Boffins are poring over brain scans of people in, out of, and never touched by the mysterious force we call love. But what on earth do they hope to learn?
"She was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness and knew that this was love… Never before, not even in dreams… had she felt anything remotely like this." The romantic heroine experiencing this unprecedented surge of emotion is, of course, Linda Radlett, the irresistible heroine of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love. The chap she has fallen for is a “short, stocky, very dark Frenchman in a black Homburg hat” who picked her up at the Gare du Nord, where she was sitting on a suitcase and weeping. He is also, as it turns out, a very rich duke – though she doesn’t find that out until she has been very thoroughly seduced by him.
That “strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness” is something to which a great many of us devote an unconscionable amount of time. If we are not hoping for it, or wondering if we are actually feeling it, we are mourning the end of it. When young, one thinks of little else, even if its object changes almost every week. And while we may fall in love less frequently as we grow older, the intensity of the feeling – not to mention the inexplicable randomness of the people we fall in love with – does not diminish in the slightest. Or so I find.
Love is, as Linda Radlett discovered, a feeling both unmistakable and unaccountable. It is not just lust, or intellectual compatibility, or admiration of beauty, or amusement. All these are involved, but you can feel some or all of them for someone, and still not be in love with them.
Acres of paper and lakes of ink have been devoted to anatomising love. “When it comes, will it come without warning/Just as I’m picking my nose?” speculated W H Auden in his lyric O Tell Me The Truth About Love. But according to the distinctly unromantic-sounding publication Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, it isn’t poets but scientists who can tell us the truth about love.
At the University of Science and Technology of China in Heifei, Professor Xiaochu Zhang and his researchers rounded up a collection of men and women who said they were in love, along with some who had fallen out of love and a third group who had never been in love (poor souls!) and put them in an MRI scanner. The resulting scans apparently demonstrated “evidence of love-related alterations in the architecture of the brain”with a dozen areas of the organ involved. These included, as you might have guessed, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction and the amygdala. The caudate nucleus, meanwhile, takes special responsibility for the endings of love affairs.
I am not sure how much it would have helped, the last time I got the heave-ho, to know that my heart wasn’t broken – it was just my caudate nucleus giving me gyp. Equally, I can’t see Professor Zhang’s intriguing revelations making much difference to my feelings for the current custodian of my heart. An MRI scan might show that it was just my amygdala taking a canter around the paddock – but I feel quite fond of the old boy, all the same.
That there are practical applications for the Heifei findings I don’t doubt – though I wonder what they might be: love potions? Pre-nuptial scanning to reduce the incidence of divorce? The possibilities seem endless. But while the ingenious researchers at Heifei work out how to cash-in on their findings, it strikes me that cads, bounders, love rats, flibbertigibbets and anyone else keen to romantically disencumber themselves will find their work invaluable. As a formula for an irrevocable brush-off, “It’s not you, it’s my dorsal anterior cingulate cortex” sounds so much more impressively terminal than any of the unscientific alternatives.
Jane Shilling http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11473899/Scientists-not-poets-can-tell-you-the-truth-about-love.html
