The Science of Love

The results - a correlation between romantic love and the activity of dopamine-fired neurons deep within the brain - astonished the author. I would like to share her enthusiasm, but am constrained by the fact that no images of caudate nucleus or ventral tegmental area glowing as volunteers gaze in rapture at their William, Barbara or Bjorn are shown. There is a 16 page Appendix detailing the ‘Being in Love’ questionnaire that each volunteer had to complete, but no glimmer of an fMRI scan. We are assured that one of Dr Fisher's colleagues 'did many statistical analyses', but these are not presented either. Instead we are referred merely to her recent publications. Neither the Archives of Sexual Behavior nor Neuroendocronology Letters, however, are likely to be found on the average reader's bookshelf. I did not locate them in the extensive library of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine either.

Image Courtesy Veikko Jousmäki Semir Zeki

Not that I doubt the author's findings. They appear to be supported by independent work of Semir Zeki and his colleagues at University College, London, that predate the publications of the Fisher group by some two years. What I am concerned about is Helen Fisher's implication that of all the pleasurable emotions one might feel, it is romantic love alone that causes one's dopaminergic neurons to work overtime. I suspect that had she shown an 18 year old Carmelite nun pictures of the Virgin Mary, the same result might have been obtained. Indeed I am ready to jump into her brain scanner and have pictures of caviar blinis flashed before my eyes, or excerpts from Schubert's String Quintet in C relayed to my ears: I'll bet my caudate nucleus would respond as well. In short, I believe that gazing at a picture of your sweetheart is but one of thousands of pleasurable emotions that are transmitted along dopaminergic pathways.

The blobs that light up by fMRI may be no bigger than a pin head, but that still means that each encompasses some million neurons (nerve cells), communicating with as many as a thousand others. To establish the precise details of this network - by methods not yet available - is a Herculean task to which Dr Fisher does not allude. Instead she writes entertainingly about topics such as lust (triggered by the hormone testosterone, that inceases sexual drive in women as well as in men), rejection and despair. Her story is peppered with quotations, from Aristotle to Yeats, with more than twenty from Shakespeare alone. No doubt we should be impressed by her literary erudition. Yet the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations - that does find a place on my bookshelf - contains over five hundred references to love, so Dr Fisher's scholarly contribution is not, perhaps, so remarkable after all.