They don't nurture their young because their more primitive reptilian brains aren't equipped with the necessary sensory hardware. But the brains of mammals, evolved from reptiles, have limbic systems, where emotions are centred.
More than a feeling
While all mammals innately nurture their young, what distinguishes humans is the cognitive brain, grey matter, intelligence. It's separate from the limbic brain, which is why emotion isn't influenced by intellect, though it can certainly confuse the issue.
"Love is more than a feeling," Lewis says. "Its two principal parts are the ability to sense the insides of another limbic system and the urge to provide for the needs you sense. Your portal to a person's limbic brain is your eyes. Intense eye-to-eye contact. It nourishes the limbic system."
Your ability to tune into others accurately depends on your awareness of your own feelings. This sensitivity, like perfect pitch, is a genetic gift. A loving and compassionate upbringing helps. Alas, there's no scientific formula yet for knowing you've found your romantic limbic soulmate.
"It's like art," admits Lewis. "When you see it, it moves you. Just tune into the person and go with that. No one knows better what's going on between two people than those two people. It's an emotional connection, not physical. It's not the ass, it's the eyes. It's not sexual. You can feel the difference between wanting to get laid and having that electric mind-to-mind connection."
 Don't mistake the craziness of being in love with true loving, he cautions. In love, you enter a delirious state produced by high concentrations of very enjoyable neurotransmitters that have nothing to do with intimacy. "To know what another person is really like, those infatuating chemicals have to calm down, so you can sense and accept their flaws - difficult for people in love in that delirious state. A loving relationship is a biological process. It needs time, like hair growth or digestion."
 Love is a necessity. Our brains are not designed to be stable on their own. "Just as cycles of day and night regulate the circadian rhythms of our brains, so other people can organize and regulate our brain rhythms," he says.
 Women who are emotionally and physically close tend to have synchronized menstrual cycles. Couples who are tuned into each other tend to regulate each other's hormone systems, immune systems, heart rate and blood pressure, he explains. "They're living in synch."
 This connection between brains potentially changes the brain states of both parties because emotions are contagious. "If I'm around you a lot, the brain state you evoke in me happens repeatedly and leaves an imprint on my brain," he says. "That's how people, over time, change each other. If a person brings out the best in you, and you can feel it, it helps you to be better. It also works in reverse. It's a valueless system."
 When people say they don't feel complete or whole without someone else, that's normal, he says. With conventional wisdom plus the entire self-help industry selling emotional independence, "people are confused and unhappy because they think they should be happy on their own and there must be something wrong with them because they're not."
 I ndependence is a destructive myth because of the way our brains are designed. We have emotional and physical needs that can only come from another person, never from within ourselves. "You can't provide limbic regulation for yourself any more than you can provide food for yourself simply by just wishing for it," says Lewis.
 We're hardwired for togetherness. "It's inescapable. The most independent you can ever be is to find someone who regulates you well. Stay with that person. Then you're happy and free. That's healthy dependency. You're symbiotic."
E-mail relationships won't cut it because the connection is not biological. It's cybernetic, emotionally toneless. Long-distance relationships starve the limbic system. No wonder Lewis wouldn't leave Lisa in Sausalito. With no eye-to-eye contact, no limbic nourishment, his system might go haywire.
Don't go changin' ...
One definition of love is acceptance - of everything. Even the stuff that drives you around the bend.
So simple in theory yet so difficult in practice - especially in the heat of the moment, when he's critical, she's nagging and you're both convinced you're on a collision course.
Stop. Just accept that your partner isn't going to change, says UCLA psychologist Andrew Christensen.
Early in a relationship, couples can see a positive aspect of difference, but with day-to-day living, those differences are bound to begin to grate.
With spousal conflict comes an unavoidable contradiction - we want to be loved the way we are. But these differences, which are often relatively minor, inevitably upset us.
Often, the foundation of such marital conflict is the "fantasy" that you can make your partner change, he says.
So, why not opt for acceptance? "It doesn't mean giving in or tolerating behaviour you're not comfortable with or that you're never going to argue," says Christensen. "It means seeing behaviour in the larger picture: It's sending the message, I love you the way you are, and I don't expect you to change to accommodate my needs."
Here's the paradox: When we feel accepted, we're not defensive. We can better understand our spouse's feelings and concerns and may change because we want our spouse to feel better, explains Christensen.
In his new book, Reconcilable Differences (Guilford, 2000), he delves into the four core tenets of Acceptance Therapy:
 Develop a third side to the story. There are always three sides - his, hers and the objective side.
 Acceptance through tolerant distance. View the problem as an 'it' rather than a 'you.' You'll understand the 'it' better. Use phrases like, 'We did it again.' Use humour; laugh at yourselves. Distance yourself from the problem. Give it a name, like, "Ooops, I just pulled one of my Jerry Martins."
 Acceptance through compassion. Empathize. Try to understand that your spouse's hurtful actions towards you may be defence mechanisms masking his or her pain.
 Be able to take care of yourself. If you must, walk away from a difficult situation. You might diffuse it. Remember, the only person you can change is yourself.
Love, love me do
From poetry to Prozac, the historical course of love was never truer.
Romantic love is a relatively new concept in Western culture, says University of Toronto English professor Ian Lancashire. It was first recorded by 12th-century French Provencal poets to describe their unrequited love.
Love existed before, but only in oral narratives and mythology. There was always sex, but it was seasonal, he says. "It happened in spring. People were hormonally programmed for it. But relationships between the sexes were different. It's hard to feel romantic love when you're hungry, cold and there are no lights on. And men never married for love."
Instead, they fell in love with women they couldn't have, he explains. So the only way they could handle these emotions was to reflect on their desires. The earliest of these meditations was written in verse and it "expressed their wishes to be in the embrace of their beloved, often the wife of another man," adds Amilcare Iannucci, PhD, also at U of T.
Straight to the heart
"In their poetry, they believed love was a spirit that entered the body through the eyes. A woman's beauty infected you, like a virus. It went straight to your heart, then back to your brain, where it took over your imaginative faculties. It imprinted your brain, never to leave your memory."
These tortured souls would swing from "euphoric obsession to black melancholy," says UCLA's Massimo Ciavolella.
They became sleepless and lost their appetites. If they saw the woman they desired, their heart rates escalated. In extreme cases, they became either delusional or suicidal.
"The last stage of this obsession was known as lovesickness," he says. "Their symptoms were pathologized. Today, in milder forms, we call it infatuation."
"Love is physiological and can make you healthy or sick," says Dr. Anthony Levitt, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook-Women's College Health Sciences Centre.
"People who are depressed lose their emotional flexibility," he adds, noting similarities between medieval lovesickness and more severe cases of manic-depression or bi-polar mood disorders.
In medieval times, lovesickness was thought to be cured either by marriage or sexual intercourse. Today, all you get is a pill, one of the newer anti-depressants - like Prozac - that act on the neurotransmitters of the limbic brain to lift your spirits.
More effective, but not nearly as much fun.
This article first appeared on April 12, 2000]
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