Neurobiology of Pair Bonding

In our discussion of the Science of Bonding/Romantic Love/ etc... I feel as though several aspects of the presence and development of love were left out. First, I think it's important to note that love, pair bonding, emotional bond/connection, whatever you want to call it, changes over time. Relationships change, people change, how much you trust someone changes over time- and these all lead to a mutation in that "love/bond". This bond can be made weaker or stronger or stay the same "strength" just have a different shape (the image in my head right now is of a carbon-carbon bond and you can go from a one bond to a double bond or triple bond and with love there could be straight bonds and squiggly bonds...  ) but and they would all still qualify as "love". I'm sorry to bring in my relationship but, for example,-the love i experienced when i first started dating my boyfriend 6 years ago was very different from the love I experienced after we had been together for 2 or 3 years and the love I feel now is different from the love i felt 2 or 3 years ago. I wouldn't say I love him any more or any less than I did in previous years, it's just different. Because we are constantly changing and our brains are constantly changing the way we process and interpret our emotions and experiences with love is most likely going to be constantly changing, and so the idea of mapping certain pathways and areas of the brain that show that someone is in love seems very challenging. I guess my point is that I don't fully agree with Megan in that I don't think "brain imaging techniques could be used to support findings that love is actually just the product of chemicals creating a classically conditioned response to a person." I think the manifestation of love is more complicated than a classically conditioned response to a person. There is too much variability in how humans experience love/bond that to claim that maybe 3 specific regions of the brain are involved and activated for people in love almost seems to oversimplify a very complicated and confusing emotion and experience. Nevertheless, pair bonding/love is certainly something worth investigating at a neurological level. 

If love is in any way manifested in the neuronal circuitry of the brain, it could ONLY be understood in terms of a highly distributed system. As many have already mentioned, there is simply no one-way to “fall in love”. Love is a system that lacks a cause and effect relationship because it can be created from so many different paths, levels, and actions. I am intrigued by this love at first sight vs. love that develops from arranged marriages discussion because it does seem to indicate that romantic love can develop without sexual desire. Furthermore, it seems likely that these feelings of closeness/ close love are responsible for triggering sexual desire. But even if we could agree that there are many ways to fall in love, I think it would still be a mistake to begin searching for the location of love in the brain. As discussed a long time ago in class, even if we had the best brain scanning machines available, we would still most likely reach a point where we couldn’t explain everything that is going on in the brain and how it relates to behavior. We would get to a point where we could not reduce the actions of the brain any further. As discussed in class, this point may represent the part of every individual that is uniquely subjective and indefinable. I feel that if we try and search for love, we may end up in a similar situation. After all, people who are in love have difficulty explaining how they feel/ why they feel the way they do. Perhaps a person, in love, has connected to that “irreducible uniqueness” in their partner. They can’t tell you what it is exactly, but they know that they feel a deeply intimate bond with their partner, a bond that no one else can understand. If love is unique to an individual, then it kind of makes sense that when one experiences love, they experience a connection with something that cannot be localized and can never be fully defined.

I took away several questions from this discussion that I did not come in with. One question regards the role of culture in love. Several of the Time articles discussed how people detect MHC in potential partners and unconsciously use this as a measure of how compatible they are with that person. Thus, researchers urge women to get off of the pill and people to stay away from meds that can mask their ability to detect the compatibility of their partner’s MHC. Similar to effect drugs can have on our ability to detect MHC, I wonder if the images and expectations of love that culture engrains in our minds throws off our ability to find the partner we are most compatible with. Media and social norms push us to pursue a certain kind of mate by defining what is attractive and what is appropriate dating behavior. Maybe all these expectations and pre-defined images of who we should pursue throws off our ability to find our real match that we would be most compatible with.

Also, I think culture plays a huge role in blowing love out of proportion. All the songs, movies, shows, books and general talk about love increases the desire to be in love and such strong desire can bring about the intense emotions associated with love. There are other emotional/mental states that stimulate the reward system and bring about a state of euphoria (such as being successful in something or even something simple as being full). However, as mentioned in class, society places a much larger emphasis on love. So it do our brains really have a special love circuit or is our obsession with love a product of culture?

Moreover, maybe it is this over-emphasis on love that pushes scientists to explain this phenomenon that drives so many to do crazy, unexplainable things in its name. Perhaps there is this pressure for researchers to break down love into smaller, biological components to prove that love is something that is really powerful and can drive you over the edge—to support the image of love that society has developed. However, as we discovered in our class survey, these scientific papers may not necessarily be very useful or educational. Research may just be done to provide some “hard science” evidence behind love while not providing anything substantial to be learned. I think this is particularly true when science tries to localize everything to certain brain regions (as mentioned by Paul).

I like the idea that our brain has the power to create something that we cannot fully explain. Similar to how a series of simple numbers can give rise to many complex combinations that cannot be attributed to one number, different brain regions/processes can give rise to mental/behavioral phenomena that cannot be tied to specific brain regions. This is why I like Vidya’s idea of thinking of love as a pattern. Not necessarily a pattern in that there is a shared similarity among all people, but that there is a collection of neural events that gives rise to and uniquely defines love for a particular person. Much like how we discussed how every person may have a unique manifestation of a mental illness, maybe love is unique to the individual.
 

I really enjoyed hearing everyone's thoughts regarding the nature of love and how we should define it.  I agree with Vidya in that we are thinking of love as a disease, something that we can define by certain "symptoms."  Although we read an article about animals being gay, it seems as though we agreed that love is a human emotion, or at least that we can't say that two animals are "in love."  Instead, as scientists, we say that they are pair bonded.  This reflects the same type of thinking that leads us to try to qualify the symptoms of love.  I agree with he rest of the class in that I would not feel comfortable telling someone that they were not in love when they believed that they were.  However, I also don't know if I would feel comfortable telling someone they were not depressed, or did not have an problem with anxiety if they did not meet the criteria outlined in the DSM.  They may not be clinically defined as having the disorder, but once a person feels that they have a problem, I believe that it should be considered a problem.  It is difficult to define an emotional state, especially a powerful emotional state such as love, and make decisions about if you are not the person feeling that emotion.  Love is not a problem, but I think that even without the "symptoms" of love, people can still feel love.

I also enjoyed our discussion of what makes research or exploration scientific.  Is it possible to "scientifically" study love?  It may not be possible, although we can try to find ways to study what we believe is love.  If we take the word of people who say they are in love, the real question is if there is anything in common in the brain activity of people who are in love.  This question seems to have been answered to some extent by the studies that show increased activity in certain brain areas when viewing pictures of loved ones.  Researchers have tried to interpret these brain areas as components of the feelings of love.  But these results could probably be interpreted in different ways.  It would be interesting to come up with other ways to study the brain activity involved with love, perhaps using DTI to show pathways that have been strengthened.  Before and after imaging of love would be informative, although it would be difficult to find people who were definitely going to fall in love.

     Whether or not we can define love seems to have become a critical problem for research and theories on the subject.  I'm surprised we haven't addressed the problem from the viewpoint of seeking a language to define emotions in general.  I don't think I would be comfortable saying that panic, anxiety, fear or even hunger are manifested similarly in others.  I don't know if I fully endorse the idea I brought up in class that David mentioned about love being a pattern subjectively experienced by all but evidence for that idea would be hunger.  Hunger makes some people irritable, it's painful for some and merely uncomfortable for others but we can look at leptin and other hormones controlling the feeling.  Similarly, love is different for everyone but perhaps we can look to the VTA (as Helen Fisher would say her research has demonstrated) to determine if a person is in love, regardless of what they think.  It draws us back to an earlier problem of whether or not we can tell someone if they're in love.  David asked the question in class "Can somebody be wrong about whether or not he or she is in love?"  and we didn't really address the question.  I don't think we would tell a couple who have been married for 30 years and have 4 kids that they're not in love if the tell us that they are in love.  Yet many wouldn't hesitate to tell a 13 year-old girl who has been "dating" a boy for 5 days that she's not actually in love.  My initial reaction was that if someone says they're in love, then they are. It's defined by thinking you are- upon further consideration, I would say that is wrong.  Many people say that they were wrong- after a break up or a few weeks later, many of these sentiments are heard: I thought I was in love with X.  I think I just WANTED to be in love with X.  I convinced myself that I was in love but I wasn't actually.  

Much of our discussion revolved around the feasibility of defining love. Is love something that is, in principle, definable? It seems to me that much of the answer to that question depends on how we want to define it. I can't help but feel that if we need to define love in biological terms, we're a bit screwed. By that, I don't mean the conclusion that most people jump to: that love exists as something "beyond" the realm of the physical. Rather, I mean something that closely resembles what we discussed earlier in terms of the irreducibility of patterns when thinking about the merging of biology and religion. Vidya mentioned earlier that maybe love is just a "pattern" experienced in many possible ways. The impossibility of differing experience in identical brain states aside, this seemed to at least gesture at some kind of isomorphism, or resemblance, between two brain states both experiencing love. Upon closer inspection, however, we ultimately are forced to admit of some unavoidable difference between instances of love brain states. Then what makes a pattern a pattern? Interestingly, it looks like the question of love brain states becomes an analogue of the very question of love. Like the concept of love, the brain states of love share some vague sense of similarity, but which cannot be defined by any precise mechanism or pathway. This returns us to the question of irreducibility, but in a way that may appear more palatable now that we're dealing with love instead of religion. What difference can we define between that vague, (("floofy")) thing we call love and the HARD SCIENCE thing we call brain states?

P.S. We'd probably have a better time defining it in a Shakespeare class, if only we could stand the floofiness of it all.