• Question: If the feeling of love is supposedly drugs and hormones going around our body, why do we feel so strongly about the person we're with? And can you fake the drug or make it using chemicals?

    Asked by maddy2468 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Robert Woolfson

      Robert Woolfson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Feelings are incredibly poorly understood, like much of the brain. While we know hormones are messenger chemicals that produce certain reactions that lead to certain feelings, it can’t possibly explain the strength or depth of those feelings.

      Even among feelings, love is complicated. It’s incredibly hard to define what love is as it means different things to different people. My personal belief based on what I know is that love is probably much more to do with who your are as a person and the complex relationships between experiences in your head than simple chemical compounds.

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Rob is spot on – we know very little, and the way these hormones and chemicals mix is very complex, and different from person to person. Each person’s brain chemistry is different, and each person will have slightly different “mixes” that produce their feelings.

      Oxytocin is a fantastic hormone – it’s responsible for a lot of the reactions that cause feelings of love and trust. It’s pretty easy to boost too – even just kissing or hugging someone, or dancing with them can boost oxytocin levels in the brain 🙂

      I think that some hormones can be made, but the body is actually really clever. It can pick up if the chemical structure is slightly different, from not being made naturally. Also, a lot of them are unstable, so they have a limited lifetime, which makes putting them in a pill or something difficult.

      Serotonin, for example, is the “happy hormone”. But you can’t just take serotonin. Instead, what you can do is eat protiens that contain a specific amino acid (tryptophan) which is used by your body to make serotonin.

      In depressed people, there is a shortage of serotonin for some reason or another. One type of antidepressant slows the brain from reabsorbing serotonin as fast, so there’s more of it available. So I guess this is a sort of way of “faking” it.

      But the problem is, one type of antidepressant will work really well for one person, horribly for another, and a third will have no effect. This is because there is a lot more at play than just one hormone, it’s all about how everything works together, and this is different for each person. We are a far, far way from understanding how we work 🙂

    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Well, drugs and hormones can be very powerful! Some drugs can make people do crazy things just to get more of them, which is why drugs like heroin and crack are so dangerous – they make you do anything to get more drugs, even things you hate. But love isn’t just that – people are more than just bags of hormones walking around. We have culture, philsophy and art, all ways of thinking about what it is to be a human. We use these ideas to make love more powerful. Sure, on a basic level it’s the body saying “you need to make more genetic copies of you!”, but we’re intelligent beings and can give love, or any emotion, more meaning than that if we want.

      And to some extent, you can fake attraction with drugs – pheremones are chemicals that make people or animals attracted to whatever the pheremones are on. But again, this is only on a basic level, and people can decide for themselves whether they’re in love or not.

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