Friday, April 1, 2011

The Physiology of Love, a Civic Soapbox essay by Christian Early

I am a philosopher by trade and a romantic by disposition. I currently teach a course called "Love and Evolution," in which I argue the best way to tell the story of the story of the as a love story.

image from Scientific American
On Valentines Day, Scientific American published a picture of a brain on love. Researchers discovered two things about Cupid's Arrow. The first is that it is a particularly potent and addictive cocktail of dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin. And the second is that it only takes a fraction of a second to hit its target. It may take a whole life and then some to figure out what just happened, but we really do fall in love in a moment in time.

Antonia Damasio
That picture and the research behind it is part of what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls the Emotion Revolution. Damasio argues that all living things that move about, from the amoeba to the human, do so using emotion to navigate their world. For human beings the brain systems required by reason are enmeshed in those needed by emotion and interwoven with the systems which regulate the body. In short, we are always "emotional" and if our systems become dis-integrated, when they can't make contact or communicate, we lose our ability to navigate our natural and social environment successfully.

Humans, then, are on a continuum of all creatures and living things. We are not so different after all. Flies get angry, snails get scared, and dogs get happy. They don't have consciousness awareness, but they do have emotions. This may seem like fanciful projection, but I suspect that metaphors we inherited from the industrial revolution have veiled how freaky cool, as a friend of mine likes to say, life really is.

Mary Gordon
Recently I learned of Mary Gordon and her the Roots of Empathy program in which expecting mothers visit a classroom over the course of a year. The program is producing a wealth of data showing a direct correlation between empathic maturity, or emotional intelligence, and critical thinking. Summing up the findings, Gordon says "Love grows brains." Humans are rational not because brains are calculators, but because brains are emotional.

Staying alive while moving about is primarily, though not only, a matter of sorting for safety and danger. When we fall in love, our whole being tells us that this person is safe, but it very rarely stays that way. When we have a bodied sense of danger, when our internal alarm bell goes off, we engage in all sorts of behavior ranging from seeking and clinging to cutting off and attacking. There is a disorienting shadow side to love: broken hearts, betrayal, loss, and loneliness. We suffer in part because we are creatures who care.

We are just now beginning to put love under the microscope, and some might want to reduce love to mere chemicals, but I think it is not only fair, but also true, to say that the lived experience of love leaves us with a wonderful though often tragic mystery.
--Christian Early is a Danish immigrant who teaches philosophy at Eastern Mennonite University.


  1. This extremely important perspective seems to be ignored by all the "Artificial Intelligence" advocates I know of. Can an AI, lacking a biological body, ever emulate a human being? Can it care enough to be motivated to act on its own? Why would it? And what does that mean for the uses, dangers, and benefits of developing AI's that would take over serious decision-making roles now performed by humans?

  2. Beautiful essay. Calls to mind David Brooks' new book called The Social Animal, where he describes this type of research and more, including how children learn best when they have a positive relationship with the teacher. We all know this. Still it is fascinating.