In my last blog entry, I detailed the surprising sex lives of a few unorthodox animals. I hope you found it interesting and possibly the start of a friendly debate. I wonder if during that debate the subject of love was mentioned. Usually, love and sex hold hands and one cannot be spoken of without the other interrupting. Many opponents to the LGBT community believe that it is not possible to love someone of the same sex or gender. I do not agree. How can we control something that is so far beyond our scope of conscious thought. Love is a basic, primal urge controlled by factors of the brain beyond the ability to reason or make decisions.
Love is in the air; it is a timeworn cliche which is strikingly accurate. Love literally begins in the air when pheromones, scent-signaling chemicals that are responsible for initial attraction, are sent and recieved by two people. Pheromones can tell us not only who is reproductively fit but also who would make a good reproductive match for us physically. After the initial attraction from pheromones steers us towards a possible match, we then put that match to a taste test. It is speculated that kissing is a further way for our bodies to unconsciously tell us whether or not our mate is a good match for us. After our bodies have led us to an attractive and conducive mate, then our brains can kick it in over-drive with a cocktail of hormones that send us reeling, head over heels in love.
It begins with dopamine in the ventral tegmental, a region of tissue low in the brain. Dopamine regulates reward; it is what makes us feel good when we eat, give a gift, or receive a pleasant surprise. It is also present in high quantities when we are around a person we love. The dopamine ecstacy of being near our love is turned into an obsessive need for them by another part of our brain, the nucleus accumbens. This area of the brain is higher and farther forward and this is where dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin combine. Oxytocin is so powerful that it is the key ingredient our bodies use to bind a mother to her child. During labor a woman screams, kicks, and swears that she will kill anyone that tries to impregnate her again, and mere moments later when her baby is released to the world her body floods with oxytocin and she can think of nothing more than holding and loving her baby. This strong attachment is felt also in the head whirling, can't think, can't sleep days, weeks, even years of new love. Obsession becomes addiction in the caudate nuclei, two regions of the brain, one on either side of the head. This is where the patterns and habits that control our motor skills are stored. This area of the brain has an elephant's memory and refuses to let us forget our elation, our craving, or the person responsible for it.
When looked at from a scientific perspective it becomes obvious that love is an unconscious reaction within the brain to chemical signals over which we have no control. Basically, it is not something we choose; it just is. So the next time you start to say, "Why can't you stop being gay, just be straight," stop and think what you are really asking. You are asking someone to denounce their most basic urge and relinquish one of the most revered and rewarding emotions that humans are fortunate enough to have. So perhaps you should love thy neighbor a little more and judge a little less. As the Beatles say, "All you need is love."
Citations:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704672-1,00.html
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