Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So many people ask is there a chemical or genetic basis to human love,
and I certainly believe there is. And the reason I believe so is
from the work that we've done with prairie voles
on pair bonding, which I'm not going to say that pair bonding is love,
but behavioral outcomes very similar. It involves the reward circuitry as I said
in prairie voles, and people have done brain imaging in humans
thinking about their loved ones, and you have very similar circuits activated.
So in many cases, studies in animals have shown that processes
that occur in animals
also occur in humans using parallel systems. For example
*** acts the same in a rat as it does in a human,
so I really believe that the mechanisms that were tapping in voles,
many of those may also be
responsible for those feelings that we have when we're with a loved one; the elation,
the excitement.
Dopamine is going to be involved there and we know that dopamine released in the brain
during interactions like that,
and so I'm very confident that emotions such as love
are really a byproduct of chemical reactions that happen on in our brain
where certain neurotransmitter molecules activating receptors
in certain brain circuits that activate an emotional feeling,
and one of those emotional feelings that we know to be very human is love.
Love happens between partners, but also between
parents and their offspring, offspring and their parents
and I think there's surely a biological mechanism to that