The neurobiology of love

This theme is probably one of the most complicated to discuss. Many great thinkers, philosophers and Neuroscientists had their share of disappointment when trying to digress about it. The subjectivity of the concept of “love” goes crashing against the objectivity of what is expected from “neurobiology”.

For this reason, one of the best approaches is to have Art, or a piece of Art, as the anchoring factor to base the discussion. Whenever Science falls short, Art may be our guide. Artists are much better prepared to cope with ambiguities, opposing ideas, and counter intuitive concepts. Love is a mixture of all of those, and much more.

Having stated that, and having justified our shortage of objective material, let’s take the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, written by Charlie Kaufmann, and directed by Michel Gondry, as our anchor.

A doctor develops a machine and a technique that can “erase” undesired memories from the minds of prospective patients. As we may imagine, a very interesting and colourful cohort of cases come and go at the waiting room of the clinic. The majority of the cases are about romantic relationships, and their universal tendency of ending traumatically, or not ending at all.

However, the technique fails in what should be its strongest prescription. The subconscious minds of lovers, or ex-lovers, although suffering from love, resist any intervention, and have a strong resilience towards keeping their suffering. It’s some sort of scientifically implausible masochism.

At this point, Neurobiology collapses. Love is a dilemma, so to speak. This feeling is not only the amalgam of good and bad memories. There are attraction and desire, which pre-exist any conscious memory. They are inaccessible neither to those who suffer, nor to those who attempt to heal it. It is the large, unknown, undiscovered, yet vastly explored, land of romantic attraction.

This land has always been heavily populated by poets, artists, lunatics. Very few Scientists ever tried to make the ultimate leap towards inhabiting it.

This fact tells us much more about the methodological limitations of Science, than about the curiosity of humankind. We, Scientists or not, always wanted to know why girl/boy A attracts us much more than girl/boy B. What makes us insane, crazy for love, ridiculous, shameful, but at the same time happy, full of life, exhilarating.

We never had the tools to measure and quantify feelings, in a rigorous and controlled mode, as Science expects it to be measured.

New Neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), are starting to give us the first glimpses of the living and activated brain. The subject is given tasks to perform during the acquisition, and the areas responsible for those tasks “light up” on the scanner. The Holy Grail of Neuroscience is to map the areas or pathways responsible for consciousness, emotions, and feelings.

However, some questions may precede the epistemological quest for the Holy Grail. Where is the mind? Would that be a creation of the brain, its millions of neurons, and its trillions of synapses? The co-occurrence of somatic responses (piloerection, tachycardia, cold sweats) and good memories would be the anatomical correlates of love? And that’s it? Where is the music, the candles, the violins, the champagne? Why? The mind is what the brain does! But that is also a very tricky and ambiguous statement, very far from any definitive answer.

Descartes (“cogito, ergo sum!”) made the separation between emotions and reason, soul and body. Recently, Antonio Damasio made ends meet by stating that emotions are the cornerstone of memories. If we don’t “like” a given subject, odds are that it will be very difficult for us to master it. Many of us had the experience of a teacher in grade school that made us “hate” his/her subject because of his/her “attitude”. In clear opposition to that teacher that showed passion, love, for a given subject, and is one of the factors for the choice of our careers. Emotions are, after all, a precious tool for biological evolution. It helps us learn, reason, evolve.

Richard Dawkins took this to extremes by saying that living beings are only biological machines, designed to carry and preserve genes, at any cost. In his book “The Selfish Gene” we are confronted with the disappointing reality that our romantic love, our candlelight dinners, our memories of loves past, are only a very well designed strategy that gives pleasure in return to us passing forward our genetic information.

No matter what: theories, hypothesis, and methodological approaches. We are curious little monkeys, or “carbon units”, to use a trekkie term. Maybe we are still too far from the answer with the tools we inherited from the Greeks, Galileo, and the likes. Maybe a new Scientific paradigm will eventually come to free us, in a quantum way.

However, even the most pragmatic Neuroscientist will continue to be driven to tears or laughter with Charlie Kaufmann, Michel Gondry, Shakespeare, Faulkner, or Camoes. And many of us will leave the theatre with “hearts” filled, “minds” overflowing, and the sensation that there has to be more in Art than Science can ever measure.