Kathleen A. reviewed Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love on + 17 more book reviews
Helen Fisher's "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love" is a broad and somewhat convoluted look at love which includes biological lust, romantic love, and attachment. Although touted to be a look at romantic love from the perspective of fRMI images of the brains of lovers, most of the book is Ms. Fisher's musings on the topic and quotes from fiction, history, and poetry. She includes several hypothesis on the evolutionary reasons for observed biological phenomenon regarding our levels of dopamine and testosterone and our preferences for certain characteristics in our mates with no science to prove or disprove these conclusions.
Sifting through the book looking for actual facts and results, I found twenty five pages buried in the middle of the book that include the scientific facts of the study itself. Ms. Fisher's team selected subjects who they believed to be "in love" based on their answers to several questionaires, including a survey called the "Passionate Love Scale". They then fmRI scanned the brains of these subjects while they were looking at photos of their beloved. The results showed that the part of the brain that produces dopamine (the vental tegmental area VTA) was highly excited. Also excited was the part of the brain that manages and seeks pleasure. Fisher hypothesized that dopamine from the VTA was delivered to this pleasure center, the tail of the caudate nucleus in the brain.
Based on these findings, Fisher proved her hypothesis that romantic love is driven by dopamine levels and also proved the hypothesis of a colleague, Art Aron, who believed that romantic love was not an emotion, but a motivation system in the brain. The excitation of the caudate nucleus provides a pleasurable reward experience to those who are in romantic love, driving them to think about and to seek the attention of the beloved and to get pleasure from this. Romantic love is therefore a human mating drive that is an inherited drive (like hunger or thirst) not controlled by the subject and is independent of drives of sexual desire or lust, or emotions, which are controlled in other parts of the brain and by other chemicals than dopamine.
This experiment included subjects from the U.S. and Japan with an average age of 18.5 years. They reported a mean duration of being "in love" of seven months. Fisher points out that another similar study done in London that was completed about the same time used an older group of subjects and found the duration of being in love to be longer and included additional parts of the brain. It can be inferred from this that the biological experience of romantic love can be affected by the age and maturity of the subjects.
Fisher also reports there are some significant differences in the other parts of the brain that were involved between the male and the female subjects.
I would recommend this to anyone looking for scientific facts on the topic of romantic love. Just don't expect to find a lot of them here. They are on pages 51-76 to be exact. The remaining 275 pages are mostly opinions on sex drive and lust that are drawn from literature, anthropological evolutionary hypothesis, and historical quotes. There is an occasional mention of other studies on these other topics.
Sifting through the book looking for actual facts and results, I found twenty five pages buried in the middle of the book that include the scientific facts of the study itself. Ms. Fisher's team selected subjects who they believed to be "in love" based on their answers to several questionaires, including a survey called the "Passionate Love Scale". They then fmRI scanned the brains of these subjects while they were looking at photos of their beloved. The results showed that the part of the brain that produces dopamine (the vental tegmental area VTA) was highly excited. Also excited was the part of the brain that manages and seeks pleasure. Fisher hypothesized that dopamine from the VTA was delivered to this pleasure center, the tail of the caudate nucleus in the brain.
Based on these findings, Fisher proved her hypothesis that romantic love is driven by dopamine levels and also proved the hypothesis of a colleague, Art Aron, who believed that romantic love was not an emotion, but a motivation system in the brain. The excitation of the caudate nucleus provides a pleasurable reward experience to those who are in romantic love, driving them to think about and to seek the attention of the beloved and to get pleasure from this. Romantic love is therefore a human mating drive that is an inherited drive (like hunger or thirst) not controlled by the subject and is independent of drives of sexual desire or lust, or emotions, which are controlled in other parts of the brain and by other chemicals than dopamine.
This experiment included subjects from the U.S. and Japan with an average age of 18.5 years. They reported a mean duration of being "in love" of seven months. Fisher points out that another similar study done in London that was completed about the same time used an older group of subjects and found the duration of being in love to be longer and included additional parts of the brain. It can be inferred from this that the biological experience of romantic love can be affected by the age and maturity of the subjects.
Fisher also reports there are some significant differences in the other parts of the brain that were involved between the male and the female subjects.
I would recommend this to anyone looking for scientific facts on the topic of romantic love. Just don't expect to find a lot of them here. They are on pages 51-76 to be exact. The remaining 275 pages are mostly opinions on sex drive and lust that are drawn from literature, anthropological evolutionary hypothesis, and historical quotes. There is an occasional mention of other studies on these other topics.
