Here is an article entitled “Anti-Love Drug May be the Ticket to Bliss” from last month’s New York Times that I thought might be of interest on this strange day of celebrating all things romantic:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/science/13tier.html?n=Top%2fNews%2fScience%2fColumns%2fFindings
Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you! Lee
“In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.”
Was Freud right all along?
– Jesse
Sounds a little creepy if you ask me (as do all things scientific)…. I just hope that this doesn’t become Pfizer’s next Viagra.
Chris
I have to agree with Chris on that- it really IS creepy. I really hope we never reach the stage where certain emotions can be controlled or initiated via drugs/ medications especially by others. Now, that’s really scary!
Freud is always wrong from the Neuropsychologist’s point of view, but it’s actually kinda weird how often his really odd ideas seem to reemerge in social psychology. I apologize in advance for the rant that follows.
I don’t think this will happen any time too soon. The idea of modifying emotions based on chemistry has been around for millennia. Even today I think we lack the technology or neuroscientific understanding to really apply this. It’s really easy to say we know the location of a function in the neuroanatomy because of a few fMRI scans, but that’s just correlative evidence at best, not causative. The real ability to manipulate things like emotions and thoughts would require a really impressive pace of advancements in nano-scale electrodes and a functional mapping of an individual’s brain at a cell-to-cell level. To really manipulate a function of the brain you would have to have universal control of the entire system, including (to an extent) its environment. Neural functions like ‘love’ and memory are so massively dispersed that you can’t take a pointer and an MRI and say ‘that’s where it is, there is the neural source of love’.
One thing I must say from what experience I have is that neuroscientists seem to exaggerate, or science journalists misquote a lot. I like to imagine scientists are like the Jedi of our society, so I’ll blame the journalists. I was interviewed for an article in the IEEE Spectre last semester, and the journal (it’s not ‘Science’ or ‘Nature’ but it’s a step above Scientific American’, think ‘Wired’ but meant for engineers) sent someone who had a bachelors degree in english and only a minor in microbiology. I looked around, and apparently that’s the common level of scientific knowledge many reporters have. Not to sound crazier than this rant is making me seem, but there is no way someone with such a limited background could really understand the physical properties behind my research to a level at which she could properly explain it to another audience. I am deathly afraid of a misquote or an editor (who never met me or saw my poster) exaggerating something I said. I could probably go on for a few more pages on this rant, but I’ll save you guys the misery.
The take home message is; don’t always trust science journalists, and don’t think that we have figured out the brain just because the newspaper says so.
-Greg