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Possible Love Molecule?
aychamo writes "Psychiatrists from Pavia University have associated early romantic love with a biochemical known as nerve growth factor (NGF). Apparently, levels of NGF in the bloodstream were significantly higher in subjects who were in the early stages of romance than individuals not in a relationship. Interestingly, "subjects in love who--after 12-24 months--maintained the same relationship but were no longer in the same mental state to which they had referred during the initial evaluation" did not have elevated NGF levels."
repeat after me, "Correlation does not imply causality".
Usually I don't have to reduce my threshold so low to find this comment. It's always there. Anytime science is performed that deals in correlation, someone has to make this comment.
Unfortunately, to me it just makes me feel like you don't understand what correlation is. Of course it doesn't show causality. So it's useless? Give me an area of science that doesn't use correlation ever, and I'll show you an area of science that's so obvious it's not interesting.
I really have never understood the mentality that anything which cannot be directly observed should be ignored. Science is a game of inches (despite the media's best efforts) and "breakthroughs" are rare, as they fundamentally require something that is both fully observable (maybe indirectly by a new technology) and something which was previously not understood at all.
What's wrong with a study that finds that there is a relationship between X and Y and should be studied further? If this is useless, the government is paying for a lot of pointless research in Inferential Statistics.
funny, researchers have known for years about oxytonin (sp?) and elevated levels of that during hte first year or so of a relationship. it is also released during orgasm and childbirth (to help endear the child to it's mother suposedly). or so i've read.
as far as NGF...i'd much prefer a new girlfriend.
That's absolutely fabulous. Now they can develop an antidote and add it to the drinking water like fourine...
Being an interested layman, I don't want to read junk science anymore than you, a scientist, want the public to be dog-ignorant. Slashdot is Slashdot, it's arse for trustworthy info, but often interesting for comments. Rather than trying to reform the incorrigible, why not get together with a few other like minded scientists and start publishing your own competitor Slashdot-style blog of "genuinely interesting but real and undistorted science news"? I'm sure there's plenty of it out there to be told.
Is there an opposite effect like a NGF killer protein responsible for modulating behavior in humans in the absence of love? Does that mean that people going through divorce, love lost, heartbroken or the Thrill is Gone are equally biologically driven by some whigged-out molecule?