The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction by Larry Young

The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction by Larry Young

Author:Larry Young [Young, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Human Sexuality, Science, Life Sciences, Neuroscience, Interpersonal Relations
ISBN: 9781101595282
Google: fHL6gnCqfooC
Amazon: 1591846617
Publisher: Current
Published: 2012-09-13T04:00:00+00:00


THE GIRLFRIEND CHEMICAL

For those species in which it exists, monogamy is important—even for, and sometimes especially for, males. The male angler fish, a deep-sea denizen, takes monogamy very seriously. Anglers live so far under the surface that light is virtually shut out of their world. So these fish have evolved a lantern, a little bioluminescent bulb-on-a-pole they use to attract prey, and, perhaps, to find each other. Even with the aid of the lantern, though, it can be tough to find a mate that far down. So when they stumble upon a female, male anglers form an actual, not just metaphorical, bond. They bite into her, fuse blood vessels, and then dissolve away until the males exist mainly as a hypothalamus and sack of testicles attached to a female’s body.

Female anglers aren’t as loyal. They can be found wearing several sets of testicles, like so many trophies. Don’t feel sorry for the male, though. He’s gotten what he wanted most, evolutionarily speaking. Every time the female spawns, he’ll produce some offspring, dropping into the angler population whatever genes made him select this lifestyle. The primordial angler males whose brains weren’t organized to pursue this extreme monogamy were unlikely to produce many offspring at all, given the environment. As a result, those bachelor genes have largely faded away from the gene pool. That’s how natural selection works. Behaviors adapt to environments to produce the most surviving offspring.

In 1993, James Winslow, Sue Carter, Thomas Insel, and others announced they’d discovered that vasopressin activity in the brain played a role in mammalian monogamy. They had conducted a series of experiments with prairie voles. Before mating with a female, the males happily associated with other voles of both genders. If a strange virgin male arrived in another virgin male’s cage, the two would sniff and investigate each other, and that would be the end of it. All that changed once the males mated, however. They developed a partner preference for the female they’d mated with, and then started attacking any strange vole who came into the cage.

Vasopressin wasn’t as obvious a candidate for a role in bonding as oxytocin: science already knew that oxytocin was involved in affiliative behavior. By the time the Winslow experiments were over, though, the scientists had proved that brain vasopressin, which is released in males’ brains during mating, not only was involved in their postmating behaviors, but the male prairie voles wouldn’t do the behaviors without it. If vasopressin was blocked, they didn’t form a partner preference even if they mated. Without vasopressin, males have very poor social memory. And while they would mate if vasopressin was blocked, they wouldn’t act aggressively toward other males afterward.

They also found that if they infused vasopressin into a male’s brain while he was with a female for just a few hours—without mating—he would prefer to be with that female over others, even if she ignored him. Subsequent research showed that mating, and then living with a female, physically changed the male brain, increasing the density of vasopressin-emitting nerves and reorganizing the nucleus accumbens.



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