love is the drug

So that explains it ...

This is your brain on love: When you're attracted to someone, is your gray matter talking sense — or just hooked? Scientists take a rational look.
By Susan Brink
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 30, 2007
Her front brain is telling her he's trouble. Look at the facts, it says. He's never made a commitment, he drinks too much, he can't hold down a job.

But her middle brain won't listen. Man, it swoons, he looks great in those jeans, his black hair curls onto his forehead so adorably, and when he drags on a cigarette, he's so bad he's good.

His front brain is lecturing, too: She's flirting with every guy in the place, and she can drink even you under the table, it says. His mid-brain is unresponsive, distracted by her legs, her blouse and her come-hither stare.

"What could you be thinking?" their front brains demand.

Their middle brains, each on a quest for reward, pay no heed.

Alas, when it comes to choosing mates, smart neurons can make dumb choices. Sure, if the brain's owner is in her 40s and has been around the block a few times, she might grab her bag and scram. If the guy has reached seasoned middle age, he might think twice about that cleavage-baring temptress. Wisdom -- at least a little -- does come with experience.

But if the objects of desire are in their 20s, all bets are off. A lot will depend on the influence of Mom and Dad's marriage, the gossip and urgings of friends, and whether life experience has convinced these two brains that what they're looking at is attractive. She just might sidle over to Mr. Wrong and bat her eyes. And he could well give in to temptation.

And so the dance of attraction, infatuation and ultimately love begins.

It's a dance that holds many mysteries, to psychologists as well as to the willing participants. Science is just beginning to parse the inner workings of the brain in love, examining the blissful or ruinous fall from a medley of perspectives: neural systems, chemical messengers and the biology of reward.

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science's first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

All animals mate: The most primitive system in the brain, one that even reptiles have, knows it needs to reproduce. Turtles do it but then lay their eggs in the sand and head back to sea, never seeing their mate again.

Human brains are considerably more complicated, with additional neural systems that seek romance, others that want comfort and companionship, and others that are just out for a roll in the hay.

Yet the chemistry between two people isn't just a matter of molecules careening around the brain, dictating feelings like some game of neuro-billiards. Attraction also involves personal history. "Our parents have an effect on us," says Helen Fisher, evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies human attraction. "So does the school system, television, timing, mystery."

Every book ever read, and every movie ever wept through, starts charting a course toward the chosen one.

The love dance
"Love," that one small word, stands for a hodgepodge of feelings and drives: lust, romance, passion, attachment, commitment and contentment. Studying this brew is made harder because the pathways aren't totally distinct. Lust and romance, for example, have some overlapping biology, even though they are not the same thing.

Similarly, the dance that leads, if we're lucky, to a stable commitment moves through several key steps.

First comes initial attraction, the spark. If someone's going to pick one person out of the billions of opposite-sex humans out there, it's this step that starts things rolling.

Next comes the wild, dizzying infatuation of romance -- a unique magic between two people who can't stop thinking about each other. The brain uses its chemical arsenal to focus our attention on one person, forsaking all others.

"Everyone knows what that feels like. This is one of the great mysteries. It's the love potion No. 9, the click factor, interpersonal chemistry," says Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony Labs.

The passion lasts at least for a few months, two to four years tops, says relationship researcher Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

As it fades, something more stable takes over: the steady pair-bonding of what's called companionate love. It's a heartier variety, characterized by tenderness, affection and stability over the long haul. Far less is known about the brains of people celebrating their silver anniversaries or more, but researchers are beginning to recruit such couples to find out.

When Kelly and Robert Iblings of Calabasas had their first face-to-face meeting after a month of corresponding online, all signs of a spark were there. Kelly, 30, recalls thinking "Wow!" Robert, 33, thought Kelly was beautiful. "I love his height," Kelly says of Robert's 6-foot-4 frame. "And those eyes. He's quite handsome. I mean, look at him. He's cute. He's hot."

"She's very cute," Robert says. "And I like the way she laughs."

Their brains' signals were in sync, and it was good.

It probably didn't hurt that they were a little bit nervous about meeting each other.

For years, scientists have known that attraction is more likely to happen when people are aroused, be it through laughter, anxiety or fear. Aron tested that theory in 1974 on the gorgeous but spine-chilling heights of the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia -- a 5-foot wide, 450-foot, wobbly, swaying length of wooden slats and wire cable suspended 230 feet above rocks and shallow rapids.

His research team waited as unsuspecting men, between ages 18 and 35 and unaccompanied by women, crossed over. About halfway across the bridge, each man ran into an attractive young woman claiming to be doing research on beautiful places. She asked him a few questions and gave him her phone number in case he had follow-up questions.

The experiment was repeated upriver on a bridge that was wide and sturdy and only 10 feet above a small rivulet. The same attractive coed met the men, brandishing the same questionnaire.

The result? Men crossing the scary bridge rated the woman on the Capilano bridge more attractive. And about half the men who met her called her afterward. Only two of 16 men on the stable bridge called.

Fear got their attention and aroused emotional centers in the brain. "People are more likely to feel aroused in a scary setting," Aron says. "It's pretty simple. You're feeling physiologically aroused, and it's ambiguous why. Then you see an attractive person, and you think, 'Oh, that's why.' "

In a laboratory, Aron tested his arousal theory further by having people run in place for 10 minutes, and compared them with people who didn't run. Those who had exercised were more attracted to good-looking people in photographs than those who had been sedentary.

Any kind of physiological arousal would probably do the trick, Aron concludes from his studies. Couples who ride roller coasters, laugh at a really funny comedian or escape a burning building together get an emotional jolt and could attribute the feeling to the attractiveness of the other.

The forces of attraction are in many ways mysterious, but scientists know certain things. Studies have shown that women prefer men with symmetrical faces and that men like a certain waist-to-hip ratio in their mates. One study even found that women, when they sniffed men's T-shirts, were attracted to certain kinds of body odors.

That initial spark can flash and fade. Or it can become a flame and then a fire, a rush of exhilaration, yearning, hunger and sense of complete union that scientists know as passionate love.

Key to this state of seeing a person as a soul mate instead of a one-night stand is the limbic system, nestled deep within the brain between the neocortex (the region responsible for reason and intellect) and the reptilian brain (responsible for primitive instincts). Altered levels of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin -- neurotransmitters also associated with arousal -- wield their influence.

But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. "It's a drive to win life's greatest prize, the right mating partner," Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction.

People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.

Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.

In an experiment published as a chapter in a 2006 book, "Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience," Fisher found 17 people who were in relationships for an average of seven months. She knew they were in love from their answers to what researchers call the Passionate Love Scale. They all said they'd feel deep despair if their lover left, and they yearned to know all there was to know about the loved one.

She put these lovesick, enraptured people in an fMRI to see what areas of their brains got active when they saw a photograph of their beloved ones.

"We found some remarkable things," she said. "We saw activity in the ventral tegmental area and other regions of the brain's reward system associated with motivation, elation and focused attention." It's the same part of the brain that presumably is active when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or when gamblers think they're going to win the lottery. No wonder it's as hard to say no to the feeling of romantic arousal as it would be to say no to a windfall in the millions. The brain has seen what it wants, and it's going to get it.

"At that point, you really wouldn't notice if he had three heads," Fisher says. "Or you'd notice, but you'd choose to overlook it."

Other studies also suggest that the brain in the first throes of love is much like a brain on drugs.

Lucy Brown, professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has also taken fMRI images of people in the early days of a new love. In a study reported in the July 2005, Journal of Neurophysiology, she too found key activity in the ventral tegmental area. "That's the area that's also active when a cocaine addict gets an IV injection of cocaine," Brown says. "It's not a craving. It's a high."

You see someone, you click, and you're euphoric. And in response, your ventral tegmental area uses chemical messengers such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin to send signals racing to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens with the good news, telling it to start craving.

"The other person becomes a goal in your life," Brown says. He or she becomes a goal you might die without and would pack up and move across the country for. That one person begins to stand out as the one and only.

Biologically, the cravings and pleasure unleashed are as strong as any drug. Surely such a goal is worth taking risks for, and other alterations in the brain help ensure that the lovelorn will do just that. Certain regions, scientists have found, are being deactivated, such as within the amygdala, associated with fear. "That's why you can do such insane things when you're in love," Fisher says. "You would never otherwise dream of driving across the country in 13 hours, but for love, you would."

Sooner or later, excited brain messages reach the caudate nucleus, a dopamine-rich area where unconscious habits and skills, such as the ability to ride a bike, are stored.

The attraction signal turns the love object into a habit, and then an obsession. According to a 1999 study in the journal Psychological Medicine, people newly in love have serotonin levels 40% lower than normal people do -- just like people with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Experiments in other mammals add to the human chemical findings. Female prairie voles, for example, develop a distinct preference for a specific male after mating, and the preference is associated with a 50% increase in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.

But when the monogamous vole is injected with a dopamine antagonist, blocking the activity of the chemical, she'll readily dump her partner for another.

Using their heads
Kelly and Robert Iblings, now married for nine months, are fascinated by all this talk of nucleus accumbens, addiction and primitive mating instincts. Sure, they admit, they found each other attractive. But they were also making use of their front brains' sharp thinking skills. They were remembering painful past lessons and looking for signs of compatibility.

They had each survived an earlier, failed engagement, and they knew what they were looking for this time around. They were listening to their front brains as they told them to look for compatibility, stability, shared values and commitment.

From their first e-mail exchanges through eHarmony, an Internet dating service, the Iblings each felt they had found a unique mate. She liked to travel. So did he. They both love books and learning, have similar religious beliefs and come from loving, intact families. She no sooner sent an e-mail telling him about an exhibit she saw on a business trip to New York than he sent a message back telling her he knew of the exhibit because he had bought a book on it the day before.

Coincidence, or soul mate?

The front brain certainly gets involved as it ponders all of life's experiences and past mistakes, researchers say -- but not just the front brain. The nucleus accumbens, virtual swamp of dopamine that it is, is also holder of memories. Its quest for reward is influenced by childhood experiences, friends, previous failed engagements or the jerk who cheated on you. The sum of those experiences make some people attracted to a prince or a frog, a princess or a shrew.

And, as it happens, practical matters such as whether a couple both like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain do matter in igniting passionate love.

A research project headed by eHarmony Labs' Gonzaga interviewed 1,200 dating and newlywed couples. The results, reported in the July issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who reported similar interests and feelings were more satisfied. "Those who reported chemistry said they felt at ease, relaxed, connected. They knew they had some things in common," he says. "Chemistry is more than just being hot or handsome."

Clearly, in the matters of love, the stars were aligned for the Iblings. When they met, they were ready for each other. But they were also attracted to each other. The chemistry was there. Most relationship researchers think it has to be.

They had what it took to kick-start the relationship with an undeniable urgency, allowing two people to give up the candy store of other choices and commit to each other.

Odds are that in two to four years, this urgency will fade -- and the couple will, if all goes well, settle in for the long haul with companionate love. Such peoples' lives are entwined, as are their property and bank accounts, and they begin to answer questionnaires differently. The rush and the urgency is gone, but they feel committed, emotionally close and stable.

It is the state that many desire, yet it is the least studied. There's a reason for that. Most studies of couples are of college students and young newlyweds.

Brown, however, has recently recruited volunteers for a study of people 40 to 65 who have been together for many years. She'll put them in fMRIs to see where love resides after the urgency fades. "It's unknown, the extent to which these original brain motivations are still active," she says. "Or whether companionate love has turned more cortical, more conscious thinking, more evaluative." Her first volunteers had their brains scanned this month.

The free fall of love's first rush can happen at any age, whether people are 20 or 70, says Elaine Hatfield, psychology professor at the University of Hawaii and relationship researcher.

What differs is that the older people get, the more memories they harbor of joy and trust, rejection and disappointment. And as people learn from experience, the front brain, with its logic and reason, probably gets a greater say.

"When you are young, passion and hope are so strong that's it's almost impossible to stop loving someone," Hatfield says. "After you've been kicked around by life, however, you start to have a dual response to handsome con men: 'Wow!' and 'Arrrrrrgh!'

"It takes not will power but painful experience to make us wise."

Somehow, it all comes together, for better or for worse, the sum total of what's found in the mating dance of the ancient reptilian brain, the passion of the limbic brain and the logic of the neocortex.

Oh, what a ride.

feeding hungry mouths and wiping smelly behinds

Apparently, women are hyperverbal because of the oxytocin in our brains. And we're paid 72 cents per dollar that men make (on average) because we've been tending to (presumably) our children's needs —eating and pooping — for millenia. Interesting ... but now what?

Questions for Dr. Louann Brizendine: He Thought, She Thought
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: December 10, 2006

Q: As a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, you’ve drawn some strange conclusions about “The Female Brain,” to borrow the title of your debut book, which argues that a woman’s brain structure explains a good deal of her behavior, including a penchant for gossiping and talking on the phone.

A: The hormone of intimacy is oxytocin, and when women talk to each other, they get a rush of it. For teen girls especially, when they’re talking about who’s hooking up with whom, who’s not talking to whom, who you like and don’t like — that’s bedrock, that excites the girl’s brain.

You make it sound as if female friendship and affection is just a search for oxytocin.

Sixth-grade teachers will tell you that girls get up and go to the bathroom together; girls say they have to go at the same time. They need to go off and intimately exchange the important currency of their day, which increases their oxytocin and dopamine levels.

Your book cites a study claiming that women use about 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000.

The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.

Are you concerned that you are rehabilitating outdated gender stereotypes that portray women as chatterboxes ruled by female hormones?

A stereotype always has an aspect of truth to it, or it wouldn’t be a stereotype. I am talking about the biological basis behind behaviors that we all know about.

Were there any research findings you were reluctant to include in your book because they could be used to bolster sexist thinking?

Any of this could be taken badly. I worried, for instance, that stuff about pregnancy and the mommy brain could be taken to mean that mothers shouldn’t go to work. The brain shrinks 8 percent during pregnancy and does not return to its former size until six months postpartum.

How big is the average male brain?

It’s about the size of a cantaloupe. It’s 9 to 10 percent larger than the female brain.

But the size of one’s brain is unrelated to one’s level of intelligence, right?

Yes. Remember, the female brain has more connections between the two hemispheres, and we have 11 percent more brain cells in the area of the brain called the planum temporale, which has to do with perceiving and processing language.

If women have superior verbal skills, why have they been subservient to men in almost all societies?

Because of pregnancy. Before birth control, in the 1700s and 1800s, middle-class women were pregnant between 17 and 22 times in their lifetimes. All these eons upon eons, while Socrates and all these guys were sitting around thinking up solutions to problems, women were feeding hungry mouths and wiping smelly behinds.

And yet all human brains begin as female. Or so you claim in your book.

All brains start out with female-type brain circuits until eight weeks of fetal life, when the tiny testicles start to pump out adult-male levels of testosterone that travel in the bloodstream up to the brain. You have to grow all of the basic sex-specific circuitry in the male brain before birth, because that’s when the entire road map is laid down.

Although your book draws heavily on other scientists’ research, you don’t do any clinical research yourself. Isn’t that a drawback?

No. I don’t like doing clinical research because of placebos. In a “double-blind placebo-controlled study,” as they are called, neither the doctor nor the patient knows what the patient is taking. I don’t want to give patients a placebo. It’s cruel.

Not in the long term. How are scientists supposed to find a cure for cancer and more generally advance medicine if no one does controlled tests?

I am glad someone does it, but I’d rather help each female brain that walks into my clinic walk out in better shape.

femme mentale

Sure, men and women have different plumbing. So it's no surprise that we are also wired differently.

p.s. Let's hear it for the 22-second hug.

Femme Mentale
San Francisco neuropsychiatrist says differences between women's and men's brains are very real, and the sooner we all understand it, the better
Joe Garofoli
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Louann Brizendine's feminist ideals were forged in the 1970s, so the UCSF neuropsychiatrist is aware that some parts of her new book, "The Female Brain," sound politically incorrect.
Such as the part about how a financially independent woman may talk about finding a soul mate, but when she meets a prospective mate her brain is subconsciously sizing up his portfolio. Or the part describing the withdrawal pains moms feel when they return to work and can no longer cop a hormonal high from breast-feeding their babies.
Women have come a long way toward equality over the past 50 years, but the Yale-trained Brizendine, 53, says her research indicates that human brains are still wired for Stone Age necessities.
Male and female brains are different in architecture and chemical composition, asserts Brizendine. The sooner women -- and those who love them -- accept and appreciate how those neurological differences shape female behavior, the better we can all get along.
Start with why women prefer to talk about their feelings, while men prefer to meditate on sex.
"Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," she writes. Men, however, "have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes."
Untangling the brain's biological instincts from the influences of everyday life has been the driving passion of Brizendine's life -- and forms the core of her book. "The Female Brain" weaves together more than 1,000 scientific studies from the fields of genetics, molecular neuroscience, fetal and pediatric endocrinology, and neurohormonal development. It is also significantly based on her own clinical work at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF 12 years ago. It is the only psychiatric facility in the country with such a comprehensive focus.
A man's brain may be bigger overall, she writes, but the main hub for emotion and memory formation is larger in a woman's brain, as is the wiring for language and "observing emotion in others." Also, a woman's "neurological reality" is much more deeply affected by hormonal surges that fluctuate throughout her life.
Brizendine uses those differences to explain everything from why teenage girls feverishly swap text messages during class, to why women fake orgasms to why menopausal women leave their husbands.
So the next time parents scold their daughters for excessive text messaging, consider Brizendine's neurological explanation:
"Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl's brain. We're not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It's a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm."
Part road map for women looking for scientific explanations for their behavior, part geeky manual for relationship woes, "The Female Brain" already has become fodder for the morning chat shows. On the "Today" show this week, one critic downplayed the book's explanation of gender differences, saying men and women are "more like North Dakota and South Dakota."
Brizendine's goal isn't man-bashing (despite snippets like "the typical male brain reaction to an emotion is to avoid it at all costs"). Instead, she celebrates the differences.
"There is no unisex brain," Brizendine writes. "Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they're born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality."
Brizendine's book offers a 2 1/2-page appendix on the female brain and sexual orientation, but she doesn't mention transgender folks. Sexual orientation, she writes, "does not appear to be a matter of conscious self-labeling but a matter of brain wiring." All women are wired for a sexual orientation during fetal development, and "the behavioral expression of her brain wiring will then be influenced and shaped by environment and culture."
That's not to say either sex is more intelligent. Just different, Brizendine said. Nor do she or other scientists who study the brain, like Bruce S. McEwen, a Rockefeller (N.Y.) University brain researcher, dismiss the role that parenting and environment and experience play in shaping a person.
"The basic idea is that men and women approach the same problems in somewhat different ways, at least in part because of the biological differences in the brain, which in turn interact with experience -- the nature-nurture story," said McEwen.
"This does not imply whether either sex is superior ... but it does provide the basis for such cultural sayings as 'Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.' "
Indeed, "The Female Brain" covers ground that has been tilled, to various degrees, in books from 1993's "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus" to 1999's "The First Sex," to last year's "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter." Brizendine takes the research a step further and stretches it to cover a female's life from womb through menopause.
Katherine Ellison, author of "The Mommy Brain," said Brizendine represents a trend among neuroscientists who have been inspired by their experiences as parents to investigate what scientists have recently dubbed "the maternal brain."
"It has become more OK to talk about brain differences between genders over the past few years, whereas before, if you said men and women were 'different,' it seemed to imply women were at a disadvantage," said Ellison, who lives in San Anselmo. "Now scientists are pointing out some clear advantages of the female brain, and in particular the 'mommy brain.' "
Among the more controversial subjects addressed in Brizendine's book is: Can new mothers successfully juggle career and family life?
Perhaps not, writes the onetime single mother. And that's OK, Brizendine said, if the workplace can be reshaped to better accommodate new mothers.
"This book is a call-to-arms for women and society to rework the social contract that women have with employers throughout their childbearing years," said Brizendine, while sitting in the Sausalito home she shares with her second husband of 10 years and teenage son. "We cannot afford to lose half the brainpower in this country. Our intelligent women are getting completely out of the loop for five to 10 years, and they cannot get back in.
"The message is that women can't stay at home 100 percent of the time and cut themselves off from their careers. The workplace should realize that women are wired to take care of children, and they want that time and need that time."
It is a sentiment that wasn't around when she was born in Hazard, Ky., a poor Appalachian mining town, where her parents, Protestant missionaries, were stationed. Her father, a minister, was active in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, often appearing as a guest preacher in African American churches throughout the South. Despite Brizendine's mother being the valedictorian of her high school class, Brizendine's maternal immigrant grandparents believed that women should not be educated and refused to give their daughter any money for college.
"One of the things that has been passionate in my life is to have a profession that would allow me to support myself," Brizendine said. "Watching my mother, an intelligent woman, have limited choices because of the culture -- and because she was married to the typical male of that time in the 1950s in this country -- it was clear to me that I had to find a different way myself."
She attended UC Berkeley on an academic scholarship, initially in the nearly all-male world of architecture majors. But in her junior year, she switched to neurobiology, fascinated by experiments where manipulating the hormones of an animal produced different behaviors.
"To me, that hit pay dirt," Brizendine said. "To have that kind of explanation for behavior that wasn't based on how your family raised you -- or how the stereotypes of society were set on you."
From there she went to Yale Medical School, less than a decade after the undergraduate campus went coed. One day in class, Brizendine asked the professor why females weren't used in the study they were reviewing. She recalled him saying, "We don't use females in the study because their menstrual cycles would mess up the data."
"To be honest with you, the reason that this astounds me to this day," said Brizendine, "is because I didn't argue with him." But back then it was unthinkable to say, "Well, how can you then make medications, and how can you make assessments that you'll apply to female patients when you don't really know?"
Next, Brizendine hopes to expand her clinical work.
In the next month, she will open a satellite branch of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, which will focus on issues of most concern to African American women, Latinas and lesbians -- a further attempt to see how cultural issues affect the female brain.
For all women -- and those who love them -- she offers a tip.
Research shows that the female brain naturally releases oxytocin after a 20-second hug. The embrace bonds the huggers and triggers the brain's trust circuits. So Brizendine advises, don't let a guy hug you unless you plan to trust him.
"And if you do," she said, "make sure it lasts 20 seconds."

Head cases
A few neurological differences between women and men from Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain":

• Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.
• Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.
• Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.
• Women remember fights that a man insists never happened.
• Women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce.

Via Arts & Letters Daily

sweet surrender

I'm fascinated by hormones and neurochemistry, especially oxytocin. Apparently, I'm not alone — check out Hug the Monkey, a blog about oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. It may be involved in bonding and the formation of trust between couples through release during orgasm in both sexes.

As someone who generally resists the idea of biology determining many things in my life, I have to say that I hate the fact that hormones rule so much about us, including our moods. But I found these thoughts on oxytocin as the hormone of bonding (and surrender) quite interesting:

Oxytocin is a hormone secreted by the hypothalamus at the based of the pituitary gland. Associated with the contractions of childbirth, the onset of lactation and the overall success of maternal bonding, oxytocin also seems to be necessary for all sorts of social bonding.

I don't know if anything at all has been written about the biochemistry of surrender. And I've spent a good bit of my professional life discounting biological explanations of social effects, but could it be that oxytocin is the hormone not only of bonding, but also of surrender? Could it be that there is an evolutionary value in having a lovely hormone that makes you loving and trusting when you haven't got even the remotest possibility of fighting or fleeing and quite urgently need the help of others?

It is part of the parasympathetic nervous system that moderates fight-or-flight impulses. It also reduces pain and makes us feel bonded to others. If there is a "surrender response," it may be greater in females; what UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor calls "tend and befriend" behavior.

In her book, "The Tending Instinct," Taylor explains that in stressful or dangerous situations, women are more likely to close ranks, gathering with other women and children to support each other, while men are more likely to jump up and fight to protect the family, clan or whatever. This is (simplistically) because men have higher levels of vasopressin -- the jump up and protect hormone -- and more testosterone, which mutes oxytocin. Women's higher levels of estrogen increase the calming, bonding effects of oxytocin.

cupid, draw back your bow ...

And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover's heart for me
Nobody but me.

I had a late-night discussion about Sam Cooke last weekend. Thursday night, I saw "The Essential Sam Cooke" and barely made it out of the store without purchasing said CD.

Which is probably why this headline jumped out at me:

What makes Cupid's arrows stick?Dr Thomas Stuttaford
Scans reveal how the brain changes when we fall in love

One major advance in medicine, rarely given the credit that it deserves, is the introduction of sterile, sharp, disposable needles. Forty years ago my partner and I filled in the time before morning surgery by sharpening much-used old needles on an oiled grindstone, before sterilising them. Cupid, the son of Venus, sharpened his arrows, too — in a similar way to that employed at the Fleggburgh surgery, though he used blood rather than oil on his grindstone. There is a legend, followed up by Shakespeare, that Cupid had two types of arrow: one gave rise to long-lasting, committed, so-called virtuous love, the other to lust. The arrows that led to lasting love were gold, which would have needed careful sharpening to penetrate and stay embedded.

The lovestruck person hit by a golden arrow would pass through the three stages leading to lasting commitment — lust, acceptance and attachment, and deep friendship. What could be more virtuous? Cupid’s other arrows were leaden: although they might strike their victim, they were unlikely to penetrate, let alone to remain embedded. Cupid’s leaden arrow gave rise to short-lived, lustful, sensual passion.

That there are different types of love, the virtuous and the lustful, the one lasting and the other transient, is accepted by neurophysiologists and psychologists. The brain and the hormonal endocrine system have been studied, as has the biochemical and radiological effect of the two types of arrow. Cupid’s arrows now are made neither of gold nor of lead, but by visual images and, above all, by a whiff of pheromones or scent.

We are attracted by those in whom we can see something of ourselves, or of our opposite parent, or of some other role-forming adult figure of our childhood. It may be that only one part of the woman’s body (in the case of a man) can sharpen the arrow so that it penetrates. Nearly all people of both sexes, even if they don’t admit it, suffer from a degree of partialism — a sexual preference for a particular part of the body of a future mate.

The pheromones are produced by the modified sweat glands around the nipples, groin, genitalia and under the arm. They are also present in the cheeks, eyelids, ears, temple and scalp, where they secrete a less obvious smell.

Recent research indicates that tears also contain pheromones. The romantic novelist’s idea of the tough hero’s resolve melting when the woman cries may not have represented any change in his hard heart: perhaps the smell of the tears merely stimulated those parts of the brain — the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the dorsal caudate body and caudate tail — that, according to the science writer Michael Gross, are activated during those first lustful stages of love in someone genetically or environmentally conditioned to succumb.

These changes in the brain, demonstrated in MRI studies, disappear once the lustful, romantic stage has waned. Indeed, a rejected ex-lover has a quite different batch of brain responses — areas associated with obsessive compulsive behaviour, controlled anger and pain are activated, hence the observation that rejection can superficially heighten love and alter its nature.

When people fall in love, the MRI changes are accompanied by changes in blood serotonin levels that mirror those found in people with obsessional states. At the same time, levels of the hormones cortisol FSH and testosterone rise. Surprisingly, the rate at which testosterone rises in lovestruck women is greater than in men, in whom there may even be a slight fall. The level of another chemical messenger, nerve growth factor (NGF), also rises in the blood of those who are “in love”.

The biochemical results suggest that a leaden arrow falls out between 12 and 24 months after Cupid has struck. The hormonal changes and increase in NGF disappear and levels return to normal.

Luckily for those hit by a golden arrow, the second stage of attachment is tipped with oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone” associated with female orgasms, delivery and lactation. This stays at a higher level so long as the second stage of partnership lasts.

working up the nerve

Decisions, decisions: do I share this factoid at tomorrow's Toastmasters meeting or not?

Sex helps calm nerves before public speaking
Full sexual intercourse offers the best results, psychologist says
Updated: 2:53 p.m. ET Jan. 25, 2006
LONDON - Forget pretending you are talking to one person or concentrating on a single point in the audience — having sex is good way to calm nerves before giving a speech or presentation.

But Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley in Scotland, said it has to be full sexual intercourse to get the best results.

He studied nearly 50 men and women who recorded their sexual activities for two weeks and analyzed its impact on their blood pressure levels when under acute stress, such as when giving a speech.

Brody discovered that the volunteers who had sexual intercourse were the least stressed and had blood pressure levels that returned to normal more quickly than people who engaged in other types of sex.

But people who had abstained from sex had the highest blood pressure response to stress.

Even after taking into account stress due to work or other factors, the range of responses to stress were best explained by sexual behavior.

“The effects are not attributable simply to the short-term relief afforded by orgasm but rather, endure for at least a week,” Brody told New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.

He believes that the release of the so-called “pair bonding” hormone oxytocin might explain the calming effect.