By A.J. Jacobs
How do I love thee? I love thee with serotonin produced by my raphe Nuclei. I love thee with testosterone receptors deep in my hypothalamus. I love thee with dopamine that floods my primitive lizard brain.
Actually, I hope I love my wife with all my major brain parts — but who knows? The truth is, I don't know how I love her. That's the whole point of today's experiment. We'll see.
Right now, I'm stuck inside a whirring, clunking MRI machine at New York University. Six inches above my nose hovers an image of my smiling wife wearing a black spaghetti-strap dress. (Yes, that one.)
In the adjoining room, two respected scientists are clicking computer keys and watching streams of data flow out of my skull and into their terminals. I stare at Julie's smile. I think about the most romantic moments in our courtship: kissing in the rain on West Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. The first time I reached over to hold Julie's hand — it was during a twee Irish film called Waking Ned Divine — and the joy I felt when she squeezed it back. The gondola ride in Venice. (Really? Gondola? says one part of my brain. So clichéd. No, responds another, stay on task.) "Okay, the romance phase is done," says one of the scientists. "Are you ready for sex?"
I think I love my wife. At least most of the time. (Not counting when she makes me go see Henry Jaglom movies.) But what does that mean — I love my wife? And how does my love stack up against other husbands'? For the first time in the history of human mating, scientists may have found a way to pin down this most ethereal of emotions. We're on the verge of dissecting this butterfly.
A handful of researchers, armed with MRIs, have begun to sift out the chemical mix that makes up love. "Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural," says Helen Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers who is one of the world's leading researchers on brain chemistry and sexual relationships and half of the team of scientists poking through my cranium. "We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love."
It's a controversial notion, that love can be reduced to a chemical cocktail. It gives conniptions to the Foucault types who see love as socially constructed.
Just think of the implications: If love is simply chemicals, doesn't that change its meaning? And how soon before we create a scientifically valid love potion? (Already under study, by the way.) What about a love vaccine to help us from falling for the wrong person? And if you have to rely on chemical enhancements, do you get an asterisk next to your name in the book of love, like Barry Bonds?
I've volunteered to be a guinea pig for two of the field's pioneers. In the past five years, Fisher and her research partner, neuroscientist Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, have put forty-nine crazy-in-love people into MRI machines to study their brains. I'm number fifty. But I'm the first not to be in the crazy-in-love, head-over-heels phase. I'm the first average married Joe they've ever studied.
When I told friends and family I was trying to scientifically assess my love for Julie, they all had the same response: "No good can come of this."
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