Love in the age of neuroscience

How do I love thee?
In the age of neuroscience, we may still count the ways, but can we still say, “I love thee from the bottom of my heart?”
Neuroscience says love is not an emotion oozing from the heart but a cranial activity caused by neural firings in the brain. A network of neurons in the brain, so it goes, is being activated when people are in love. Using brain scanners, neuroscientists can see which type of biochemical is being transmitted to which area of the brain when one is in the throes of love or any other emotion.
For example, in romantic love, one study says, the hypothalamus, a part of the brain near the base, is specifically activated and pushes out chemicals like testosterone and other sex hormones that arouse the libido. The hypothalamus is not activated in feelings of parental love.
The saying that love is blind has a biological basis. When we fall in love, the study says, a part of the neural networks associated with social judgment is deactivated. That explains why we can’t see the faults of the one we love and makes us prone to end up choosing the wrong person for a life partner.
We can see the flaws only after our initial ardor has cooled down, allowing previously suppressed brain areas to awaken to reality.
Knowing from neuroscience that our feelings are brain-based, isn’t it but logical to say, “I love thee from the recesses of my brain?” or “my brain tells me ...” instead of “my heart tells me that I love you?”
Funny?
The dawning of neuroscience has disturbed not only our traditional belief about love but also about the soul and, yes, about God.
If we were to believe neuroscience, our soul is not separate from our flesh, but a product of cerebral activity. Neuroscience has reduced the long-held concept of the soul as a separate entity from the body to an inseparable body-and-mind dualism.
This is because neuroscience is enamored with a methodology known as physicalism in probing the existence of everything: anything that can’t be proven empirically or consistently repeated in lab tests does not exist.
So aside from dismissing the existence of the soul, neuroscience also does not believe in the reality of paranormal phenomena and near-death experiences outside our cranium.
That goes true with God – and with life after death.
Neuroscience, which started as a study of the nervous system to find cures for mental illnesses or disorders, has made its foray into the turf of faith.
The challenge was loudly articulated by erstwhile unknown neuroscientist Sam Harris, whose books “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian nation,” brought for him instant fame. Along with Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion,” Harris blames religion for much of the world’s violence and considers our belief in God as another superstition.
Neuroscience disputes claims about religious visions, including reported encounters with the Supreme Being, Jesus and angels by those who have had near-death experiences, as nothing but illusions created in the brain.
Neuroscience stumbled on this hypothesis after finding out that people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy are prone to have religious visions or paranormal experiences.
Science in general has changed much of our worldview about religion since astrophysics has proven Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolves around the sun. Though most of us still believe in God, quite a number of us have ceased to believe in the Bible’s version that He created the world in six days.
Darwin’s theory of evolution makes us believe that we share a common ancestry with the apes. Einstein’s theory of relativity has bequeathed to us our relativist values, although the great physicist couldn’t have intended his theory to create ripples that would disturb many aspects of our lives.
Nowadays, with the aid of genetics and neuroscience, neo-Darwinists are trying to shake our faith in God with claims that man’s intelligence is not a divine gift but a by-product of man’s evolution – the cells in our brains have evolved into a more complex organ as our intelligence adapts to environmental pressures in a process called natural selection.
This has become the atheists’ response to suggestions by some theist scientists that many people see religious visions in near-death experiences because a “God gene” has been hard-wired in the human brain.
Science’s awesome discoveries have given atheists a powerful fodder to relegate religion among our superstitious beliefs and spin science into a sort of a new god that could unravel the mysteries of life and the universe, although science has its own downsides.
Despite its tremendous successes, science has many shortcomings that follow in every discovery it makes.
In the field of cosmology, it has been stuck in the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, which scientists believe provide the invisible glue to keep the universe from falling apart. Science has discovered black holes but fails to explain why the black holes are there or what their role is in the whole cosmic scheme.
Neuroscience itself is bugged by the problem of qualla, people’s subjective experiences. One of the most enigmatic problems which neuroscience is trying to solve is how we perceive colors of physical objects. Is color an intangible characteristic of an object or does it exist only in the mind?
The problem is inherent in physicalism as a method of inquiry which neuroscientists could not abandon, understandably because doing so will open the doors to the field of metaphysics, which they abhor.
With this dilemma, I would rather want neuroscience to continue its search for remedies to people’s neurological disorders, instead of poking its nose into life’s mysteries such as the nature of love and a kiss.
I may acquiescence to its finding that human emotions are brain-based, but I digress if it probes the nature of a kiss and comes up with a conclusion that it is nothing but an exchange of saliva – and, yes, germs.
So, how do I love thee? I still like to hear Elizabeth Barrett Browning count the ways in her “Sonnet XLIII, From the Portuguese,” from which I borrowed the opening line of this article. Not born in the age of neuroscience, she talks about the soul, God’s grace and life after death.


Author's note:
I wrote this article as part of my assignment in an online course in creative writing I took with the Writers Bureau in London. This article was later published by the Business Mirror in Manila on September 5, 2007. Subsequently it become part of my book "The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays" which is on sale at amazon.com and Barnes and Nobles.

I decided to post this to fill the gap since my last previous post about a week ago. I was writing a blog on Susan Blackmore, a well-known psychologist who studied paranormal phenomena which she later abandoned after almost rhree decades of investigation. Unfortunately the blog, which I tried writing in between my free time, was erased while I was erasing her essays from which I based the blog.

I hope you enjoyed reading "Love in the age of neuroscience."