Continued from part 1
You may ask why this article attracted your
attention. Your healthy
curiosity brought you here. One of the reasons lies in your personal
relationships dissatisfaction. As people, we know so little about love itself.
Women
are much better about rich feelings they experience while being in love. I
fact, women feel at home with love and they easily explain their wonderful
sensations and feelings.
Sensations
are pleasant reactions from skin, lips and genitals during real body
stimulation (touch, caressing and sex arousal), remembered or imagined in
dreams.
Feelings
are our interpretation, explanation and understanding of pleasant or unpleasant
experience.
Men
in love very often do not understand what is going on with them. They fail to
explain the unexpected and sudden states and urges of erotic power, arousal, euphoria,
excitement, pleasure or feeling of comfort, when they think, imagine, dream or
remember about their woman – the object of their desire.
Sometimes,
when their beloved woman is not in their physical vicinity, all of a sudden,
they start experience panic or doubts about their worthiness. Jealousy
literally covers them and makes them create false pictures of their woman
sexual unfaithfulness with another man or even group of them. This makes men
miserable, angry or aggressive.
That
is why it is very useful to know about love from scientific research. Science
explains the origin of our biological states. The more we know and understand
about this wonderful state, called ‘love’, the better we feel and recognize
what is going on. Being in love makes us better and more natural. Love brings
us inexplicable wellness, strong desires and fantastic satisfaction of being
together with beloved person…
Scientific
knowledge enriches our intelligence, i.e. the skill of understanding facts,
states and events. With intelligence about the quality of our relationships, we
become the delicate feelings themselves.
We start understanding our partner better and loose our fear to express
our feelings of fondness, turning them into lovely words, compliments, caresses
and open affection.
The scientific tale of love begins innocently
enough, with voles. The prairie vole is
a sociable creature, one of the only 3% of mammal species that appear to form
monogamous relationships.
The prairie voles’
couple in love, forever…
Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous
24-hour effort. After this, they
bond for life. They prefer to spend time with each other, groom each other for
hours on end and nest together. They avoid meeting other potential mates.
The
male becomes an aggressive guard of the female. And when their pups are born,
they become affectionate and attentive parents.
However,
another vole, a close relative called the mountain vole, has no interest in
partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast
differences in behavior are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole
species are more than 99% alike, genetically.
Why do voles fall in love?
The details of what is going on — the vole
story, as it were — is a fascinating one. When
prairie voles have sex, two hormones called oxytocine and vasopressin are
released. If the release of these hormones is blocked, prairie-voles' sex becomes
a fleeting affair, like that normally enjoyed by their rakish mountain cousins.
Conversely,
if prairie voles are given an injection of the hormones, but prevented from
having sex, they will still form a preference for their chosen partner. In
other words, researchers can make prairie voles fall in love — or whatever the
vole equivalent of this is — with an injection.
A
clue to what is happening — and how these results might bear on the human
condition — was found when this magic juice was given to the mountain vole: it
made no difference.
It
turns out that the faithful prairie vole has receptors for oxytocine and
vasopressin in brain regions associated with reward and reinforcement, whereas
the mountain vole does not. The question is, do humans (another species in the
3% of allegedly monogamous mammals) have brains similar to prairie voles?
To
answer that question you need to dig a little deeper. As Larry Young, a
researcher into social attachment at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia,
explains, the brain has a reward system designed to make voles (and people and
other animals) do what they ought to.
Without
it, they might forget to eat, drink and have sex — with disastrous results.
That animals continue to do these things is because they make them feel good.
And they feel good because of the release of a chemical called dopamine into
the brain. Sure enough, when a female prairie vole mates, there is a 50%
increase in the level of dopamine in the reward centre of her brain.
Similarly,
when a male rat has sex it feels good to him because of the dopamine. He learns
that sex is enjoyable, and seeks out more of it based on how it happened the
first time.
But, in contrast to the prairie vole, at no time
do rats learn to associate sex with a particular female. Rats are not monogamous.
one-night-stand sex
partner
This is where the vasopressin and oxytocin come
in. They are involved in parts of the
brain that help to pick out the salient features used to identify individuals.
If the gene for oxytocin is knocked out of a mouse before birth, that mouse
will become a social amnesiac and have no memory of the other mice it meets.
The same is true if the vasopressin gene is knocked out.
Love physiology: Oxytocine and vasopressin effects. Oxytocine and vasopressin are small peptides that
have similar structures. They may have evolved from the same ancestral peptide
and thus are functionally and structurally interrelated. Both are involved in
social attachment formation, prosocial and reproductive behaviors, including
sexual and parental. They play a role in reward processes and may therefore be
associated with endogenous opioid and opiate signaling, i.e., morphine, since
this autoregulatory signaling system is crucial for attachment, pleasure
induction, response to separation and stress reduction
The salient feature in this case is odor. Rats, mice and voles recognize each other by smell.
Christie Fowler and her colleagues at Florida State University have found that
exposure to the opposite sex generates new nerve cells in the brains of prairie
voles — in particular in areas important to olfactory memory.
Could
it be that prairie voles form an olfactory “image” of their partners — the
rodent equivalent of remembering a personality — and this becomes linked with
pleasure?
Dr
Young and his colleagues suggest this idea in an article published in the
Journal of Comparative Neurology (Young et al., 2005) They argue that prairie
voles become addicted to each other through a process of sexual imprinting
mediated by odour. Furthermore, they suggest that the reward mechanism
involved in this addiction has probably evolved in a similar way in other
monogamous animals, humans included, to regulate pair-bonding in them as well.
To be continued…
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Scientific references
- Acher R. Molecular evolution of fish neurohypophysial hormones: neutral and selective evolutionary mechanisms. Gen Comp Endocrinol 1996; 102:157–72.
- Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, The neural basis of romantic love, NeuroReport 11:3829±3834, 2000.
- Larry J. Young, Anne Z. Murphy Young and Elizabeth A.D. Hammock. Anatomy and neurochemistry of the pair bond. Journal of Comparative Neurology. Volume 493, Issue 1, 5 December 2005, Pages: 51–57. Read the article on-line from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.20771/abstract
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