Hawtin and Proust

The shuffle button today provided my ears with a Ritchie Hawtin set recorded at the Arches in Glasgow some years ago - a night at which I was at. 

Hearing the music took me straight back to those sweaty catacombs. Memories came to mind of the feeling of the speaker-maddened air moving my insides; of the combined sensations of light and sound as the anticipated drop hit; of the feeling of rightness of being there with exactly the people I was with and at exactly that time. 

All very invigorating for a journey on a grey Hong Kong bus, but probably all completely fabricated. Thinking rationally about it I can't pick out that night from all the others; that one dose of bass or that one drop from the many that I enjoyed around that time of my life. Much more likely that I have been doing a bit of confabulation based on my recognition that I was there and so should have such memories. 

Does that matter? Not really, I don't think. The feeling and recognition was a genuine one of my general experiences around that time. That my brain chose to attach some specific, although imagined, link between those states and the night a recording of which I happened to be listening to doesn't seem to detract from the specialness of my true but more generalised memories. 

Nor does it take away from the train of thought that the memories initiated - all the people that came to mind that are linked with that time, some of whom I have spoken to recently, some not since then, and some that we will sadly never get to speak to again.

Now if only there were any decent clubs in this city...

Love, Straw Men and Neuromania

Love – that wonder of the gods, those arrows of that knavish lad, Cupid – would seem too ineffable a concept for one to study it scientifically. Indeed, to put someone in a scanner and see what happens in ‘love’ would seem to miss the point of it and its influence on our culture completely.

There are neuroimaging studies of love, however, where scientists have done just that. Is this proof positive, then, of an overreaching reductionism in science and in our culture in general? A prime example of the ‘neuromania’ that is said to be sweeping our shores?

Firstly let’s take a brief look at these studies. A search of the Pubmed database for the terms “love” and “fMRI” returns around ten studies that involve neuroimaging and love-related topics, spread out over the last decade. These topics include romantic love, maternal love, and the grief involved in losing a loved one.

Taking “The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love” (Bartels, 2004) as an example, a group of 20 mothers were passively shown passport style pictures of either their own child or a number of control pictures (a child other than their own whom they had know for as long as their own child, their best friend, and another acquaintance). This approach is similar to that adopted by the same authors in their previous study of romantic love, where pictures of the person’s lover were used instead of those of the child (Bartels, 2000), and a comparison of the two is included in the present study.

By contrasting the activity evoked by the viewing of their child to that evoked by the viewing of the control pictures, the authors identify those regions of the brain that show a greater level activity during that condition.

Bartels, 2004. Fig. 3

As can be seen, a similar network of regions was found to display greater activity during the viewing of both one’s child and one’s lover. These regions included the ever-present anterior cingulate and anterior insula pairing, along with what is generally referred to as the ‘reward’ system (that phrase and its inaccuracy is perhaps the subject of a future post).

Whilst the study suffers from the usual problem of ‘so what’ that befalls most of these purely anatomical-region based neuroimaging studies, perhaps the most interesting finding is that there is some involvement of the periaqueductal grey (PAG) when a mother views a picture of her child but not when an individual views a picture of their lover. Such a finding can be seen in the context of the excellent work investigating maternal bonding processes that has been undertaken in non-human animals, and can potentially be usefully extended out into psychological ideas of attachment.

So the study doesn’t tell us much, but nor do its authors claim that it does (“These results have thus brought us a little, but not much, closer to understanding the neural basis of one of the most formidable instruments of evolution” Bartels, 2004, p1164). So what of the idea that studies of its kind represent an example of how scientists, and in particular neuroscientists, are seeking to explain away the world, as proponents of such an idea, such as Raymond Tallis, would claim?

Such criticism would seem to hold that such studies seek to reduce humanity to the chemicals and processes that make up the individual and that in doing so they either must necessarily fail in the task that they are said to be attempting, or that if they were to be accepted as succeeding then we would lose something integral to our humanity.

One problem with such a line of reasoning is that it appears to conflate two different entities. The argument is that science is seeking to explain away the wonderful variations and achievements of humanity. But, if we look at, for example, the studies of love, what is being studied is the human, not humanity. These two concepts are not identical; indeed that point is one of the core tenants of, for example, Prof. Tallis’ view.

Take as an analogy an anthill – we can study and understand the physiology of an individual ant, but that will not necessarily give us a complete understanding of the organisational system of the anthill as a whole. The person studying the individual ant would not seek to claim that it did, however. What they can provide are the individual-specific factors that shape and limit the higher-order organisation that arises within the anthill as a whole for someone else who’s focus lies with this higher-order question to go on and use.

What these studies are seeking to do is not to explain the functioning of the whole metaphorical anthill. Instead all they aim to do is to see what happens within the individual in a particular set of circumstances. The authors express no desire to make Shakespeare’s sonnets redundant, no quest to replace Barry White with brain scans; nor do they make any claims about the ultimate meaning of their findings beyond tentative suggestions about neural and psychological processes.

The critic of such studies could also point out that such simplistic studies can never capture or explain the varieties of experience involved in being in love. That is obviously true, but is only an objection if one is committed to an ontology in which there is just one monolithic entity ‘being in love’. Such an ontological position seems unsustainable, however. Much more realistic, and the one that is more in line with the critic’s overall worldview, is one that proposes a range of experiences that can be subsumed under the class ‘being in love’.

Within this class will be the jump in your stomach when you see your loved one, the way that your loved one looks better than anyone else to you, the willingness to do anything for another, and so on. Each of these things will be interconnected and interdependent, but there is still scope to study what is involved in each of them, studies that can proceed at different levels of explanation. What are the specific transmitters that cause the ‘jump’? What are the brain processes that alter one’s perception of the objective physical characteristics of another? What are the social factors that influence the norms of commitment between people? All interesting questions, and none of them reductive (as far as I can see).

Ten studies over a decade in a field that produces thousands of papers a year is not very many at all. Having actually looked at them, to hold up a small set of studies that look at a fascinating aspect of human experience in just one of many the ways open to us as representing an example of the overreach of science in its supposed quest to reduce the world to physics would seem odd, if not disingenuous.

It may ultimately only be possible to conclude from the studies that a certain set of brain regions display more activity when one looks at one type of pictures when compared to another set, but surely finding out even that limited piece of information, motivated by nothing but curiosity, is a pretty admirable thing to be doing?

Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love NeuroImage, 21 (3), 1155-1166 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.11.003


Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love NeuroReport, 11 (17), 3829-3834 DOI: 10.1097/00001756-200011270-00046