Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships [Hardcover]

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Kayt Sukel’s work has appeared in myriad publications, including Atlantic Monthly, USA TODAY, The Washington Post, National Geographic Traveler, Continental, American Baby, and Cerebrum. She is often a partner within the renowned family travel website, TravelSavvyMom.com, blogs about international eating for UpTake.com, and is also another frequent contributor on the Dana Foundation’s many science publications.

Chapter 1

The Neuroscience of Love: A History

(Theirs and Mine)

In 1994 a scientist named Sue Carter submitted a grant application to study a hormone called oxytocin (not being confused with the narcotic Oxycontin, aka hillbilly heroin) in the small rodent known as the prairie vole.

A prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) looks a great deal much like your garden-variety mouse, but scruffier and which has a shorter tail. Happily burrowing under gardens and meadows in a very large stretch of central North America, these small rodents might completely escape our notice except for one special trait: they are monogamous.

Socially monogamous, that is. Unlike other rodents—or most other mammals, to the matter—prairie voles form lifelong pair-bonds, or lasting social and sexual relationships using a single member with the opposite sex. Both males and females are also directly involved with the parenting of offspring. Because in the rarity of such habits inside the animal kingdom, many animal behaviorists are getting to be exceptionally interested inside the prairie vole. One particular researcher was Carter.

A professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Carter hypothesized that oxytocin, which is connected to childbirth and breastfeeding, could increase social attachment. She had already conducted research to keep the idea and hoped until this grant would allow her to continue studying the hormone and its particular relationship to social behaviors inside the prairie vole. In her application she did not mention love, marriage, and even humans. Somehow the grant review committee decided she was studying the little four-letter-word that begins by having an l—love, that is—which was considered a significant no-no within the hard science climate from the day.

“I was looking to get federal grant funding to continue my work, and suddenly I utilized to be accused of studying love,” she said after i visited her lab in Chicago. Petite, white-haired, plus a little bohemian in style, Carter somehow managed the feat of being both incredibly welcoming and intellectually intimidating with the same time. “Honestly, it had been a shock to me. I would not have access to used the saying love—I never used the phrase love. I didn’t think in regards to the are employed in relation to love. I became simply talking in regards to a preference of just one animal for another—not some human construct that seemed to have little to complete with what we should were actually studying.”

Carter said she was unsure of how to respond towards the review. She conferred with Kerstin UvnÄs-Moberg, a fellow scientist also considering oxytocin who was simply working at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute. Could it's that their work was related to something as messy and indefinable as love? Might there be described as a neurobiological basis for your future study of love? Looking at newly published research by various labs concerning oxytocin, social attachment, and pair-bonding in prairie voles along with other mammal species, the result seemed to become yes. Carter and UvnÄs-Moberg thought it was time for you to stop ducking this issue and admit their work did have implications for human behavior.

“It seemed such as the time to suit your needs to really make an attempt to articulate and explain the notion that social bonds were critical to human love,” Carter said. While sex was, is, and will be with the utmost importance to propagating our species, Carter and UvnÄs-Moberg were convinced that love needed being articulated inside the context not only of genetic propagation but also of survival—specifically, the methods social bonds might help people thrive inside face of stress as well as other complexities of life on an everyday basis. Perhaps our brains promote social relationships to be able to make sure that more than one individual is on tap to avoid dangers, to generate sure there is enough food around to feed the family, and to help you raise the young’uns. Investigating how the neuroscience underlying social bonds might promote these behaviors seemed a pertinent line of study.

Though this line of inquiry seemed clear to Carter and UvnÄs-Moberg, it had been difficult to have respect (and, perhaps more important, funding) to review such ideas experimentally. There had been ample evidence in neuroscience literature to suggest that love was a worthy topic of research. But the scientists never called it such, avoiding it such as the dirty word it is. Instead they referred on the related topics of pair-bonding, monogamy, attachment, and mating behaviors. If you read between the lines, there were a lot of information out there, perhaps even enough to create the neuroscientific study of affection its very own field. Still most professional scientists were afraid to call love by its true name.

There wasn't any sense in talking concerning the neuroscience of love with no proper working definition—a common standard that scientists across disciplines could use to check and validate hypotheses. Sadly, as fitting (and poignant) as Ted Nugent’s “tire iron” characterization might be as a song lyric, it would be limiting to use since the basis for any credible, replicable scientific study. To that end Carter and UvnÄs-Moberg invited thirty-eight prominent scientists within the field of neurobiology with a meeting on the 1996 Wenner-Gren Symposium in Stockholm titled “Is There a Neurobiology of Love?”

One of the products of this meeting was a definition. Instead of choosing Merriam-Webster’s basic statement about love as being a case of “strong affection for another,” the group consensus was that love is “a life-long learning process that starts with the relationship in the infant to his or her mother as well as the gradual withdrawal through the mother using a hunt for emotional comfort and fulfillment.” This definition was included in the summary report written by the prominent
neuroscientist Bruce McEwen.1 It provides more detail compared to the meaning of love as strictly an emotion or a basic mammalian drive, like hunger or thirst—even if it is less romantic than “sweet surrender” or “my first, my last, and my everything.” Though a mouthful, this definition would serve since the standard that future studies through the neurobiology field could refer.

The meeting also started a renaissance of sorts, a green light for neuroscientists, neurobiologists, and neuroendocrinologists to finally call love, well, love. This allowed the crooks to start studying the nuances of this human phenomenon in the perspectives of brain and biology. Two years later many from the meeting’s prominent attendees published studies in a special issue from the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology on topics ranging from the evolutionary antecedents of love towards the physiological consequences of withholding it. With such respected scientists backing the concept, researchers could more easily study the l-word from the space from the brain and neurobiology.

Sexy Baby Banning

Fast-forward ten years. Many great studies concerning neuroscientific aspects of that “life-long learning process” we call love were published in the late 1990s, with a great number appearing in high-profile journals like Nature and Science. Brains, it seemed, have quite a bit to accomplish with love—certainly far over do our proverbial hearts. While working on the story to get a neuroscience website, I accidentally stumbled across McEwen’s meeting report. A simple misclick on the library database brought me to it, and although it absolutely was completely off-topic I became compelled to read it.

Maybe I became drawn towards the question raised inside the title, “Is there a neurobiology of love?” It has not been a topic I’d had occasion to study before. Maybe it had been the fact that it was written by McEwen, an acclaimed neuroscientist from Rockefeller University. His work had impressed me since I would be a graduate student. Maybe I was just procrastinating. I may have see the phonebook as an excuse to adopt a rest that muggy afternoon. Or possibly it had something to accomplish with my sleep deprivation. Did I mention I needed recently become a mother?

If you will discover there's stereotype of your new mom—think bedraggled, beleaguered, and baggy-eyed—I fulfilled it, after which some. From the stains in my shirt to the state of my house, there was it's unlikely that any part of my life left untouched from the results of motherhood. As much as I actually do not subscribe to the notion of “mommy brain,” or even the idea that motherhood makes you stupid, I have to confess which i sometimes wondered the undeniable fact that was going on upstairs. But honestly, what had changed the most—somewhat inexplicably—since learning to be a mother was my marriage.

The arrival of my son had completely altered my relationship with my husband. Though I certainly expected my marriage to improve once there were children, I had not been prepared for an entire loss of intimacy. We have been a tight-knit team, albeit a motley one, the good news is we were satellites in separate orbits, crossing paths only if it located our child. My friends with kids assured me that the situation was natural and would right itself over time, after the shock of our own new addition wore off. One friend, a mom of three, went beyond that: “You can’t expect you'll feel a similar way about your husband now. Your relationship needs to change which means that your son can be your focus. Our brains are wired so our children may come first. It’s an evolutionary thing.”

Her statement tied to me. I cannot understand how an “evolutionary thing,” as she'd so eloquently put it, would eliminate a nurturing, loving relationship between two adults or perhaps an active sex life. Now which i had checked in the breeder category, wasn’t I supposed to help keep popping out kids to guarantee propagation of the ancestral line? Sex, otherwise just a little passionate love, was needed to fulfill that goal. Perhaps I'd missed something.

It was a conundrum. Like the majority of new moms, I became bone-tired. Yet I was ent...