Love is an emotion that everyone has felt at least once in their life, whether it was towards a family member, friend or significant other. Although it is a universal emotion, we each experience love differently. This makes love a very studied topic as the question of where love stems from or how feelings of love are formed are often asked. In Benedict Carey’s The Brain in Love, Carey focuses on the role that biology plays in the matter of attraction. The author argues that love is like being addicted to drugs as there is a biological role in love. Carey provides different studies on why he believes that romantic attraction is a biologically based human drive.
Throughout the text, Carey explains how biological factors account for the insanity of passionate love. He says that while lust is what makes humans initially attracted to others, the drive for romance is what allows us to focus on one person (Carey 400). An anthropologist named Hellen Fisher, who conducted many studies of the human brain stated that “What we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus on one person to the exclusion of all others” (Carey 401). Fisher’s conclusions from her studies support Carey’s idea that forming a romantic relationship is based on the drive for romance. Scientists conducted studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look into the brains of college students who were in the early stages of love. With these studies they found direct evidence that the “neural mechanisms of romantic attraction are distinct from those of sexual attraction and arousal” (Carey 400). In other words, they found that in the brain, romantic attraction works differently than arousal. Through this we can see that the brain differentiates the feelings of love and lust. Carey mentions a study conducted by Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki from University College London who took more than 3,000 brain scans of 18 college students who were recently in love. These scans showed that the brain has “high concentration of receptors for dopamine, the chemical messenger closely tied to states of euphoria, craving and addiction” (Carey 401). They then compared these scans to scans of people in different emotional states, such as sexual arousal, feelings of happiness and cocaine induced euphoria. They found that the patterns for romantic love were unique, but there was some proximity and overlaps between love and the other emotional states. These studies all support Carey’s idea that love has a biological basis as the brain produces higher concentrations of dopamine when in love.
Carey’s essay provides different studies that support his claim that love has a biological basis. These studies made me agree with his thesis as they provided statistics and drew conclusions that seemed plausible. I think Carey could have provided more evidence from other studies to even further support his thesis. Though the studies provided did help prove his point, if there was even more evidence, his claim would have been even stronger. The information presented in the essay helps us to better understand the concept of love. While some may think love is just an emotion that they can control, it is actually a biological process that occurs in the brain.
The ideas presented in this article can be seen in many literary texts. These ideas can also help us understand the actions of certain characters in readings showing us why they are making the decisions they make. For instance, in Mikhael Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time – Princess Mary, we meet Pechorin, a narcissistic womanizer who only cares about himself. Due to his narcissistic tendencies, Pechorin pursues Princess Mary, whom he has no interest in. Although Pechorin makes an effort to pursue Princess Mary, he is ultimately led back to Vera, his true love. Through his pursuance of Princess Mary we do not see much of Pechorin’s emotions, however once he realizes that Vera will be leaving far away with her husband he is thrown into a frenzy as he desperately tries to reach her. Once he realizes that he cannot reach Vera, he breaks down (Lermentov 158). Through this we see the depth of his love and for the first time his actions are not based off of his narcissism. As mentioned before in The Brain in Love, Benedict Carey states, “While lust makes our eye wander, they say, it’s the drive for romance that allows us to focus on one particular person, though we often can’t explain why” (400). This can be seen through Pechorin. Though it was his narcissism rather than lust that led him to pursue Mary, his love and biological drive for romance ultimately led him back to Vera. Although it seemed that he had his sight set on Princess Mary, the mechanism of love that is innately in humans causes him to see that he had a true romantic attraction towards Vera.
Although it is not widely known, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that feelings of love stem from biological processes in the brain. This is proved throughout Benedict Carey’s article. Carey provides different studies that show how our brain has biological factors that affect romantic attraction. This idea can also be seen in various literary texts which further proves its accuracy. Though we may think love and our emotions is something we can control, it is scientifically proven that romantic attraction is a biologically based human drive meaning we cannot control it.
Works Cited
Carey, Benedict. The Brain in Love. Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2002.
Lermontov, Mikhail. A Hero of Our Time. 1840.
