I have been reading a lot about the brain chemicals of love and all the neuroscience stuff you just alluded to. So on my recent visit to my daughter, the neuroscience PhD candidate, I figured I'd ask her if she was aware of all this new research in her field.
I was surprised by her answer. She said that she thought it was possible that there might be brain chemicals involved in being in love, but that it is not a subject taught in neuroscience as it is currently taught, and that she could not imagine how they would test such a hypothesis. How would they find human subjects who were "truly in love" versus "thinking they were in love" who would stay in love for the full length of time of the study, and how would they find a control group that was not in love, and how would they have the subject keep the "in love" thought in his/her mind while doing an MRI to see these phenomena in the brain, and not have the subject mentally wander and think about something else? All in all, her opinion was that this was pop psychology and not the result of any real scientific inquiry.
