thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
what ancient night does a man touch with his senses?
Pablo Neruda created the italicized verses above and below (they are from his One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1960). Neruda – the Chilean poet who could make a thousand angels converge on the tip of his pen to flutter with his inked phrases, rendering them indelible in the slate of our minds. When I come across scientific findings on what happens to us when we do "unscientific" things like love, he always hovers in my mind, serenading me while meandering through my chambers of logic. So I "invited" him to "run through" this particular science column with me. Besides, what woman, in science or elsewhere, could resist a river of Neruda?
Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, a known expert on what happens to us neurologically when we fall in love, recently teamed up with Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Their work appeared in the Journal of Neurophysiology last May 31. They investigated what happens to the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) or blood flow in the brain of people who were "in a few weeks or months of new love." They looked at a total of 2,500 images of 17 students. They found out, quite to their surprise, that with "new love," the brain got excited in parts called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area which the experts say are associated with our more primal yearnings such as hunger and thirst. And like good neighbors, these chambers regularly "talk" to each other and are dense with cells that regularly release and receive "dopamine," a natural brain chemical that is the life of the neural party when we engage in activities that have to do with desiring or expecting a reward. In fact, the experts noted that these parts even get more excited when a "reward" actually registers in our gray pleasure domes. Does the blood force of new love stop in its path there?
Loving is a journey with water and stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.
The experts say that according to the scans, "as a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment." This was again a bit surprising to the scientists who somehow first thought that "romantic" or "new love" has more to do neurologically with "excitement" or "emotion" such as "affection" (the domain of the brain’s "amygdala") that seems to augur well later for "long-term attachment." But apparently not quite, since the blood in some cases, ran from the hunger chambers to neural nests for long, deep commitments.
Another recent study published in the June 10 issue of Science could shed a bit of light on the biological basis for "long-term attachments" of males to a single partner or to nurturing offspring, that is, if you are a prairie vole which is more of cousin to Stuart, the mouse than to Willy, your stereotypical human Y. Emory University’s Dr. Elizabeth A. D. Hammock and Dr. Larry J. Young have been studying this "fidelity gene" for sometime now (a De Rerum Natura column over a year ago entitled "Only You: An Interview with Fides and Fidel" featured a similar study by a veteran scientist Dr. Lowell Getz of the University of Illinois.) They found that chromosome No. 2 in voles harbors a DNA section, the length of which controls a gene which is the gene for the vasopressin receptor. Vasopressin is a hormone released in the pituitary glands that according to studies on voles, make them monogamous. The longer the DNA section (there are 17 length variations in voles and 19 in humans), the more manifestations of monogamy the male voles seem to exhibit. Again, before June brides begin charging to medical clinics to bring their new grooms to ensure monogamy, experts caution that this hormone’s role in the monogamous choice in humans is yet unknown. Besides, I think there are more sublime ways, other than molecular, to keep your human partners interested. Take it from our poet who seems to have been far ahead again of scientists, understanding that love’s "journey" (note: not a "drive-thru") is a timeless sauntering to quench a primal thirst – "with water" – and to uncover mysteries you can experience but cannot fully grasp – "and stars." A scientific study on the electrical "talk" between the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area to signal "new love" may appeal to the huddled chambers of our logical mind; it may even drop a note of gratitude by the wayside to vasopressin. But when it comes to love alive, notions of "neural charges" are neutralized by our poet’s "clash of lightning bolts" and we feel instead that we are charging toward "smothered air and abrupt storms of flour" even with the knowledge that we are hormonally "adulterated" with something as medically sounding as vasopressin. Poetry always calms the science of love silent and sears it in a fuller understanding.
Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight
"New love," our neurological experts’ study claims, even when couched in the same neural chamber as "hunger," is distinct from "sexual arousal" that we ordinarily also treat as a "hunger." But there is a blur, I think, when this romantic hunger is fleshed out to be met. In real loving lives, it is not merely our conjoined caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental area that venture into the beloved with a single delivery of blood flow to light up a brain scan. The neursoscientists also know this. They cautioned people from taking this study and wholly applying it in their real love lives which are naturally, as tangled with our other body parts, with the world and with others as it is neurologically. When we love, we naturally explore the physical and metaphorical "borders, rivers and tiny villages" of the beloved and ourselves. MRI "cannot read people’s minds" and "a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics" as MRI. And just as any traveler moving across infinities of lovescapes, we leave not just a shot of blood but pieces of ourselves, in each other. So what happens after "new love" settles? Neruda’s sonnet ends this way:
runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is no more than a flash in the night.
I could never sail through a river of science-writing on a topic such as romantic love without the complementing current of poetry. The Blue Grotto by the side of the Island of Capri is a cave that is filled with seawater made so by the eons long of natural battering of the island by the sea currents. I remember it because of its physical beauty and its natural history. But I also remember it because of the one I sailed it with and because of the folk love song sung by the Italian sailor who rowed our canoe. I think when the river of pure intellect and dainty experimental methods meets the wave of sublime and meaningful art, we should not miss a beautiful chance to plunge into a richer, more connected understanding of ourselves and come out more aware of our fuller humanity.