“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of the Human Condition

By Stephanie Cacioppo

This is one of a succession of books, based on neuroscience, that I’ve been reading over the past month or two. Neuroscience is the cutting-edge discipline in which philosophers, developmental and social psychologists, as well as cognitive researchers in allied fields are nowadays engaged in pioneer work.

That being the cutting edge, it’s astonishing how dissimilar – even contradictory – are the findings that different researchers have come up with.

Here’s the hard-edged Daniel Dennett, whose life and work are encapsulated in his recent memoir, I’ve Been Thinking. According to Dennett, no correspondence can be assumed to hold between what we experience (whose cause is electrical impulses in our brain) and how the world really is. We’ve no neuro-scientific reason to believe that the red color of the cardinal bird or the bird itself – glimpsed briefly, heart-catchingly perched on our porch – was actually there. In principle, our impulses could give us the same visual scene even if we were mere brains in vats.

Martha Nussbaum also draws on neuroscience in her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions but she’s more willing than Dennett to grant a degree of realism to our brain events. The emotions, as she reads the evidence, are as seriously informative as our perceptions are. That said, the human progress from infancy to adulthood remains an uphill climb, with nature leading us through one crisis after another. We go from our ultra-dependent infancy, to a next stage where we get insufficient independent space to explore and grow, and then on to shame, disgust, jealousy and envy. Though it remains possible to emerge as a grateful, empathic, wonder-filled, mature adult – that precious balance is hard to achieve and precarious. It’s touch and go, all the way up and all the way through.

Against such carefully researched, rather dire warnings, from these well-respected philosophers, I’ve read two accounts from well-credentialed neuroscientists that are – contrastingly and startlingly – upbeat! One is The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting and Lifelong Thriving by Lisa Miller, who’s initiated research programs in developmental psychology of wide international and inter-cultural scope. Her finding is that adolescents all over the world, from varied religious backgrounds, go through a period of spiritual searching. In these quests, they try to work out their own, individual relation to the Ultimate. At the end of it, they may or may not return to the religious tradition of their parents. But their initial desire is to make that decision for themselves. The statistical finding of Miller’s researchers is that, if the youthful quest is encouraged rather than disparaged, the adolescents become more effective and satisfied adults.

And finally – saving the best news for last – there is Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love. The author is an internationally recognized authority on the neuroscience of social connections. What she reports finding, using magnetic resonance imaging and many other precise techniques, meticulously described in her book, is that there are “regions of the brain” … including “more sophisticated parts … involved in conceptual thinking, metaphorical language, and abstract representations of the self” activated by romantic love. Romeo and Juliette type love! Love for the one and only. There is a kind of self-expansion in romantic love. And there are well-confirmed, measurable health benefits.

So who’s right? They can’t all be right. Or can they? I suspect that a good deal hangs on how one makes the call in such a case. Long ago, our family friend William Ivins, then curator of prints and art authority at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, showed us a succession of engravings by copiers from Germany, France and Italy, each purporting to reproduce a certain art work. Each copy showed the unmistakable influence of a particular cultural way of seeing the same art work. The German one looked “German,” the Italian one looked “Italian,” and so forth.

The question is, as Bill Ivins summed it up, 

“What did that

damn thing

look like?”