14 DAY TRIAL // Neuroscientist Larry Young believes he may have found the answer to a millennia-old question – what is love? In a paper published recently in the journal Nature, the Emory University Yerkes National Primate Research Center scientist analyzed the responses of prairie voles, small mammals that are monogamous, to various chemicals and concluded that even human love is a “biochemical chain of events.” With this knowledge, Young says that a theoretical love potion is in the making, as is a potential love antidote.
Oxytocin is one of the main hormones involved in generating feelings of love, especially in females, says Young, who adds that prairie voles artificially injected with large quantities of the stuff were very likely to become strongly attached to the first male they encountered. In the case of males, larger amounts of vasopressin triggered bonding and nesting effects. Naturally, these occur in the little mammals soon after mating, as they do in humans.
Young now believes he can extrapolate the results he obtained on voles to humans, and potentially create potions that would make the consumer fall in love with the first person he or she encounters. All that the “cocktail” would do, he says, would be to trigger a biochemical chain of events that would make the one who drinks it convinced that the other person is the one for him or her.
Conversely, an anti-love vaccine could also be invented, by reversing the principles that lead to the creation of the love elixir in the first place. “It would be completely unethical to give the drug to someone else, but if you’re in a marriage and want to maintain that relationship, you might take a little booster shot yourself every now and then. Even now it’s not such a far-out possibility that you could use drugs in conjunction with marital therapy,” the researcher says.
In addition, a milder form of the drug could be used to endow schizophrenics and autistics with more social skills, in order to help them better integrate in society and avoid them becoming a burden for others.
“If we give an oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95 percent of other mammal species. They will not bond no matter how many times they mate with a male or how hard he tries to bond. They mate, it feels really good and they move on if another male comes along. If love is similarly biochemically based, you should in theory be able to suppress it in a similar way,” Young concludes.