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The Science of Love
Xyde writes "Economist.com has a story just in time for Valentine's day called 'The Science of Love'. Presumably the difference between love and lust is little more than a bunch of chemicals, which can be controlled with injections (in voles anyway). Quite an interesting read."
I don't know about you.. but you won't catch me going to any doctor asking for a love injection!
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The one day of the year where I am not the tarket market.
Love injection? No need. Attractiveness injection? Now there's a seller.
But don't all guys give love injections?
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
As Dr Fisher explains, "you can feel deep attachment for a long-term spouse, while you feel romantic love for someone else, while you feel the sex drive in situations unrelated to either partner." This independence means it is possible to love more than one person at a time, a situation that leads to jealousy, adultery and divorce--though also to the possibilities of promiscuity and polygamy, with the likelihood of extra children, and thus a bigger stake in the genetic future, that those behaviours bring. As Dr Fisher observes, "We were not built to be happy but to reproduce."
Ah, that explains politics in Utah.
Injections cause love? This is great news! Finally I can love my abductor, Conner, who's keeping me in his basement.
Its amazing how research these days has such a superb sense of timing.
------
I believe in freedom of thought. I have no other choice.
Found in fortune file.
Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the sky's so blue
And I will tell you why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine
Phototropism makes ivy twine
Rayleigh Scattering makes sky so blue
Sexual hormones are why I love you.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How long before some conservative mad scientist :) releases a retrovirus which makes us all pair-bond for life, inescapably? If I were still with my first love, I'd have to fucking kill myself now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, this axiom holds...
Attraction = Lust + i*Love
Lust is the "real" part, and "Love" is the imaginary part.
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
an enamored vole following me around?
KFG
I remember back at school when I studied economics, the textbook claimed the definition to be: The study of human behaviour. I suppose that people being in love, that it affects their behaviour.. means that it falls into the definition of economics.. that and the extend to which valentines day is now just a market driven spend spend spend event.
...have to be administered directly to the cardiac muscle? If so, that would explain Cupid's strange behavior.
Me: "Boss, please don't send my job to India."
[Poke!]
Boss: "Oww! What was that?.....Don't worry darling, you are safe with me."
Table-ized A.I.
Ok you get your Spouse a love injection but how does that tie there love to you? :/
Imagine waking up one morning only to find shes ran off with the milkman!
I rather see an article on the science of casual sex.
(i am not trolling i don't think)
Are you one of the 80% of men who has a lower than average ability to get your partner to fall in love? Well boy do we have a product for you! Liagra! With Liagra you can finally get both your secretary and your wife to love you and each other!! only 6 easy payments of $49.95!
i wonder how long before we see this
wait, i thought beer was already invented.
~To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. -Yann Martel
Well, there are sites such as fastseduction.com that provide guides that are based upon the premise that lust and love are remarkably similar and can be installed in people by using using certain patterns of behavior. Click, whirr, anyone?
I have two eyes, I have two feet.
...Is the ink they print money with.
Here is a key empirical observation from the article: Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for life.... However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike, genetically.
Imagine the implications for churches if it turns out that fidelity is based on genetic propensities rather than moral choice. On the other hand, if the concept of "original sin" is to be believed, perhaps that is what they have been saying all along.
A: A sixpack.
"Alcohol: Helping men get sex for thousands of years."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm not sure I'd draw the same conclusions as the author here. They start off by saying that sex will enduce certain chemicals which will in turn help to cause a feeling of lust or love in the voles. Then they go on to say if they inject certain chemicals in voles, it will cause them to "fall in love". But people (believe it or not) often fall in love sometimes without having sex. In other words, their thoughts produce the chemicals, which obviously is opposite of saying the chemicals produce the thoughts. It's a which comes first, the chicken or the egg problem. I think injecting chemicals in people would produce the euphoric state they mention in the article, but there needs to be thought processes along side of that to produce love.
I'm probably missing something here from their logic. Please correct me if so. Thanks.
But this might be going a little too far. Love is one of those things that I'm comfortable not understanding - and uncomfortable understanding.
Call me crazy...but I'm happy knowing that I love my fiancee, and thinking that it's because of her humor/mannerisms/beauty/etc.
Chicks dig my good /. karma.
for some people, particularly women. Interesting to note that the article mentions oxytocin as one of the chemicals that promotes person to person binding... yet they fail to mention breast-feeding.
Mothers who advocate breast feeding often say that it's a bonding experience for them and their baby... perhaps they're more right than they know, since Oxytocin is released in the human body by nipple stimulation.
If Oxytocin truly promotes interpersonal bonding in people, that opens up all kinds of interesting avenues of research.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I'd suggest reading about the economy of orgasms as well.
Science is wonderful, isn't it?
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Yeah, right...
These ain't scientists. They're researchers in the marketing department. I fell for your female attracting hormone scents in the back of magazines years ago. And all I got for it was a rash and had to bathe myself in tomato sauce to remove the stink. And, by the way, if you ever had to rub yourself all over with tomato sauce for hours, you will discover true love. Trust me on that one...
Now, it's off to the grocery store. I see my pantry is running low on Hunt's again.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Why is it that whenever neurologists discover some section of the brain or chemical that causes physiological condition X to come about, they seem to automatically assume that they have found the actual CAUSE of Condition X? Maybe I'm just silly, but I can't so blindly accept that brain in such an easily-mapped organic machine.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
if you've got endless cash, and the ability to purchase medical devices and pharmaceuticals without a presciption then you're golden.
However, I should point out that most pharmacies will NOT sell syringes, needles, and a bag of Pitocin to you (Pitocin is synthetic Oxytocin). In fact, I think they'd be quite skittish if they found out you were planning on using them on your hot date...
Besides, without any research to reference, do you know how much oxytocin to give? 1000 Units? 10000 Units? Do you know where and how to administer it (IM, SQ, SC, IV)? Can you adminster it to a woman without being charged with assault/battery? How many dates are going to let you shoot them up with some random drug? (well, OK... I guess there are some of those women out there, but you don't want one of them falling in love with you...)
*sigh* I wasn't going to say it, but you could just use the time-honored (and poor man's) method of producing oxytocin... in a word: foreplay.
This discussion can now officially go nowhere but downhill...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Breast milk kegger at my place, bring leather pants and an open mind. Later, Vitamin D
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I can think of no misinterpretation of the biological sciences more dangerous than the notion that propensity is choice.
Human beings - especially though perhaps not uniquely - through self-reflection have the capacity to choose actions contrary to our biological propensities and inclinations.
You are not a slave to your genetic and biological predispositions and inclinations.
To be a self is to constitute in one's mind and through one's actions what it is to be an individual person.
It is the drive to dignify, love, and exude - to be - this inner self, this individual person, by which propensity and inclination are overcome.
I didn't used to believe in love, I always equated it as basically what this story is trying to get people to believe - "love" was just biology fucking with us to get us to breed. There was nothing else behind it. Then, I met the love of my life and that little world-view got tossed on its ear. There /is/ something "else" behind real love, and I cannot dare to hope to explain it to those who had never experienced it. It wasn't just lust! It was well beyond sexual, even from the start. I was more then merely smitten with her personality, I became addicted to her very being. I wished to know everything about her, and began to care more about her then myself. Its easy to think we love only to be loved, that as with biology everything is essentially selfish - but I'd sacrifce it all for her on the drop of the hat. Love must be real because I can see two distinct periods in my life, before her and after, and who I am now bears little to nothing in common with who I was before. Shes challenged me to my very core, my long held assumptions questioned- everyting is different. She is my one, and not because being apart may drive me nuts. I felt, this will sound corny, "complete" with her. It all came full circle. I'm sure there is plenty of biology involved in all of this, we are biological creatures, but science can never explain the human soul. Its much more then just our minds, or our ego.