Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (64 page)

15
Dopamine and norepinephrine, two natural brain stimulants (
neurochemicals
) found in mammals and birds, may underlie romantic love. Research shows that sexual behavior and elevated dopamine and norepinephrine go hand in hand among many animals. Both neurotransmitters produce exhilaration, increased energy and activity, increased focused attention, prolonged motivation, and goal-oriented behavior (like pursuit of a mating partner). Lovers’ obsessive thoughts may be due to decreased brain levels of serotonin. See Fisher,
Why We Love
, p. 55.

16
This is not the same as mature adult love. Mature adult love is also focused on the partner as a separate person, but involves caring in ways that benefit the loved one.

17
The anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex are where your emotions, attention, and working memory interact. They enable you to become aware of your own emotional states, such as happy feelings. They are also where you assess other people’s feelings during social interactions. You make split-second assessments about what things mean. Your insular cortex collects data about your body, both external (touch and temperature), and internal (pain, gut reactions, and viscera). It’s involved in the cognitive and visceral aspects of processing your emotions, such as “butterflies in the stomach,” or your heart pounding. See Fisher,
Why We Love
, p. 73.

18
Bartels & Zeki (2004). Romantic love and friendship both activate the medial insula, anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus, and putamen. Gazing at pictures of lovers and friends deactivates your posterior cingulated gyrus, amygdala, right prefrontal, parietal and middle temporal cortices, posterior cingulate gyrus, and medial prefrontal cortex. Your amygdala is more active when viewing friends than a loved partner. Men and women have the same activation and deactivation patterns. Deactivation of the amygdala is noteworthy because
it mediates emotional learning, and activity in it correlates with fear, sadness, and aggression. Other research suggests happiness correlates with deactivations in the right prefrontal and bilateral parietal and temporal cortices. Romantic love and friendship involve a unique network of interconnected areas, a functionally specialized brain system underlying two of humankind’s richest experiences. Studies of sexual arousal find different patterns of activation in adjacent regions. See Bartels & Zeki (2000).

19
Drives have several distinct characteristics: They are tenacious and difficult to control, they focus on a specific reward, and they aren’t associated with a particular facial expression (as are emotions). They may also be associated with elevated brain dopamine levels (Pfaff, 1999).

20
Fisher,
Why We Love
, p. xiii.

21
A survey of 168 cultures found direct evidence of romantic love in 87 percent of them. See Jankowiak & Fisher (1992).

22
See Fisher (1998) and Diamond (2003, 2004) for elaboration of sexual desire, romantic love, and attachment as three separate but interactive systems. This conceptualization, and the extensive research behind it, has far-reaching implications. First, it explains why romantic love and attachment don’t necessarily produce sexual desire, and conversely, why sexual desire may not involve romantic love or lead to attachment. Second, this suggests attachment-based psychotherapy is likely to be ineffective at increasing sexual desire, which is consistent with research findings of MacPhee (1995). Third, it provides a non-pathological explanation of same-sex attraction and gay and lesbian relationships. Also see Gonzaga et al. (2006).

23
Scientists have identified the areas of the brain involved when you look at erotic video material. These include your anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, insula and occipitotemporal cortices, as well as your amygdala, ventral striatum and hypothalamus. See Arnow et al. (2002) and Karama et al. (2002).

24
Romance also promotes sexual desire because dopamine and norepinephrine can trigger increased testosterone. Increased testosterone can increase dopamine and norepinephrine and suppress serotonin. See Fabre-Nys (1998), Hull et al. (1999), and Jones, Dunphy, Milsted, & Ely (1998). As in many other species, elevated dopamine increases sexual arousal and sexual behavior in men and women. See Coleman et al. (1999), Heaton (2000), and Herbert (1996).

25
The complex relationships between hormones and neurotransmitters are still being discovered. Dopamine and norepinephrine can contribute to attachment by increasing oxytocin and vasopressin. But increased oxytocin (found in both men and women) can also reduce dopamine and norepinephrine. See Galfi et al. (2001) and Kovacs et al. (1990). Men with high testosterone marry
less frequently, divorce more often, and have more affairs. Moreover, a man’s testosterone levels rise as his marriage unravels, and further increases with divorce. Conversely, his testosterone declines as he becomes more attached, especially with the birth of a child, and even from just holding a baby. See Berg & Wynne-Edwards (2001); also Booth & Dabbs (1993). Increased testosterone reduces vasopressin and oxytocin, and vasopressin can decrease levels of testosterone. However, under some circumstances, testosterone elevates vasopressin and oxytocin and increases attachment behaviors. Likewise, oxytocin and vasopressin can increase testosterone production. See Arsenijevic & Tribollet (1998); Deville, Mansour, & Ferris (1996); Homeida & Khalafalla (1990); Thomas, Kim, & Amico (1996a); and Thomas, Kim, & Amico (1996b).

26
Fisher,
Why We Love
, p. 92.

27
Your testosterone, oxytocin, vasopressin, sexual desire, and “self” are all mutually interactive.

28
See Denis de Rougemont’s
Love in the Western World
(1983) for an elegant analysis.

29
Paul MacLean, evolutionary neuroanatomist and senior research scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, proposed that your brain is comprised of three distinct sub-brains, each a product of a different stage in human evolution. The oldest is your
reptilian
brain (top portion of your spinal cord at the base of your brain), which controls breathing, swallowing, heartbeat, visual tracking, and startle response. The second part is your
limbic
brain, which sits on top of your spinal cord in the center of your skull (it includes your hippocampus, fornix, amygdala, septum, cingulate gyrus, perirhinal, and parahippocampal regions). You share the first part in common with reptiles, and the second with other mammals. Your
neocortex
is the last part of the human brain to evolve; it’s the largest of the three, and it surrounds the other two parts. Other mammals like dogs, cats, and monkeys have a neocortex, but yours is huge by comparison. All three parts of your brain interact, and are not as distinct or functionally separate as this “triune brain” sounds. Murray Bowen, who created differentiation theory, knew MacLean personally and was greatly influenced by his work. From the outset, differentiation theory looked at emotions as physical processes that affect the brain and not just as subjective experiences. This is why the Crucible® Approach, developed thirty years ago, fits well with emerging neuroscience and lends itself to neuroplastic training, which I discuss in Part Four. See MacLean (1990).

30
The left inferior frontal cortex and anterior cingulate.

31
The medial prefrontal cortex.

32
Just to be clear, your “self” is not in a single location in your brain. The physical underpinnings of your self involve an ever-changing cascade of physical processes distributed throughout diverse portions of brain matter.

33
In
Wider Than the Sky
, Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman proposes our conscious “self” is dynamically and continually constructed from bodily cues. (Scientists refer to this as our “immunological self,” what our immune system identifies as belonging to our own body.) See Edelman (2004).

34
Edelman writes: “The dynamic core [self], whose activities are enriched though learning, continues throughout life to be influenced by new processes of categorization, connected to what might be termed the bodily self” (p. 74). See p. 79 for depiction of causal chains between the world, your body, and your brain that affect your dynamic core self (primary consciousness and primitive sense of self).

35
“Primary consciousness is the state of being mentally aware of things in the world, of having mental images in the present. It is possessed not only by humans, but also by animals lacking semantic or linguistic capabilities, whose brain organization is nevertheless similar to ours. Primary consciousness is not accompanied by any sense of a socially defined self with a concept of a past or future. It exists primarily in the remembered present” (Edelman, p. 9).

36
Do dogs and birds have higher-order consciousness? Edelman (2004) believes primary consciousness appeared in vertebrates at the transition between reptiles and birds and the transition between reptiles and mammals. In
Wild Justice
, Bekoff and Pierce (2009) argue that animals feel empathy for each other, treat one another fairly, cooperate toward common goals, help each other out of trouble, and have morality. Now that we know parrots can dance, they obviously have rhythm, but do they have soul? (Patel et al., 2009.)

37
Brain researcher Antonio Damasio hypothesizes how your mental self builds on your brain mapping the state of your body. “This machinery included pathways that transmit chemical signals from the internal milieu, through bloodstream, directly to brain regions such as the area postrema [which controls vomiting] or the hypothalamus; and the neural signal from the viscera and muscles that are conveyed by nerve fibres to the brain regions in the spinal cord and bloodstream. Within the brain itself, dedicated pathways signal this body-related information to certain sectors of the thalamus (a nucleus known as VMPo), and to the cerebral cortex (a sector of the insula). The integration of such signals constructs composite and dynamic maps of the body’s state from moment to moment.” See Damasio (2003), p. 227.

38
According to Eldeman, “Through the complex shifting states of the dynamic core [self], these interactions underlie the unitary property of conscious states, as well as the shifting diversity of these states over time. Because the earliest interactions involve bodily inputs from centers of the brain concerned with value systems, motor areas, and regions involved in emotional responses, the core process are always centered around a self that serves as a reference for memory.
In primary consciousness, this self exists in a remembered present, reflecting the integration of a scene around a small interval of time” (Edelman, p. 77).

39
“… higher-order consciousness involves the ability to be conscious of being conscious, and it allows the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts and affections. It is accompanied by the ability in the waking state explicitly to create past episodes and to form future intentions. At a minimal level, it requires semantic ability, that is, the assignment of meaning to a symbol. In its most developed form, it requires linguistic ability, that is, the mastery of a whole system of symbols, and a grammar. Higher primates, to some minimal degree, are assumed to have it, and in its most developed form it is distinctive of humans. Both cases require an internal ability to deal with tokens or symbols” (Edelman, p. 9).

40
To understand how consciousness is
not
reducible to simple neural correlates, see Hurley & Noe (2003). Gerald Edelman says it simply: “No two socially defined selves (necessarily socially defined in a speech community) will ever have identical brain states” (Edelman, p. 137).

41
Stern (1985) and Siegel, D. J. (2001).

42
Your self is “the genetic and immunological identity of an individual… [that] refers to characteristic inputs from an individual body related to its history and value systems. In its most developed form, seen in higher-order consciousness, it is a social self related to interactions within a speech community” (Edelman, p. 175).

43
Hurley & Noe (2003).

44
As humans differentiated from other primates, each step brought us closer to the complex sense of self that infuses human sexual desire and shapes human evolution. This is evident in major differences between sexual habits of humans and gorillas. First, the hallmark of human sexuality is private couplings, whereas gorillas copulate in public. Secondly, female gorillas readily join a harem, but human women rarely do. Power struggles commonly surface within human harems. Finally, human pair-bonds are more short-lived than those of gorillas. Gorillas mate for life; people tend to switch partners.

45
According to archeologist Richard Klein of Stanford University, representational art, figurines, and jewelry (reflecting more advanced language and working memory) didn’t appear until 50,000 year ago. But representational art is probably not a good marker for the earliest emergence of the complex human self. Complex consciousness (something above primary consciousness) emerged much earlier than that. See Begley (2007b).

46
It’s probably not accurate to talk about emergence of the complex human self as if it popped out at one point in history and then remained from then on. Scientists believe evolutionary advances showed up at different points in time but then died out and reappeared again at some point in the future. It’s likely some
individuals lived out their existence being the only ones in their community who had a complex self. This occurred at different times in the dim past until complex consciousness became a dominant trait.

47
Begley (2007b).

48
In
The Birth of the Mind
, Gary Marcus gives a remarkable explanation of how a relatively small number of highly communicative genes produced the complex human brain with staggering innate powers of self-organization and reorganization. However, archeologist Timothy Taylor fleshes out the other side of the story in
The Prehistory of Sex
. He writes: “The human ability to learn presupposes a mind that can be changed, a mind that can make certain choices. The development of such a mind, to be sure, may have been enabled by the development of particular genes…But the emergence of that mind put an end to most of the determinism of the other genes. That is, although one may have ‘an instinct’ to do something, one may choose to do the opposite.” Taylor (1996), p. 85. See also Marcus (2004).