Near the end of the movie A Beautiful Mind, the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash decides he wants to stay off his medication and out of the hospital, despite experiencing incessant delusions. "If I can just think through this," he explains to his long-suffering wife, "I can make it better." She takes his hand and puts it against her head. "Maybe the part that knows the waking from the dream—maybe it isn't here," she says. She moves his hand down to her heart. "Maybe it's here."
It's an ancient trope, but a false one. Several decades from now, when TV watchers encounter A Beautiful Mind on a classic movies channel, the idea of love residing in the heart as opposed to the head will seem as absurd as bloodletting. That's because the physiological reality of love belongs no more to the heart than it does to the liver. Like all emotions, love originates in the brain as surely as brilliant mathematical theorems do. We feel the passions of love because our brains contain specific neurochemical systems that create those feelings in us. We are not torn between the heart and the brain but rather between different parts of the brain, parts that specialize in the cornerstones of rational thought, such as long-term planning, and parts that give our lives emotional color.
Scientists who study the brain have traditionally spent far more time exploring the neural pathways of negative emotional responses: On our current map of the mind, the regions of fear are clearly delineated. Not so the kingdom of love and attachment, which has been a vast terra incognita until recently. But a new portrait of love has begun to emerge, and at its center lies a fascinating hormone called oxytocin that may well follow in the footsteps of serotonin, which shot into the popular consciousness a dozen years ago as Prozac was introduced. We are entering an age of brain biochemistry that can grasp the undecipherable—love.
You Tarzan, Me Jane In March of 1998, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles named Shelley Taylor attended a guest lecture at the university's Westwood campus. The topic was stress and the fight-or-flight instinct, a subject she knew a thing or two about, having studied human stress response for 20 years. At one point in the lecture, the speaker told a story about the levels of aggression he had witnessed in laboratory rats placed in stressful situations. After they had been repeatedly shocked with an electrical charge, the rats began to bite and claw each other to death.
