Relationship Dissection
Sex, Love, and Brain Scans
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Down underground, in the basement of UCSB’s psychology building, behind two locked doors and another emblazoned with red hazard signs, a man lies in a pitch-black room, his skull in a scanner. Behind a window, lab techs stare silently at black-and-white renderings of his gray matter.
If this clinical scene doesn’t make your heart flutter, your face flush, and your guts flip-flop with jumpy juice, then you’re clearly not a scientist at the university’s Brain Imaging Center.
Starshine Roshell
But Bianca Acevedo is. She’s a postdoctoral research fellow (am I the only one who enjoys calling women fellows?) who studies the neuroscience of love. “It’s a relatively new field, but it’s flourishing quickly,” said Acevedo, who spends her days translating lofty romantic notions into precise scientific terms. Working with the campus’s “Close Relationships Lab,” she uses a “Passionate Love Scale” to evaluate the “neural correlates of long-term pair-bonding.”
All of which would be funny if it weren’t just a little bit creepy.
I’m troubled by this impulse to dissect l’amour mystérieux and examine it under a microscope—to pin capricious Cupid’s wings to a specimen board for cold, controlled analysis. Call me old-fashioned, but I liked it better when all we knew about love came from song lyrics. Love, if you recall, was strange. It was cruel. It was blind. Love was a battlefield. It was the drug. It lifted us up where we belonged.
This information was cheesy, and it was useless. But it sounded better with a backbeat than Acevedo’s FM-unfriendly definition: “Love is a very basic drive,” she deadpanned. “It’s the craving for union with the beloved.”
Her own beloved is a professor in UCSB’s statistics department. They were married last June. And though she’s currently studying 20 newlyweds to track how love develops over time, she refused to entertain my obnoxious questions about how her research spills over into her own love life.
What she does like to talk about is her work. By showing her subjects photos of their sweethearts, and noting any changes in the blood oxygen levels of their brains, Acevedo can tell what kind of love they’re experiencing: passionate and exciting love like that of new lovers, or secure and calming love like that of long-attached couples. She was surprised and encouraged to find, in one study, that 40 percent of long-married couples experienced both.
Other studies in her field have revealed that falling in love triggers the same system of our brains that’s activated if we use cocaine—but without those pesky nosebleeds, which is nice. They’ve also found that oxytocin, the “bonding” hormone, can actually help couples get along better.
“Close relationships have the ability to impact our lives in really positive ways,” Acevedo said, pointing out that happy marriages have even been linked to better health. “And when things aren’t going well in relationships, people suffer.”
But will romance suffer from too much scientific prodding? We already know so much about so much. We know that a rainbow is really just a refraction of sunlight. We know that thunder is merely the sound of air being heated by lightning and expanding (okay, I didn’t know that one until I just looked it up). Will the dissection of affection thoroughly suck the magic out of, er, pair-bonding?
It’ll take a more dispassionate mind than mine to answer that question. But if you’d like to help Acevedo answer hers, she’s looking for more subjects to take part in her research. You can find her psych.ucsb.edu.
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Comments
I think it all depends upon your perspective. I've been studying in the sciences for a few years and have found that it has helped me appreciate my marriage more than I had previously. So many of the art around love is about the intense, passionate love that was part of the first few years with my significant other. But difficulties of life sometimes have the effect of dampening that. Learning more about the way in which the brain generates these states helped me appreciate not just how fragile love is but gave me the courage to stop expecting love to easily feel amazing. Over time it is more work but equally--it is more rewarding.
I also think that rainbows are still inspiring and beautiful. Knowledge alone is just information, its how we interpret and use it that is actually important.
ringsroses (anonymous profile)
June 15, 2010 at 7:38 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Touché and well put, roses.
starshine (anonymous profile)
June 15, 2010 at 7:56 p.m. (Suggest removal)
No one's appreciation of rainbows has ever been diminished by knowing about their physics -- quite the contrary. And a rainbow is not "just a refraction of sunlight" -- there's lot more to it than that. There's the colors and their order, which is due to sunlight being made up of different wavelengths of light, and the different wavelengths refract at different angles and thus separate. Why does the rainbow have the shape, size, and distance it does? Because the sunlight reflects off the backs of water drops and which drops reflect light at the right angle to reach our eyes is determined by the curvature of the drops. And there are fainter secondary and tertiary rainbows caused by the light reflecting more than once within the water drops -- knowing that, you'll know to look for them, and notice that the colors of the secondary rainbow are reversed. The rainbow is centered around the shadow of your head, and with that knowledge you can readily locate rainbows in waterfalls or even in the spray from a hose or sprinkler. Scientific knowledge can help us have richer experiences.
truth_machine (anonymous profile)
June 16, 2010 at 4:56 a.m. (Suggest removal)