Love And Science

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For one of my grad projects, I wished to investigate the subject of love, in particular its relationship to science.

Love is a universal emotion that is often easy to experience yet extremely difficult to fully comprehend and explain. It’s complexity and ability to influence and control behaviour is beyond the rationality of the human mind. Love can be felt on numerous levels, ranging from generic pleasure to interpersonal attachment such as romantic love, sexual love, familial love, and platonic love.

Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist has dedicated over 30 years of study to the biology of love and attraction. Dr. Fisher believes that romantic love is the most fascinating and phenomenal out of the numerous forms of love. The proof for this is ubiquitous. Romantic love has the capability of inflicting paradoxical behaviour on human beings; when in love, an individual can feel sheer joy in one instance and undiminishing sadness the next. Even with the instability of emotions and agony that comes with being in love, human beings can never stop themselves from loving. Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies around the world, yet its secrets remain locked deep within the human soul. It was not up until the leap into the study of the human brain did scientists begin to ever so slightly understand human emotions and make progress in demystifying the feeling of love.

The human brain, the centre of the nervous system, is composed of a network of neurons where its function can be summarized in one word: survival. The brain controls all the other parts of the human body, making it the most complex and intriguing of all the organs. It only makes sense that love originates within the brain. It was with the advent of neuroscience that began to form a relationship between the intangible enigmas of love with the tangible bodies of science. Though seemingly contrasting entities, love and science have been proven to have close ties. Science, always associated with the coldness of facts and figures has made the breakthrough of making the irrational feeling of love somewhat transparent.

The question I wished to investigate was what can the structure and design of the brain tell us about the nature of love?

Although the feeling of love is unique to every individual who experiences it and the behaviour is provokes often seems beyond reasoning, the chemical process that occurs in the human brain that manifests this feeling is similar in all human beings. With the aid of science, love can be rationalized. As such, understanding the neuroscience behind love will help human beings engage in a more fulfilling romantic experience.

The final piece of this project is in the form of a publication where all the content was self-generated. The structure it took was in the form of science experiments. Different situations that couples often experience when in a relationship are presented and analyzed from a scientific perspective, outlining the possible neurological systems associated with various behaviours.