Philosophy of Mind

A Middlebury blog

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  1. Is love simply physical and can it be explained purely through the firing of neurons? Bartels and Zeki argue that love is the interaction of neurons firing along with the deactivation of certain brain areas. When we experience a “love” sensation, like when looking at a picture of a person we love, the reward centers of our brains light up. Interestingly, the brain regions known to promote negative emotions and social anxiety are deactivated. So we feel rewarded by love to further a relationship and increase connectedness, while our worries about social consequences dissolve.

    It is entirely possible that love can be explained physically. This reminds of a study I looked at last year – people who looked at pictures of an ex-romantic partner who had “dumped” them had a similar neurological experience to recovering cocaine addicts who looked at cocaine. When in love, we have this surge of oxytocin and vasopressin and we become accustomed to this heightened experience. When we have this taken away from us, it is understandable that it would be similar to having withdrawals from a drug.

    I was talking with a friend the other day about the difference between a best friend and a significant other. She brought up the point that a best friend may be your “person” that you go to for advice, but your significant other feels more like an extension of yourself. I suppose that this could be anecdotal evidence that maternal and romantic love are similar due to overlapping processes in the brain. What I wonder is how interest turns into lust that turns into love in romantic relationships, while a mother immediately feels love towards her infant. It makes me wonder how we do really “fall in love.” How does an initial lust turn into something life-long like a maternal love. Is it simply from the right activation and deactivation of brain areas, or is there something more? Perhaps it is as simple as that we get rewarded with oxytocin and dopamine to find a trustworthy, monogamous relationship for evolutionary needs. However, even if this is the case, as Drew pointed out – the feeling of falling in love is still magnificent and amazing even if we can reduce it to the physical.

  2. People say, “You are what you eat,” meaning that what you eat on a physical level affects your mental well-being. Many of us know that eating healthy can help us feel better and more energetic. In addition, exercising is good to keep us in a healthy state of mind through breath and stimulation. Maybe without noticing it, we already know that our bodies are important to take care of in order to be in a healthier state of mind. Visa-versa, if one is stressed, pimples on the face can appear on the body along with stress marks, ect. Through examples like these we can see that the mind and the body definitely affect each other. If they are affecting each other, they must be two separate things.

    Brain activity can be used as a mirror to mental activity, and visa-versa. Yet, mental activity cannot be only defined as unique “if and only if” statements, because the brain only has so many areas that can be activated, but can have many combinations of these activated areas. Therefore, categorizing mental states/physical states into individual chunks does not work. Our mental states build on top of each other, as do physical states. Therefore, certain traits of one mental state can be found in others if observed physically.

    Behaviorism states that we are only physical states, but I do not agree. We are composed of a trinity: the body, mind, and spirit. Mental states and physical states overlap, but they are not one.

    On the subject of romantic love and maternal love having similar neural activity:
    Since individuating mental states and physical states into separate chunks does not work, it makes sense that maternal love and romantic love activate similar brain reactions. Yet, love cannot be reduced to only a physical state, even though it partly is one. Because of evolution, we are attracted to the partner who we find most fitting physically to procreate with. Yet, many people do not only focus on their partner’s body. They also care about their partner’s beliefs, thoughts, and mental states. Thus, love stems from physical attraction and mental attraction, and activates both physical states and mental states that then mingle with each other in a dance of energy.

  3. Some poet, somewhere at some time said once, and then again and again, “Love is a drug.” Bartels and Zeki make that exact claim: that love creates a “push-pull mechanism” that intoxicates and addicts the human brain while also clouding it. They claim that what we call “love” is a neural-physical reaction to outside influences. This reaction releases hormones in our brain that encourage ‘reward,’ they make us feel good, and encourage whatever behavior caused them.

    As much as I would love to equate love to a larger-than-me phenomenon, written in the starts and what-not, I’ve definitely had experiences where love made me blind. There are certain relationships and actions where, retrospectively, I cannot provide ample reasonings for why I chose them, other than that I was in love. Under the influence. Irresponsible for my actions.

    The problem with reducing love to a physical reaction is that it removes free will from the equation, it implies that we don’t actually chose our lovers, or they us, but our bodies. The theory is consistent with the animalistic perspective, that the base of our being belongs in our body. The implications of the Bartels and Zeki study reach far beyond physical attraction all the way to free will and self identity. They reduce behavior to something completely physical, which is troublesome in a society where we believe in choice.

  4. Could complex emotional states ever be reduced to purely physical processes? The firing of neurons or the chemical signaling of hormones? Could something that feels so mental, something that transcends basic physical and biological motives, be explained with the help of simple electrochemical signaling processes taking place through a neuronal network?

    The research conducted by Bartels and Zeki attempt to go down this path, and shed quite some light on these questions. Using fMRI scans they measured brain activity in different regions to identify neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. This is an admirable path, and it is clearly born out of a desire to make light of the basis of love.

    During class discussion, I was particularly struck by how many agreed that explaining complex mental states and emotions in purely physical, biological terms- the idea that physical states control all mental states, or epiphenomenalism- is a highly disturbing and scary concept. I can see where most come from on this. However, I looked at it more from the point of view of inevitability. I honestly believe that, with our innate thirst for knowledge and our desire to have things explained, the human race will eventually come to a point where such mental states can be made sense of. The research, such as was conducted by Bartels and Zeki, is a step in that direction. But this direction of explaining things biologically seems to me to be the only research direction that actively provides us with evidence on which to base our claims and refine our theories. The relative success of the physical sciences ensures that. I think the very fact that this is the way most research into understanding this issue is going, would imply an inherent need/desire/acceptance of the fact that one day we will come to an answer, and that answer might very well be a purely physical, biological one. With that understanding, it turns, for me, into a rather more positive idea.

    However, for now, with our major lack of information in these regards, theories such as the Psychoneural Identity Theory sound more encouraging. The biological and neurological pathways and processes that are associated with love are not causing love- rather, together, they are identical to love. I also think, unnecessary compartmentalization of this concept to a few brain regions hinders our understanding. While Bartels and Zeki look at various neural processes associated with love- deactivation of networks that are used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, as well as the growing involvement of the reward circuitry- there are many elements of the brain and mental processes that are happening simultaneously. If we put together all these mental states and map out the various different ways in which love is expressed in terms of processes in the brain/body, we might then say that we have a strong case for defining love (and by extension, a path for explaining other mental states and emotions as well.. As it stands now, what Bartels and Zeki have accomplished by their research is an excellent first step (assuming this was the first step) into this direction of understanding by providing evidence. Whatever we believe, once we bring evidence into the picture, our beliefs must be rehashed. If we are to ultimately boil down love to something that is a purely physical process, we better have the evidence to back us up.

  5. Essentially, Bartels and Zeki attempt to show that feelings of romantic and maternal love can both be ascribed to the activation of certain overlapping regions in the brain. More specifically, they suggest that both types of love are correlated with the activation of pathways that are associated with reward, the inactivation of pathways that are associated with social assessment (and other ‘negative’ behaviors), and the production of the neurohormones oxytocin and vasopressin (which have both been implicated in previous pair bonding studies). Put together, these results seem to create a pretty convincing case for the psychoneural identity theory. After all, if certain unique brain areas consistently activate when patients are presented with pictures of those they love, it seems logical to conclude that those brain areas are (at the very least) critical for the proper functioning of the “love pathway.” Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and it would certainly be useful to examine patients in whom these “love centers” had been destroyed (to see if they were still able to fall in love), or to artificially activate the centers and see if that caused people to fall in love more easily. But, given the techniques that are available to us at this time (and given certain ethical standards) these data do seem to be fairly conclusive.

    In terms of my response to the findings, I’m very much of the opinion that emotional states can be attributed to physical phenomena (in other words, I agree with the authors). That said, I wonder what actually causes people to fall in love in the first place. In other words, it’s all well and good to say that certain centers are activated when people see a person that they are already in love with, but how does the body make that original decision? When I go from a state of not loving somebody to a state of loving somebody, what changes? And how does the body differentiate between girl A and girl B? I don’t fall in love with every girl I see, after all… what about the people I have loved has caused me to love them? Is it the body subconsciously deciding “yes, that girl will help me reproduce”? If so, what differentiates love from mere arousal? Evolutionarily, it makes sense to want to form a long-lasting connection with someone (given that babies need protection and have a better chance of surviving if they have two devoted parents)… so is the body somehow deciding that specific girls will serve this function better than others? I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. I’m going to carry on believing that psychological states are based strictly in physical phenomena (perhaps because that’s the kind of mindset I was exposed to most as a child), but it is still abundantly clear to me that we have a long way to go before this mindset can adequately explain itself. For me, the theory makes sense, but as long as feelings that are as fundamental as love can only be explained to the extent that this study explains them (which is to say, not very extensively), it seems that it will remain fundamentally flawed.

    P.S. I apologize if this is really bad or if it doesn’t make sense… I’m absolutely exhausted right now.

  6. Bartels and Zeki are claiming that the experience we call love is directly caused by neural activation and deactivation of a web of brain regions. They term this interaction a “push-pull mechanism” by which reward centers of the brain are activated while areas involved in negative emotions, avoidance behaviors, and social assessment are deactivated. This would cause an increase in trust and a decrease in critical judgment of others. Bartels and Zeki argue that this is an evolved network, that individuals who are rewarded by forming strong bonds with their romantic interests and children are more likely to survive and perpetuate their genes.

    I find their argument plausible. I think love can be reduced to a physical state. This research actually tracks well with numerous other studies in nonhuman mammals. The classic study involves polygamous voles that are given a viral vector to infect certain brain regions with more vasopressin receptors (the same receptors that are in the highly active areas of human brains). Once the voles have more vasopressin receptors they cease to be polyamorous and instead become monogamous with one other vole. While voles and humans are obviously far from identical, this is essentially the infection of as close to love as rodents can feel. It is not hard to conceive that a similar but much, much more complex system exists in humans (one that is modulated by thousands of other circuits).

    I think the initial objection many may feel to this idea revolves around the horror of such an amazing, transcendental experience such as love being reduced to simple neuronal firing. However, the ability to explain loves in neurological or evolutionary terms does nothing to reduce its wonder. The ability to understand light waves and how they strike the eye and are translated to the rest of the brain does not diminish the beauty of the sunrise or make it somehow less breathtaking. Explaining the mental processes that cause male penguins to starve themselves in the freezing cold for 65 days, cradling their egg and losing 45% of their body mass does not make their actions any less incredible. Explanations of natural phenomena need not reduce their beauty or marvel, and the ability to explain love with neural circuitry neither detracts from its value nor diminishes its stunning nature.

  7. Being an adamant supporter of Freud I find it easy to accept the notion that love is a physical state. However Bartels and Zeki still succeed in surprising me by revealing that romantic love and maternal love are of the same nature — or, in more scientific term, of the same mechanism. Their experiments find that both romantic and maternal love activate brain regions that release rewarding hormone and deactivate regions that are responsible for critical judgments of the other people. The deactivation of these regions explains why “love is blind.” Bartels and Zeki suggest that their theory fits well with the evolution scheme of nature, since both romantic and maternal love are essential to the preservation of species.

    I think it’s relatively easy to understand romantic (erotic) love, and maternal love as biological tools to help homo sapiens perpetuate their existence, so if these loves are biological, then they have to be physical. I wonder if people might raise that human beings are capable of some types of love that are different (or “higher than”) the biological ones, e.g., the love for God and fellow human beings. I’m curious if any scientist has tried to explain religious experience in terms of brain states? If not, why hasn’t anybody dared to do so? Does it mean we as human beings still want to keep parts of our experiences exempt from a scientific, or physical, explanations? That in the end we need to think of ourselves as something more than physical stuff, even though this need is irrational?

  8. While it is reasonable for Bartels and Zeki to search for possible neurobiological pathways responsible for maternal and romantic love, their study suggesting neural correlates of maternal and romantic love has its share of methodological shortcomings. Their study involves fMRI to observe activated brain regions and levels of oxytocin and vasopressin, neurohormones that shown to play important roles in maternal and pair bonding, in response to seeing images of their children, friends, family and strangers.However, I question whether love is truly being observed in the study as opposed to merely levels of attachment as well as familiarity and comfort towards each individual, which may be attributed to love or be considered different behavioral states altogether.

    How one defines love can vary greatly, and the feelings expressed and perceived by humans in the name of love can range a great deal as well. Which makes me come to believe that the model used to measure love are far too limiting, for it does not involve any interaction with the people represented by the images, and doesn’t take into account any potential nonvisual stimuli that could elicit reactions associated with love. Clearly, the emotions elicited in response to the photographs cannot replace those expressed when seeing the individuals in person. Nevertheless, Bartels and Zeki seem to be going the right direction by diverging from previous philosophical arguments that are devoid of any scientific inquiry and resemble pure speculation towards the origins of love. Though it may be easy to associate their approach with PNI, it seems to be leaning more towards causal interaction, especially given that the subjects had questionnaires to fill out following the fMRI scans, thus making a distinction between physical states (the activity observed in the brain regions) and mental states (what subjects perceive and associate each image with).

  9. Bartels and Zeki suggest that feelings of love – maternal and romantic love – can be associated with and explained by certain patterns of neural activities in the brain. In the test, mothers were presented pictures of their own and of acquainted children, and of their best friends and of acquainted adults. It is found that certain regions of the brain become active when participants were viewing photos of their own children and close friends. And each type of love – the maternal and romantic love – had specific areas of brain that became activated.

    While the test seems to prove that love can be explained by the activation of neurons in the brain, I do not think love can be reduced to merely physical state. Maternal and romantic love teach us to love even when we are not physically and emotionally in love. Love includes but is not limited to physical state and firing of neurons in our brain; it encompasses the concept of responsibility, commitment and keeping one’s promises, so that people continue to have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other. Take another example: I highly doubt if my parents would have any of those “love neurons” activated in their brains when they are in a big fight with each other. But I dare say that they still love each other very much at times like these because love is not defined by the constantly fluctuating emotions, feelings and physical states alone.

  10. In this study, Bartels and Zeki compare brain activity associated with maternal and romantic love. At the end of the paper, they propose that their results suggest that love is somehow brought about by a “push-pull mechanism”. They justify this claim by pointing to findings that suggest that people experiencing love show a deactivation of certain areas of the brain associated with negative emotion and increased activation of areas associated with reward.
    From this, we can definitely say that Bartels and Zeki are claiming there is a correlation between the feeling of love and certain neural activity patterns. I don’t know if it’s fair to assign them a single philosophical school of thought because it seems unlikely that they were thinking about philosophy of mind when drawing conclusions about their research, but I think that, if pressed, they would probably opt for theories of psychoneural identity or epiphenomenalism. This is mainly because I don’t see anything in their research that would lend itself to causal interactionism. Distinct brain and mental states that interrelate seem like an unnecessarily complex explanation for the findings of their study. Applying epiphenomenalism would not be out of the question, but I don’t see Bartels and Zeki arguing for a causal relationship anywhere in their paper. It may also be that I just don’t understand the theory well enough, but I think that if we are to accept mental and brain states as distinct, that feedback from mental states to physical brain states is a pretty essential aspect of love as we understand it. This leaves us with psychoneural identity theory and the question whether love can be reduced to a physical state. This idea may seem hard- hearted, but I don’t think this should be a barrier a full investigation of the theory as it relates to love. I think that the main problem with PNI here is that we have an extremely incomplete picture of what love is on a neural scale. If techniques were to advance to the point that this were possible it might not be unreasonable to accept mental states as identical to brain states. Until then, I still regard it as the most likely interpretation of the situation, and I think Bartels and Zeki would probably agree.

  11. What are Bartels and Zeki claiming about the relation between love and neural correlates? Can we reduce love to a physical state?

    I was looking through a couple of the other responses and someone compared ‘being in love’ to ‘being sick’. I think it is simply and nicely put. Sure, Bartels and Zeki make a strong claim about the relation between love and neural correlates. Through MRI imaging, they were able to show which brain regions were involved in love, and more specifically differences between maternal and romantic love. While they didn’t come out and say, “love is identical to neural correlates,” their results provide the psychoneural identity theory with sufficient support.
    But can we reduce love to a physical state? So then all love is are processes going on in our heads? I sure hope not! If we did, where would choice lie in this conundrum? Would we have a conscious choice of whom we loved and whom we fell in love with? With PNI, I guess we are assuming that love as a mental state is universal and that everyone who self-describes as “in love” is in the same mental state. But this can’t be. Like with ‘being sick,’ we may all say “I am feeling sick.” But my sick, is different then your sick. I will have different symptoms, and different symptoms will affect me differently, and I will perceive symptoms differently. The same goes for love. What I mean when I say/feel/experience love is surely not that same as everyone else’s. I think that love can be explained partially through neural correlates, but is not identical to them. Just think of defining love! It’s difficult right? Because for each of us, we have different emotions, thoughts, and memories that surface when we think of the word love. When people claim to be “in love,” most of the time when you ask them “what is it like? How do you know?,” they can’t even explain it! I think this just shows that love cannot just be reduced to a physical state only.

  12. Bartels and Zeki claims seem to correlate with the psycho neural identity theory, in that love is equal to neural correlates. They infer that the activation of certain regions of the brain, and release of certain hormones cause feels of love and attachment when triggered by images or certain stimuli of their loved ones. Ultimately, their article conveys that love can be reduced to a physical state.
    By the article reflecting the views of the psycho neural identity theory, and claiming that mental states are physical states, they are reducing humans to animals. The whole idea of loving someone with whom one shares a strong bond and chemistry, may be literally that. Could it be that we only fall in love with a person because they are able to activate a certain region in the brain? This makes the whole idea of love very arbitrary and rather like a math equation. The whole idea about ‘love makes us blind’ also follows from this. Love makes us blind, because it inhibits other regions in the brain that are capable of making moral decisions, and that are capable of producing negative emotions. Therefore, love is simply blind due to neurological causes and not due to any time of spiritual attachment.
    By love being reduced to a physical state, it raises the idea of the attachment that people have with God. It could either prove that God does not exist, or the idea of God could refute this argument. This study used pictures for the mothers to look at, which in turn activated certain regions of their brain. But if people can never really see God, then does this spiritual attachment exist? Or maybe certain rituals and holy items, books, statues have conditioned people to feel these attachments. The idea of attachment being a purely physical matter is further proven with certain scientists being able to create drugs that can suppress feelings of attachments in rats. This is hard to argue with.
    Finally, the idea of maternal attachment is very interesting. If humans emotions can be reduced neural interactions, then that means a mothers love is a purely programmed thing. Could it be that a mother feels the emotions of love towards her child due to an evolutionary model, where once she has a child certain neurons are then capable of being activated?
    Or all in all, could all of this research mean that mental states are simply equal to physical states? But, just because this might be true does not mean that we feel any less, and our emotions are not any less meaningful. Maybe they are what they are, and because we still experience them, the origin of them should not matter.

  13. In their article “Neural correlates of material and romantic love”, Bartels and Zeki conclude that both romantic and maternal love seem to be modulated by overlapping and unique areas of the brain. Their study looked at different brain regions activated in adults while looking at pictures of their children or of other kids to try to find which brain regions control this emotion. They compared this to a study done previously which looked at brain responses to romantic love. They also found high levels of vasopressin and oxytocin receptors in these brain regions, suggesting that they are also involved in the feeling of human attachment (vasopressin and oxytocin are known to be involved in maternal attachment and adult pair-bonding). The paper also discusses the intricacies of the brain regions, and explains how they are often involved in overlapping processes. For example, the periaqueductal gray (PAG), which has been shown to play a role in maternal attachment, has direct connections to the orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with positive emotions. The interconnected yet localized nature of the brain provides endless intricacies which makes it capable of allowing us each to experience our own realities and live our lives. I do think we can reduce love to a physical state. Our brains are so incredibly complex- there is still so much that we have yet to discover about how they work. I have no doubt that the vast amount of cellular connections and hormonal effects could produce the mental states we experience daily. We know (or are at least fairly certain) that this part of our body mediates our conscious and unconscious physiological responses to stimuli- what’s not to say that it also controls our emotions and mental states? I guess I think that if it is not our brains, what is it? As a neuroscience major, so far in this course I identify most with the Psychoneural Identity Theory. With the evidence we have today, it seems as though this is the most logical solution to the question of identity. However, I am highly aware that there is still so, so, so much that we do not know. So although I lean towards placing all my faith in the power of the brain, I will readily admit that I do not know enough to say for sure what defines our identity or our mental states.

  14. Bartels and Zeki make three main claims about the relation between love and neural correlates. First, they found that both maternal and romantic love activate specific regions of the brain that partially overlap with each other and with the brain’s reward circuitry. Next, the authors found that these activated brain sites are linked to the brain sites of oxytocin and vasopressin, two neurohormones that have been extensively implicated in pair bonding. Finally, the authors found that love and attachment deactivate brain areas implicated in negative emotions, avoidance behavior, and social assessment. Thus overall, Bartels and Zeki are making the claim that romantic and maternal love have clear ties to the activation and inhibition of certain brain regions as well as the release of specific chemical compounds.

    The idea of reducing love to a mere physical state is difficult to accept. We want to say that the special feelings we have for a significant other or newborn child are unique and transcend explanation. Yet if these feelings are so unique, why is it that almost every human has experienced them in a nearly identical form? We are all familiar with the joyous rush that accompanied a first kiss. That experience is extremely relatable because we’ve all experienced the very same feeling. It’s tempting to say that love is this supernatural and unquantifiable feeling, but the blissful attachment we feel in a new romantic relationship or towards a newborn child is simply nature’s way of ensuring the propagation of our species. The physical changes in our brains evolved through natural selection to allow pairs to most effectively raise their offspring and ensure the survival of their genes. Put another way, most human beings would say that mating behaviors and pair bonding in prairie voles are simply the product of physical changes in hormone levels. How could voles possibly feel something as complex as love? Yet, that idea implies that we as human beings are somehow fundamentally different and “above” every other organism.

    Still, there is an important distinction to make between the chemical “rush” of new love and the type of love that exists between family members or couples married for 50 years. Our attachment brain areas and chemicals aren’t going to remain constantly activated forever, and so love eventually becomes rooted in memories and experiences. Individual memories are notoriously hard to locate physically, and thus I would argue that there is a much stronger case for long term “memory” love being non-physical.

  15. Bartel and Zeki’s discussion of the neural basis underlying maternal and romantic love is compelling. The study essentially found that both types of love activate some of the same brain regions that are involved in the brain’s reward system and are rich in the neurohormones oxytocin and vasopressin, both of which are important to forming social bonds and attachment. At the same time, maternal and romantic love actually deactivate regions involved in negative emotions and social assessment/judgment of others (making us “blindly in love”). Furthermore, these mechanisms are adaptive in creating close bonds that are rewarding and central to our lives.

    Although I support the PNI theory most out of the various views we have addressed in class, I don’t believe that we can boil love down to solely physical reactions in the brain. To fully support the PNI theory, you’d have to support the idea that mental states and physical states are exactly the same—there is no element in one that cannot be found in the other, and both must contain all of the same elements because they are numerically identical (Leibniz’s Law). Similar to Bartel and Zeki’s article, I do believe that mental states have a strong neural basis, and the article proves this pretty well. However, there is something fundamentally missing in the PNI explanation, and that is qualia—what does it feel like to be in love? I don’t think physical states alone can explain this, because according to the PNI theory, there must be a widely applicable definition for the physical basis of the mental state one is undergoing. However, although this mental state may reflect itself in the same physical/neural state for everyone (ignoring the problem of unique correlation), not everyone will end up with the same exact mental state of love. Love is highly variable, and we all react to it and express ourselves in different ways as a result—one person’s feeling of love might be happy, while another’s might be afraid. To give an example of what I mean, a PNI theorist might say that “person X is in love if the substantia nigra [brain region involved with maternal and romantic love] is activated.” Ignoring the problem of unique correlation, let’s say love activates the substantia nigra in everyone, and thus there is a clear “diagnosis” of love. So everyone’s physical/neural state of love is the same. Yet, we all have different outputs of mental states—some people are excited, some repress the love, others run away from it. To me, this is evidence that the physical and mental states of love cannot possibly be identical. There is another aspect to this emotion, a qualia or experience, that is unique to each individual, and this cannot be explained just by chemical reactions. That being said, I do think that there is a strong correlation between physical and mental states, and that brain activity is a strong indicator of mental states (as Bartel and Zeki suggest)—however, it is not solely responsible for them.

  16. In their article on neural correlates of maternal and romantic love, Bartels and Zeki essentially find that the emotion “love” is a product of neurotransmitters being released throughout neural pathways in the human brain. The results of their study suggested that on a neurological level when someone is feeling love, the areas of the brain mediating negative emotions, avoidance behavior and social assessment are being deactivated, and the areas of the brain controlling mechanisms of reward are being triggered. The methods that these two scientists use seem to be very sound and consistent within this particular experiment. They evidence that they are choosing to present is trying to support the argument that what is happening behind the scenes when one is feeling emotions like love, is a simply the firing of neurons in the brain.

    As Bartels and Zeki state themselves in the conclusion of their article, “the results have brought us a little, but not much closer to understanding the neural basis of one of the most formidable instruments of evolution”, which is love. The experiments they do although reliable only provide a sliver of the evidence I would need to believe that love could be reduced to a purely physical state. With this in mind, what they do present is quite convincing. What my question is, is what makes up the rest of the emotion? I believe that it is something that is happening in the brain, we just do not know the specifics yet. The pathways in our brain are extremely complicated and differ from person to person, so this could provide explanation for the differences and variation that is found within the emotion of love. Although I do ultimately believe love can be reduced to a physical state, I think that the variations and specifics of the biological process are so intricate that we very well may never fully understand them.

  17. What are Bartels and Zeki claiming about the relationship between love and neural correlates?
    Can we really reduce love to a physical state?

    Bartels and Zeki use fMRI to measure brain activity in mothers while they view pictures of children they are related to in one way or another, whether their own children or acquainted with them. The controls used in the study were pictures of the mothers’ best friend and of other adults to whom they are acquainted. The researchers compared brain activity measured by fMRI from this study, specifically associated to maternal attachment, with data from a past experiment involving brain regions associated with romantic love. They found that areas of the brain established as being rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors and that coincide with the brain’s reward system were activated, associating specific regions with the attachment types. Therefore, Bartels and Zeki concluded that “strong emotional ties to another person inhibit not only negative emotions but also affect the network involved in making social judgments about that person” and that “attachment processes employ a push-pull mechanism”. They describe this mechanism as activating a “specific pathway of the reward system of the brain”. Coinciding with this activation, circuits that are linked with social assessment and negative emotions were deactivated.

    Due to Bartels and Zeki’s successful generation of a map of the regions of activation and deactivation during these tasks, one could propose that the mental state of “attachment” or feelings of connection is directly correlated with the neural regions identified. However, I believe that love cannot be reduced to activation in a specific brain region or a set combination of physical states. In my opinion, Bartels and Zeki were on the right path in claiming that attachment behavior can be mapped in the brain, but the general feeling of love is not as simple as just one mental state or feeling. Love involves trust, attachment, and many other “feelings” or states. Every person is not going to describe love as the exact same feeling. Each individual interprets the meaning of this word, “love”, to fit their own definition or concept. Due to one’s past experiences, the relationships of people surrounding them, media exposure, or what people are taught to believe about “love”, even physical events or states can vary in between two different people having the feeling of “love”.

    Although I do not disagree with Bartels and Zeki’s conclusions, I believe that some feelings or states are too complex to be pinpointed to specific neural activation or physical states. Attachment or trust can be defined more concretely, and could possibly be reduced to certain physical/neural states. The researchers in this study did, in fact, pinpoint their focus on romantic and maternal love, allowing a better biological association to be created between these behaviors and neural activity.

  18. Bertels and Zecki used brain imaging to observe which areas of the brain were activated when the subjects experiences feelings of love compared to normal feelings. There were several interesting points. First, maternal and romantic love activated many overlapping brain areas, but also had some areas specific to themselves. Many of these areas were also involved in other emotional circuits, including pleasure, attachment, reward, and empathy. There was also corresponding deactivation in other areas of the brain, including areas for social judgment, fear, and negative thinking. Last, there were also neurohormone released (ie oxytocin & vasopressin) that were involved in the brain responses. In the experiment, brain states (ie love) so seem to be reduced to biological and physical events.
    This does seem to support PNI, where every mental state is identical to a kind of neural state. However, there are a few possible issue as well. In this case, love involved the activation of many circuits involved in other mental states as well as the depression of others. I wonder if love is rather the sum of those more basic mental states/emotions, rather than an independent emotion in itself. In general, much of the brain work’s similarly, especially when dealing with emotional functions. Most mental states do have somewhat predictable patterns on average, but activation areas can vary and overlap with other functional areas. I wonder if a less exact interpretation of PNI would allow more room for this.
    In general, I do agree with the belief that mental states can be reduced to physical states. One of the biggest challenges to this argument seems to be the issue of qualia. The brain state itself tells nothing about the actual experience of, for example, the color red from a first person perspective. While science has not yet been able to explain exactly how this first person perspective comes from physical events, I do think it is possible. For my neuroscience class last semester I had to do a project on Holonomic Brain Theory. This was an attempt to explain consciousness through events at the cellular and atomic level in the brain. This theory has scientific support, but may very well be completely false. However, it (and other similar attempts to explain consciousness involving physics and neuroscience) do show the possibility to reduce mind to the physical and explain qualia. A hologram is any system that converts physical information into patterns of wave oscillation, from which the information can be retrieved (ie radio). Some experiments have shown that very small oscillation within dendritic field correspond to conscious thinking, and that certain brain circuits may store information in this way. Holograms have an important property. When “viewed” from the one correct pov, the information is retrieved correctly (ie in a visual hologram, the image will appear). In some holograms the image can be seen from other angles when retrieved from different “points of view.” However, from others povs, the information will appear to be merely oscillation patterns. In this case, qualia could merely be the access of this information from our own “correct” 1st person pov, while things like fMRI (although this wouldn’t measure these small oscillations) access the information from the “wrong” pov.

  19. What are Bartels and Zeki claiming about the relation between love and neural correlates? Can we reduce love to a physical state?

    In this study, Bartels and Zeki used fMRI’s to measure and assess brain activity in mothers. Showing participants pictures of their family and loved ones, and other adults and children they had various relationships with. As mothers reacted to the images they saw, Bartels and Zeki were able to see the specific areas of the brain that were active depending on the emotion they were feeling because of the relationship they had with the individual in the picture. They were most interested in the neural correlates and the distribution of “attachment -mediating neurohormones” when comparing activity specific to maternal and romantic love. Due to the nature of these relationships, they were interested specifically in the neurohormones vasopressin and oxytocin.

    Bartels and Zeki also analyzed the relationship of the reward circuitry in the brain and its connection to the activation of these relationship specific neural pathways. They found that strong attachment processes “employ a push-pull mechanism that activates a specific pathway of the reward system of the brain. At the same time, circuits that are responsible for critical social assessment and for negative emotions are deactivated.”
    While I found this article very informative and scientific, I would not say that Bartels and Zeki reduced love to a purely physical state. For me, like others have also said, this article exposed the complicated mechanisms that produced the physically and mentally demanding state that love and maternal care puts people in. I appreciated the analysis of the evolutionarily evolved motivations and purposes of these emotions.

    After going back and forth about my opinion on this article and the Psychoneural Identity Theory, I have concluded that every mental state and event does not have an identical neural state. I thought about how although identical physical symptoms may be present in all participants (dilating of pupils, quickening of heart rate, etc.) the experiences and relationships that cause these physical changes are so different from person to person. The personal interpretations, memories and experiences are so vital to forming the mental states that these participants experienced when they were shown the photos. If the mental states were identical to the neural events then I would think there would be much more consistency in the human race for how a person must feel in these states or how they must act when they are in proximity with these loved ones. Through my knowledge and observations, this just isn’t the case and therefore, I cannot claim that they are identical or could be reduced to that.

  20. It strikes me as extremely interesting that logic is used in the absence of quantitative data to determine the legitimacy of many of these theories of the mind. Kim eloquently walks us through the steps of attempting to prove and disprove different aspects and criticisms of the Psychoneural Identity Theory, which ultimately is an exercise in mind acrobatics, and we are left to believe what we chose to believe. In contrast to the purely logic-based approach, Bartels and Zeki try to provide evidence of correlation but step back somewhat from interpreting their results in a philosophical fashion. They determined that both romantic love and maternal love emotions are correlated by certain patterns of activation within the reward centers of the brain, and deactivation of other structures used for “critical assessment, ” where “subregions in the reward structures activated reveal a general, modality-independent network that is specialized to mediate attachment.” This is very much in accordance with the Psychoneural Theory, where these states ARE love. In a culture where love has been widely depicted as a being a magical force, evidence that essentially ‘pins down’ its neuronal circuits to those associated with rewards will not be enough to convince most people that there is only that one aspect to the emotion. How would we be able to distinguish the varying degrees of love, especially when comparing these human data to animals? If lab rats appear to be feeling love for their pups, is it not an act of evil to separate them from each other? I am a proponent of the Psychoneural Theory, but there is much more that needs to be explored and explained before it will be accepted by society at large.

  21. Bartels and Zeki are using evidence from fMRI, previous research with love and neurohormones to reduce human attachment to activity of neural circuits. The authors explain the mechanism of human attachment as one part the deactivation of brain regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment, and assessment of the intentions and emotions of others. This deactivation serves as a distance from social judgment, making the normally critically important social assessment of little importance. As regions responsible for negative emotion are not firing, reward circuits are firing like crazy. Regions responsible for reward and regions high in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors are activated, creating a motivated and exhilarated mental state. This combination of reduced assessment of social judgment, reduced negative emotional activation, and highly active reward and attachment mediating neurohormone circuitry, according to Bartels and Zeki can explain what we refer to as love.
    When considering whether love can be reduced to a physical state, long-term relationships come to mind. If a couple has been married for many years, and the attachment has grown, yet the exhilaration of young love has faded, would the neurons in the regions described above still fire with the same intensity, and would comparable amounts of oxytocin and vasopressin be released? If not, would we consider the couple to be “out of love” or rather being engaged in a mature and familiar form of deep attachment. Additionally, we can look at fMRI and say that certain regions of the brain are highly active, but brain regions are used for many purposes, and the structure of neural circuitry is a complex one. We do not yet have even a fraction of the necessary information to fully understand this beautifully complicated organ. I do not believe that love can be reduced to a physical state alone, although many of the feelings we have when loving someone are a result of neurotransmitter release. There is some deeper mental state that is love that is something bigger than the sum of the physical components of the emotion of attachment.

  22. In stark contrast to many of the theorists we have examined, Bartels and Zeki are offering evidence of a completely physical state of love. And if we consider love, either romantic or maternal, to be an important aspect of personal identity and perception, it follows that a material view of love might imply an entirely material self.

    In their experiment, Bartels and Zeki exposed mothers to a series of pictures – of friends, family, strangers, and most importantly, of their own children. By using an fMRI to monitor areas of stimulation in the brain in real time, the researchers could deduce which nuclei of the brain were associated with certain reactions. In the case of mothers viewing their own children, the areas assumed to be associated with maternal love were pinpointed. And, by inference, the neurons and hormones associated with these regions were deduced to be involved in maternal emotions.

    Additionally, the researches cited an earlier study in which they performed a similar procedure in the interest of romantic love – where they were interested in reactions to partners rather than offspring. In comparing the findings of these two studies, the researchers concluded that these two emotional pathways overlapped majorly, although not identically. They also observed that the same pathway that activated love emotions inhibited areas of the brain linked to social perception and pain. Hence, love might be described in terms of bliss and irrationality.

    Again, although the researchers do not say so explicitly, it might be deduced from their findings that personality and behavior are dictated by real, physical processes in the brain, and that what we consider a “person” is actually a complex web of sensory input culminated in the brain. The researchers do explicitly theorize that the sensation of and response to both kinds of love serve a real, biological function: the continuation of the human species. This idea is radical when compared to other ideas of personal identity, especially older ones like those of Locke and Descartes. Basically, this argument is saying that love, and perhaps by extension all of the emotions that factor into personal identity, are material, observable, and PRACTICAL. From this perspective, it seems perfectly plausible to view love as a physical state. The fact that this theory is entirely based on empirical, observable phenomena makes it much more difficult to dispute (at least in my mind), but not impossible.

  23. Bartels and Zeki’s study is an example of the PNI approach to the mental/neural state problem. They take the scientific approach to understanding the differences between maternal and romantic love by observing the excitation of various brain regions in an fMRI machine. By showing mothers pictures of their children and then using pictures of other kids and their friends as controls, the study observed that certain areas such as the substantia nigra, periaqueductal gray, and other areas of the limbic system were highly active while other regions controlling social judgment were deactivated. The experimenters noticed that while there were a lot of overlapping areas that were activated, there were some portions of the brain that were only activated when feeling romantic love or just maternal love.

    Whether or not these results support or argue against the psychoneural identity theory is still up for debate. Though the article clearly does support the idea that neural connections do lead to specific mental states, it is not clear if it suggest that neural states are only mental states. Based on the definition of mental states, they can be a varying range of emotions or states of thinking (belief, doubt, etc.). If we are looking at the idea of love, we don’t necessarily distinguish the mental state of maternal love with romantic love. Of course, the motivation behind these two types of love are different, but the feeling that you get when you love someone is essentially the same. Since the neural states that ‘cause’ these types of love are different, to declare that mental states are identical to neural states we would have to say that maternal love and romantic love are different mental states, even if they feel the same to us in the moment. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the reward-seeking and limbic systems areas of the brain that cause love are also activated due to drug use or eating our favorite food. Yet, we don’t necessarily compare our mental state during these addictive habits with how much we love our significant other. Therefore, the X=Y statement, and the properties that are part of X and Y are not always exclusive to X or Y or completely overlapping. Although I do not have a problem with believing that all of our emotions and actions are a result of our neural state, arguing that mental states ARE neural states still does not seem to make much sense, especially because knowing our neural states is not necessary to saying we have a certain mental state (knowing which brain regions are activated does change my perceptions of the different kinds of love or pain).

  24. Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki’s research focuses on finding out which areas of the brain are involved in love, a daunting task to be sure. Unfortunately we don’t have the research methods available at this time to draw perfect correlations between a specific emotion and a brain region. However, Bartels and Zeki seem to be on the right track by analyzing which regions become active when looking at pictures of loved ones and close friends. Being strictly a science paper (no philosophy here), the authors do a good job of avoiding drawing too many conclusions that aren’t directly supported by their evidence. However, they do claim to have found regions that relate to very specific behaviors that are often associated with love. For example, looking at a picture of a loved one seems to deactivate regions of the brain that make emotional judgment of negative emotions.

    The question of whether love is reducible to merely a physical brain state is a complicated one. It is hard to deny the evidence in studies, such as this one by Bartels and Zeki, that something is happening in the physical brain when a person is shown someone they love. However, there is much more to love than mere reactions. For example, there is undeniably a cognitive element to love; there are specific reasons to be in love with a person other than just emotional attachments formed via oxytocin or vasopressin. Additionally, it seems to me that there is a persisting quality to love; it is sort of like a belief in that way. One might not feel in love 24/7 but when asked, they would definitely say they were in love, similarly to a belief. Both also seem to affect cognition and other patterns of behavior. If someone believes that the earth goes around the sun, even if they aren’t thinking about that fact at the moment, it affects the way that they think about a sunset that they watch, or related events like the moon moving across the sky. I do think it is a noble task to attempt to find out whether love is a brain state, and I think where Bartels and Zeki have started is as good a place as any, but I believe that the true answer will require a much more holistic approach.

  25. What are Bartels and Zeki claiming about the relation between love and neural correlates? Can we reduce love to a physical state?

    Bartels and Zeki claim that maternal and romantic love can be explained by some patterns of neural activities in the brain. To test this, participants were presented pictures of either their children/significant other, or friends, or strangers in a scanner. The results suggested that there are specific brain regions that were activated when participants were viewing pictures of their children or their significant others. Although, the data showed a strong correlation between the neural activities and viewing pictures of loved ones, I am not convinced that love can be reduced to neural correlates alone. One critical point to note with any imaging study in general is that as of now, scientists not yet have a good understanding of the BOLD signal from fMRI. The “lighting up” of a single brain area could result from many factors, and depending on analysis methods used, many different data sets can be derived from the same BOLD signal data set. That is, it is very possible that with a different type of signal analysis, we might not be able to link these neural activities to maternal and romantic love. Instead, what really underlies and confounds the data in this study might be a factor of face familiarity and exposure to a certain faces over others. Personally, I do not think that love can be reduced to a set of specific neural correlates alone. However, these neural signals are definitely an integral part that underlies certain behaviors that we believed to be expression of maternal and romantic love.

  26. Bartels and Zeki claim that both romantic and maternal love activate certain regions in the reward system and suppress other neural mechanisms associated with critical social assessment and negative emotions. Love is seen to elicit certain neural activity in the brain. Their results show that people in love undergo certain brain activity, but the reverse is not true. Although there is a causal connection between brain activity and the feeling of love, they cannot say that brain activity causes feelings of love.

    I believe that love cannot be reduced to a physical state. If you reduce love to a physical state, how could one differentiate ‘love’ from ‘like’? It would be very difficult to make a cutoff point of neural activity or hormonal release to make the distinction. In addition, Bartels and Zeki state that ‘love’ hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin play a role in pair bonded animals. If we reduce love to a physical state, would we say that animals love each other? Subsequently, how could we differentiate human love from animal love?

  27. Bartels and Zeki compare the respective neural correlates of romantic and maternal mental states in order to determine whether the two result from similar brain activity. I say “result from” because I do not think that Bartels and Zeki are advocating for the Psychoneural Identity Theory. Rather, they seem to imply a causal relationship between physical neural activity and mental states, which makes me think that they take an Epiphenomenalist view. Bartels and Zeki describe human emotions and actions as originating from their neural correlates.
    They further link these neural activities with evolutionary theory in that neural pathways for reward are activated with both romantic and maternal love. Thus, mothers who care for their children, and people who care for their romantic partners feel a rewarding sensation, which leads to increased reproductive success. Their description of this process starts at the brain, with activation of neural pathways; it is not the mother’s desire to protect her child that causes neural pathways to activate, but rather the other way around.
    As evidenced by this report, it is possible to break down love into nothing more or less than physical states in the brain. To believe otherwise is to believe that there is a Cartesian ego or soul that adds something to the qualia of love that cannot already be induced by our brains. This violates Ockham’s razor in that it is unnecessary for us to have souls when we can identify neural correlates for emotions such as love, and when we can explain smaller aspects (such as a rewarding feeling) of such a phenomenon through physical/material means. A soul or ego can add nothing to the picture, so positing its existence is really just making the concept of love unnecessarily complicated.

  28. Bartels and Zeki are suggesting that the most intense forms of love can be attributed to neural pathways. During the study, the researchers observed the areas of the brain that were activated and chemicals released upon a mother looking at a picture of a child (This is probably not the most reliable method for observing the way love affects the brain). They found that certain neuronal pathways were activated upon the mother gazing at her child. Some of the structures activated during maternal love were also activated when observing romantic love. Each type of love also had areas of the brain-activated specific to them. The evidence they presented attempts to show that love is merely the firing of neurons in certain areas of the brain.
    Can we reduce love to a physical state? My heart says no, but my brain wants to say yes (pun intended). Based on this evidence, it is hard to argue. I know the method used could have been stronger, but there is still a lot of support for this argument. I have trouble believing epiphenomalistic point of view that physical states control all mental states though. I like to support the Psychoneural Identity Theory. The neural pathway is not causing the mental state of love, but is identical to the mental state of love. Romantic love has similar activations to maternal love, but they are not exactly the same. These two mental states have their own neural pathway that is identical to it.

  29. Bartels and Zeki begin by hypothesizing that, because mother-child love and romantic love use the same neurohormones but take both similar and differing expressive forms, that the neural architecture involved in producing both types of love are also both similar and different. They go on to claim that they were able to isolate, via fMRI, neural correlates consistently activated in both adults viewing images of their romantic partners, and adults viewing images of their children. Similarly, they claim two areas, specifically the lateral orbito-frontal cortex and the periaqueductal gray region of the tegmentum, were only activated in mothers viewing images of their children. That is compelling evidence for the idea that love can be attributed to certain neural correlates (if we ignore the relatively high 5-10% probability that this pattern was a result of chance), but considering the study’s structure I don’t think I can place a great deal of faith in the results, especially given the way researchers chose to ‘measure’ love.

    These doubts were especially highlighted for me when I read about the woman who admitted to having an argument with her husband, which colored her emotions while viewing a picture of her child. Researchers excluded her from the study, presumably because her brain activity regarding her child could not be attributed solely to feelings of maternal love, which implies that other subjects’ it could. This seems questionable to say the least. All significant human relationships are complex and multifaceted, and to pretend they could accurately isolate one feeling over another in anyone simply viewing a photograph is a bit absurd. I would venture to say that the excluded woman wasn’t the only one with complicated, overlapping feelings viewing those photographs, but merely the only one who admitted it.

    As far as “reducing love to a physical state,” I land somewhere in between a pure PNI point of view and an innate desire to believe we’re all special snowflakes with our own experience of love. I really do think that everyone experiences and expresses love a bit differently, just based on observation and inference throughout life, but that belief would seem to come into conflict with PNI Theory. Perhaps the best method to explain away that conflict would be that brains are plastic, and every individual has unique experiences that in turn shape their brain physiology to be slightly different from everyone else’s. So, while we might eventually be able to broadly point to specific neural regions/activity responsible for creating feelings of love, it would be impossible to say everyone experiences love exactly the same way. That being said, of course I want to leave room for the possibility that love is a higher level experience that cannot be solely attributed chemical interactions. Love is such a charged topic and such a fundamental part of the human experience that in this instance, I think it’s unlikely that anyone can regard the subject matter with enough objectivity to produce a ‘true’ explanation and still less likely that explanation become universally accepted.

  30. Bartels and Zeki’s paper essentially states that feelings of love are a result of a neural pathway that releases certain neurotransmitters in the brain. With this, they take the PNI approach because they equate these feelings of love with the triggering of these neural pathways. While I do have some questions about their methods (is showing a picture that the mothers picked themselves for 15 seconds really a good measure?), they do offer quite a bit of empirical evidence that supports their conclusion. Their results are compelling, and I think in many ways love can be reduced to a physical state. We certainly have physiological/neural responses when we interact with or think about people we love, be it our partners, friends, or family. Yet I believe that there are other aspects of our behavior regarding love that cannot be explained by a neural pathway alone. Sometimes individuals do things that are irrational or against their best interest for someone they love, and I think that is a result of something outside of just a biological response. Love has so many facets and can be manifested in such different way that I think it would be impossible to ever truly explain all of the behaviors surrounding it. I think Bartels and Zeki offer an important start to understanding this emotion, but there are some things that just cannot be explained.

  31. Bartels and Zeki are taking a scientific approach to love. And why shouldn’t they? There has been research into anger, fear, stress, anxiety, and happiness, so why not love? After all, it could just be an emotion. Because the brain handles all perceptions and sensations, it follows that feelings of love or adoration have neural correlates. Bartels and Zeki are claiming that the same techniques that reliably prove the amygdala is critical in the processing of the negative emotions, aggression and fear, can be used to find the “love areas”. They go about this via fMRI scans for women and men in the romantic love trial and mothers alone for the maternal trial. By measuring the blood oxygen dependent level of certain tissues, they can pinpoint which areas are activated preferentially.
    Through their research, Bartels and Zeki can say which areas responded to static visual photographic representations of loved relations vs. non-loved relations. They found that there were a few significant differences between their results for maternal and romantic love. And one would hope so. Using precise imaging techniques and a different set of both people and images, there should likely be a difference. This test, however, is crippled by just how deeply limited it is. On a fundamental level, the researchers aren’t even sure if the participants are responding to the subjects of the images or merely the images alone. They bolster their argument through rat-based evidence, but quite a few meta-analyses have found that rats are not always a reliable model, especially on a cognitive level. For this trial to be more focused, brain activity should be measured while the participants are actively interacting with their loved one. Furthermore, there needs to be an identical interaction with someone they are familiar with as a viable control. As we can see, this would be a close to impossible task until MRIs become the size of a baseball cap and can control the exact behavior of the subjects.
    On a larger level, yes, love could possibly broken down into a physical state, but I would liken it (forgive me) to an illness. Any illness has a root cause (in this case, a partner or a child) but the symptoms can be incredibly varied. Some may experience heart palpitations, stammering, increased libido, etc. but not everyone will. We cannot reduce love=x,y, and z, because there can never be an all-encompassing set accounting for everyone’s brain. Feelings of love, or any emotion for that matter simply have too many variables for it to be broken down empirically. Certain areas, of course, are activated more than others, but this study seems to overlook the unique input from neocortical cells handling long-term memory and its influence. I believe that there may be common symptoms, but not common experience of love or any emotion.

  32. Although this study by Bartels and Zeki (2004) does provide interesting insights and potential first steps towards understanding the neural correlates associated with differing types of love, it did not convince me that they had done so themselves. The researchers do a fine and thorough job of associating the fMRI activated regions to those containing a high density of oxytocin/vasopressin neuronal inputs and receptors – two neuropeptides that have been shown to be pivotal in social and romantic attachment-formation across a wide range of species – and thus are fully able to make claims about the neural correlates of attachment. They also provide interesting data into regions and subregions of the brain associated with negative emotions and cognitions that are seemingly deactivated during their task. However, there lies a large discrepancy (in my eyes) between attachment and love. Thus, my primary doubts with this overall study lie in its methodology, particularly that they were incomplete/incorrect in their goal of “measuring love”.

    A question that was raised instantly in my mind when reading this paper was whether viewing pictures of a loved one is really a proper paradigm for measuring love. I’m not implying that there may be any better options currently available, but I couldn’t help but think that other inputs, such as auditory and olfactory, might affect such a complex emotion – a conjecture that the researchers themselves make during the article. Related with the idea of love being an extremely complex emotion is the thought that perhaps the activity that they saw as a result of the picture task was reflective of a host of emotions rather than solely love, as it hard to imagine only feeling one emotion, even a complex one, when viewing a photo of an important individual in one’s life. Lastly, I took issue with the “survey” that asked the participants to quantitatively assess a host of emotions that they felt while viewing the pictures. In addition to emotions such as love and friendship being complex, they are also extremely subjective – such that an individual who rated their love as a 6 while viewing their photo may have “felt” the same way or felt the same extent of that emotion as another person who gave an 8 to their own photo. This could further serve to complicate the experimenters’ data. The experimenters are not to blame whatsoever for these issues, but rather the emotion that they were trying to analyze. Another issue with this study is brought to light during its discussion portion. While the researchers seem to provide a great amount of evidence for their overall hypothesis and conclusion by providing evidence for the regions mentioned using prior literature, they altogether ignore regions that might implicate their arguments as overreaching, such as the occipital cortices. In summary, the experimenters have a relatively strong case here for neurobiological correlates of attachment, yet making a grand statement about love itself – mainly that we can reduce it to neural correlates/a purely physical state – is a stretch. This experiment also provides an interesting hurdle to firm supporters of the psychoneural identity (PNI) theory, mainly since they argue that all mental states are identical to particular physical states. An experiment such as this, despite allowing for general conclusions about the physical states associated with love, shows a great variety between subjects in their fMRI results. Possible retorts to this finding might be that “love” itself is not a mental state, or that it is comprised of many mental states and therefore can not be measured in the same way, yet this is something that supporters of the PNI must address.

  33. The study carried out by Bartels and Zeki attempts to identify the neural correlates which, according to a psychoneural identity theory, would have to be necessary and sufficient for the experience of maternal or romantic love. In other words, if these physical correlates really are identical to the subjective experience of love, then there cannot possibly be any part of that experience which is not accounted for by facts which we could (in principle) observe with a powerful, precise enough brain scanner. There can be no property held by the experience of love that is not also held by its physical correlates, and vice versa, because if there were, then it would be obvious that the two were not identical. This is the part of the psychoneural identity theory that I have, on first glance, the hardest time swallowing — it seems prima facie that there are lots of differentiating properties between subjective mental states and third-person physical processes, most saliently that of the first-person qualitative experience that seems present in the former, and absent in the latter. It seems like there is a real category-distinction in the world between things that have internal states and things that lack them; for instance, we’re usually pretty confident in ascribing these sorts of states to ourselves and other higher animals, and in not-ascribing them to things like rocks. I guess my main question with psychoneural identity theory, and with physicalism in general, is: what makes physical things like brains different from physical things like rocks? How do we translate between our third-person descriptions of physiological processes — descriptions which do not seem to entail any kind of subjectivity at all, and which could conceivably take place without producing sentience — and the first-person experience of ‘what it’s like’ to feel x?

    This seems, to me, to be the main problem with identifying love with any physical state. Bartels and Zeki do a very convincing job of pointing out specific, consistent physical events that are correlated with all experiences of love (of course, the fMRI scans of all the participants in the study were slightly different, and the correlates discussed come from the overlaps of these many slightly-different physical states — still, I don’t think this is in itself a problem for physicalism, because the mental states associated with these physical states are plausibly just as individual). These physical events include activation in regions of the reward system rich in receptors for the neurohormones oxytocin and vasopressin, such as the substantia nigra, the globus pallidus, the nucleus of Meynert, and the ventral tegmental area. They also included deactivation in areas of the brain involved in negative emotion, social judgment and theory of mind, including the amygdala and the middle prefrontal cortex. This is undoubtedly a very valuable contribution to our understanding of ourselves and how our bodies work, but I think it is crucial to understand that it doesn’t necessarily explain anything about how we get from such physical events to the qualitative experience of the emotions we are trying to study. I don’t mean to assert, at least not at this juncture, that such an explanation is in principle impossible — but I do think it’s undeniable that we don’t have one yet. The feeling you get when you look at a picture of a loved one — that distinct yet indefinable experience expressible only by cross-modal sensory metaphors like ‘warmth’ and ‘softness’ — appears to have properties that clearly differentiate it from any physical process. I am willing to consider the idea that this appearance might be due to an inaccuracy in our system of concepts (something like a morning star/evening star mistake). But I also think that if it does prove that this is the case, the only way we’ll ever be able to correct our error is by somehow collecting information about how physical events translate to qualitative states. This kind of information is simply not found in Bartels’ and Zeki’s data, despite the other kinds of scientific value present in their contribution.

  34. Admittedly this study was full of a lot of technical jargon that went way over my head. I think the main point is that their study presents evidence to suggest that both maternal love and romantic love (mental states) have, as their bases, neural states in the brain. While experiencing both types of “love”, certain neural sectors are active and firing. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap in which areas fire during experiences of each type of love. This is consistent with their claim that both forms of love are derived from an innate need to perpetuate and sustain the species. Evolutionarily, it follows that similar areas of the brain would respond to each type of love. They do not appear to be claiming that love is certain brain activity, but rather that certain brain activity is a reliable basis for the experience of love.

    I am hesitant about responding to the latter question. If there is any spiritual cell in my body, it probably holds that love is a state that science cannot explain. But that’s a big “if”. There is certainly evidence to suggest (this study included, of course) that love is related to the brain in certain predictable ways. I am sure that early stage romances show different neural firings than old marriages. Love is mysterious, though. Does reducing it to a mere physical state cause it to lose its mystery or elusiveness? I don’t think so. Love is love. Whether it’s a neural process or something much greater doesn’t change our enjoyment of it or our need for it. So, I’m open to the idea.

  35. Bartels and Zeki do not explicitly make the claim that the mental state of love is identical to its neural correlates in the brain but definitely do imply that the brain states of maternal and romantic love are the “neural basis” for the mental states.. This claim is complicated, however, by the extremely complex behavior the brain exhibits when the subject is in these mental states. It is not simply the case that when a person is experiencing maternal love, one area of the brain is active and when they are experiencing romantic love, another part of the brain is active. What actually occurs, as Bartels and Zeki find, is that several different parts of the brain increase activity while others decrease activity, depending on whether the subject is experiencing maternal or romantic love. Bartels and Zeki also find that there are some areas of overlap between the brain changes in a subject who experiences maternal or romantic love. This suggests the difficulty with trying to identify mental states with neural states. If a neural state is identical to a mental state, then Liebniz’s Law implies that two distinct mental states (such as maternal and romantic love) should have two distinct neural states. According to Bartel and Zeni’s study, this is not exactly the case. This argument, however, relies on the premise that maternal and romantic love are actually distinct from one another, which is not entirely true, since they share certain characteristics (they are both types of love). Still, if one took this premise to be true (that is, that the mental states of maternal and romantic love are distinct from one another) then it would be impossible to assert the psychoneural identity theory in this case.

    As to whether we can reduce love to a physical state, I am not so sure. Perhaps it would be possible to apply the token theory of identity as opposed to the type identity theory. While the token identity theory asserts that each mental token is identical to a brain token, it does not assert that each mental type is equivalent to a brain type. For example, if I experience a feeling of love for a particular person, then this mental token will be identical to a brain token. If I experience a feeling of love for another person, then that mental token will be identical to another brain token. According to the token identity theory, these brain tokens do not need to be the same, whereas according to the type identity theory they would need to be the same. This, however, seems implausible, as even though I am experiencing love in both cases (and thus experiencing the same type of mental state), the mental state is different in each case as it is in relation to a different person. Thus, it seems unlikely that the type identity theory would hold up here, while the token identity theory seems more plausible. Given that the token identity theory is a form of non-reductive physicalism, it would not be possible to reduce love in its entirety to a physical state.

  36. Bartels and Zeki are claiming, like most neuroscientists, that emotions and mental states are produced by different patterns of neurons firing in the brain. Specifically, they examined maternal love in the present study (2003) and romantic love in the previous study (2000). Although they use some language that could be interpreted as causal interactionism (“maternal and romantic love activate specific regions in the reward system”), I think it would be very difficult to argue that they are proponents of this philosophical argument. They repeatedly mention romantic and social love as evolutionary tools that ensure individual human beings want to procreate and pass on their genes. This sort of argument makes me think of epiphenomenalism—it makes humans sound like vehicles for genes that have evolved to produce emotions that make them more likely to survive in the next generation. The implications of epiphenomenalism in this case would be that physical states or events within the nervous system cause mothers to protect and take care of their children, or adults to spend their lives with one another. The importance of emotions such as love is greatly downplayed by the theory of epiphenomenalism—a personally disturbing thought.
    I believe you can reduce love and all other emotions to a physical state. Any alternative explanation always depends on an abstract concept of mental substance/essence for which I know of no evidence. The evidence for all experience being dependent on physical states and processes, on the other hand, is mounting. The fact that neuroscience experts cannot point to every neuron that fires for a certain emotion does not disprove physicalism. Epiphenomenalism in this case is disturbing, but also liberating in a certain sense. It feels kind of like determinism.
    Saying that we are “reducing” love to a physical state is an inherently biased way of asking this question. It implies that love is a great, complex entity that we can never understand, and that there is something base and crude about classifying such a valued emotion as physical. While love might feel incomprehensible, this study provides evidence that it can be understood.

  37. What are Bartels and Zeki claiming about the relation between love and neural correlates? Can we reduce love to a physical state?

    Bartels and Zeki attempt to examine the relationship between maternal and romantic love by identifying overlaps in the neuro-endocrine pathways correlated with each. They determine that, evolutionarily, the persistence of maternal and romantic love has allowed for the maintenance and perpetuation of species. In particular, oxytocin and vasopressin are identified as the hormones guiding general expressions of love. Additionally, Bartels and Zeki intend to compare the neural correlates of love to reward centers, in an effort to further elucidate the evolutionary benefit and biochemical mechanism behind the emotion. To distinguish between maternal and romantic love, Bartels and Zeki took fMRIs while showing participants photos of other people with whom they had various kinds of relationships. These methods were used to elicit feelings of maternal or romantic love and subsequently activate distinct brain areas. While the results of this study report many overlapping areas of brain activity between romantic love and maternal love (medial insula, cingulated gyrus dorsal and ventral, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, and several subcortical areas), several active areas unique to romantic love were identified. These areas include the post ventral part of the thalamus and an area overlapping the periaqueductal gray of the midbrain (PAG). These areas are also known to have a high abundance of oxytocin receptors, supporting the previously suggested involvement of neuro-endocrine reward pathways. On the other hand, areas unique to romantic love include the ventral tegmental area (VTA and the substantia nigra (SN). Upon identifying each of these areas, the study reveals that together, they correspond to the regions responsible for regulating an even wider range of neuropeptides. In this sense, Bartels and Zeki seem to be claiming that there are direct neural correlates to both kinds of love.
    Because love, both maternal and romantic, are emotions that take over and consume the body in its entirety, some philosophers are hesitant to “reduce” it to a physical state. Based on this paper, it seems as though classifying love as a physical state is not in fact reducing it, but rather defining the emotion by the complex bodily process that cause “it”. Keeping in mind the evidence presented by Bartels and Zeki, it is my opinion that love is a complex emotion equivalent to a very complex physical state. The activation of different combinations of brain area, the precise regulation of neuropeptide levels, and in turn various behavioral displays seem to be a sufficient way to define the “qualia” or what it is like to feel love. In other words, this study does not “reduce” love to a physical state; it begins to elucidate the complexity of the physical state that is love. Furthermore, by calling attention to the distinction between maternal and romantic love as well as the emotion’s dependence on reward centers in the brain, Bartels and Zeki complicate the notion of physical state. In behaviorism, a major difficulty is that the definitions of different mental states overlap. Similarly, physiological states overlap in there definitions; for example, experiences of romantic love and maternal love share some activated brain regions. This raises the question: If mental states like love are defined as physical states, can these physical state then be defined by “if and only if” qualifications? Will defining mental states as physical states solve the problems faced by behaviorism?

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