The neuroscience of love, mysticism and poetry

Abstract

‘I’ll teach you differences!’ says Kent to the rascal Oswald in King Lear . And neuroscientists attempting to make correlations between love and the brain would do well to heed Kent's lesson. For, there is a tendency in such enquiries to seek, and to find, localized common denominators as if the seat of love were an organ like the kidney and passion no more than a wayward hormone. But here, at the outset, is another kind of difference. Not so long ago, in conversation at the Salk Institute with neuroscientist Prof. Terry Sejnowski, I asked what difference the discipline had made to his view of human nature? ‘Neuroscience teaches’ he replied, ‘that much of our behaviour normally viewed as the result of manifestation of individual responsibility, is hidden and determined’. In consequence, he had become ‘less judgmental’ of his fellows. To what extent then is love hidden and determined in the recesses of the brain and CNS? The impetus to explain the neuroscience of affections, sexuality, romantic love and its associated emotions has grown apace in recent years, resulting in a fascinating, although at times obtuse and ever-expanding literature. It would be true to say that the value of many of the research conclusions remains questionable. It was at the Salk for example, that Prof. Simon le Vey had been working in the 1990s on the difference between the homosexual and the heterosexual brain revealing, in his view, the importance of the similarity of hypothalamic structure in homosexual attraction. Elsewhere, researchers have been working on correlations between falling in love and phenylethylamine (PEA); while others have studied the density of peptide binding sites in the formation of emotional attachment. A central problem in these enquiries has involved a secure definition of that much used and abused word ‘love’ itself. Some …