Prairie Voles Again!
I do hope that we are all properly appreciative of the scientific contribution of these cute little creatures. I mentioned them in one of my Valentine’s Day posts, but you will find a picture and an accompanying story here.
Thomas Insel’s group at the National Institute of Mental Heath in Bethesda have spent years working on pair formation and partner preference in these little fur balls.
It seems that pouring dopamine into a region of their brains known as the nucleus accumbens makes male prairie voles seek out girlfriends. There are at least seven major subgroups of dopamine receptors. But in these little creatures D2 receptors are involved in approach behavior that is associated with the formation of a pair-bond, and D1 receptors maintain the bond. While forming a relationship the little vole’s brain actually changes.
I am always a bit worried about trying to read too much into these experiments, because human behavior really is a great deal more complicated. But I have a couple of thoughts:
1. Dopamine receptors are proteins, so they are products of genes that get switched on by the formation of a relationship. Might some people have a genetic reason for having difficulties in relationship formation, and how would that play with environmental factors? You may well know some people who seem cold and uninterested in relationships, and indeed, there are some personality disorders in which people have chronic difficulties in forming relationships. Yet certain types of psychological therapy can help them.
2. Some antipsychotic medications block D2 receptors. Is that a further explanation for the relationship difficulties of some people receiving these medicines?
3. I think that we should thank the Prairie Vole Kingdom for their help…..
Technorati tags: relationships, dopamine, love, science of love
Love, Sex and Cupid’s Chemicals?
1. Lust: This is supposed to be driven by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen and happens together with rises in the nerve growth factor (NGF). So the idea is that we learn to enjoy lust. I don’t think that we needed millions of dollars of research to tell us that!
2. Attraction: This is the phase when we are supposed to be thinking of nothing else but the new significant other, and even reduce our need for food and sleep. The NGF is still lurking around here, but now there are supposed to be other chemicals coming into the picture: Serotonin, that makes us feel good; Dopamine, that is involved with emotion and the important facility of salience: deciding what is important in the environment; and norepinephrine, that cranks up our metabolism and also gets involved in the formation of memories and behavioral responses.
3. Attachment: This is supposed to be what happens after the initial stage of attraction, if a relationship is going to last. This is said to be mediated by the hormones vasopressin, which is involved in memory and fluid balance, and oxytocin, that is produced during childbirth and during breast feeding, and is thought to be involved in cementing a bond between mother and child. Oxytocin is also released during sexual orgasm, so it has been thought that oxytocin is the reason why having a lot of sex brings a couple closer.
1. Yes, there is a chemical contribution to many of our experiences, but it is a contributor, and not the explanation for them
2. We have huge amounts of data to prove that our emotional and psychological reactions cannot be reduced to chemicals alone. There is a human mystery that is way beyond such reductionist notions
3. These chemical studies will eventually need to include not just our subjective experiences, but also the role of other individuals: our relationships
4. None of the studies is yet ready to deal with the subtle systems that pervade our world. Let me ask you a question: Have you ever had an intimate partner who drained your energy and another who flooded it with positive energy? That’s pretty good evidence!
5. Have you ever felt that you had a soul connection to your partner? If you have, you know that it cannot be reduced to chemicals. It affects every part of your being.
Addendum: CNN has just published a similar article: please click here to read it.
Technorati tags: love, science of love,
Sit and Smell the Roses
“O, my love’s like a red red rose That’s newly sprung in June.”
–Robert Burns (Scottish Poet, 1759-1796)
Just in time for Valentine’s day, comes some research from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, that may have important implications for many people. Researchers discovered that the sensitivity to the smell of roses was greater in people sitting than in those who were lying down.
This is consistent with other research that has found that many of our senses are less acute when we lie down. It is not simply that when we lie down our noses are less exposed to wind drafts carrying odors, it is likely part of a complex series of partial shut downs of the senses that take place as we prepare for sleep.
There are two messages from this research:
1. Most brain imaging studies are done when people are lying down in a scanner, so when we are doing experiments involving the senses, we may need to rethink that, and see if we can re-arrange things so that subjects can be seated.
2. If you are planning on scattering rose petals, or giving someone special a bouquet of roses, perhaps you should wait until they have got out of bed…..
Stressful Marriages Can be Damaging to Your Health
There is an extremely interesting article in the month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, which was picked up by the media that examined how marital stress effects healing.
Most people now accept that the mind has powerful effects on the body, though as recently as the 1970s this was still regarded as rank heresy by many in the medical community. This new study is important for our understanding of the relationship between stress and physical health, and gives us further insights into how we can help ourselves stay well.
The study was done at Ohio State University and examines 42 married couples. Each person was given small skin lesions, and the startling finding was that in hostile couples, the wounds healed 60% more slowly than they did in non-hostile couples. The investigators even identified an inflammatory mediator called interleukin-6 (IL-6), as the biochemical link between hostility and slow wound healing. IL-6 levels are linked to long-term inflammation, which is in turn implicated in a number of illnesses, including diabetes mellitus, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.
A thirty-minute disagreement with a spouse could push back wound healing for 24 hours. The skin is the largest organ in the body and is exquisitely sensitive to stress: just thing of blushing and getting zits when under stress. So it is difficult to extrapolate from these findings in the skin, to try and predict what would happen with healing of internal organs. But we do have enough information already to say the following:
1. Allowing yourself to become involved in an argument may have long-term physical effects on you.
2. Some years ago I worked with a group of fine people who did just one thing that I did not like: they were wedded to the idea that it is a really good idea to vent your feelings. They would go as far as allowing patients to hit walls and other inanimate objects. I was never keen on this, feeling that expressing a lot of negative emotion could be counter-productive. After a patient broke bones in his hand after striking the wall, I quietly put an end to the practice. This new research indicates that I was correct to do so.
3. If you are going to have surgery, it is a good idea to be in a calm and peaceful frame of mind.
4. Stress is often unpredictable so it is a really good idea to be engaged in some ongoing stress management practice, so that you are better able to deal with the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Shakespeare put it over four hundred years ago. Clearly this doesn’t mean that you have to walk around like a burned out hippy on Quaaludes. Unless you really want to…. The best techniques that I know of for dealing with stress are the Sixty Second Peace Technique, Qigong and Yoga Breathing. If you have your own method, then stick with it. Otherwise you may want to check out some of the materials that I have written and recorded.
