A panel of UNCW faculty members set out to analyze, across disciplines, what the brain has to do with love and what exactly love has to do with the brain.

Speaking from their respective disciplines of study and research, the members of the panel discussed how the brain and love are connected. From psychology and biology to history and philosophy, here are some of the things the panelists came up with:

“All of the drugs that people damage themselves with are replicating and mimicking the drugs that we naturally produce in our brain. And, of course, falling in love produces an intensity of feeling which virtually nothing else can do. Here is the chemist’s view of falling in love: we have dopamine, the ‘pleasure’ brain chemical, we have epinephrine, producing racing heart and sweating hands, a close cousin of adrenaline, and then we have serotonin. It has been discovered that people with OCD have really low serotonin levels and, in fact, when you fall in love you get a replication of OCD and that’s why you can think of nothing else – it produces this total obsession,” said chemistry professor Robert Hancock.

“In many ways our brain is quite a dumb organ. Basically the brain is interested in the senses that allow us interface with other individuals. I would argue that hearing is our most romantic sense. All of those things you associate with romance, you know, whispering sweet nothings, long conversations until dawn, or music, all rely on our ability to hear. In this sense, it’s our sense of connection that comes from our ability to hear,” said biology professor Sonja Pyott.

“The pre-modern age in Europe was one where lovesickness was an illness, an illness that could be treated, and in the middle ages the prescription for curing lovesickness was to have sex with the person with whom you were in love with, and if that didn’t work, you were to have sex with someone else,” said history professor Lynn Mollenauer.

“Our brain is a change machine, the kind of change machine that never stops reconfiguring itself. New connections are always forming. In some manner, this system was driven by the laws of nature and evolved out of the same causal laws that caused everything else to happen in this world and somehow out of all that, the universe became aware of its own existence. That’s what blows me away constantly about the brain. That this material–this stuff–becomes aware of its own existence. The brain is the mind’s way of making more mind. It’s hard to wrap my head around exactly what that means, but it fascinates me,” said psychology professor Julian Keith.

“There’s something about love which is irreducible from a scientific point of view. The point here is that you might think that what it is like to be a brain in love is answerable by a neurochemical analysis, but another answer to the question is: nothing. You’ve never had an experience of your brain; you’ve never had a direct experience of neurons triggering electrochemical impulses, so all of our analysis of neurochemistry comes from a third person point of view. I want to suggest that the lived experience of love is indistinguishable from our experience of it. The genuine understanding of love can’t be got at by a third person, external analysis. The upshot is if we ask the question, ‘Is love identical to chemicals in the brain or neurophysiology?’ I think that plausibly the answer is no. Love is ultimately, perhaps, the deepest and profoundest mystery,” said philosophy professor Matthew Eshleman.

Many have experienced love, but each defines and explains it in a different way. Regardless of who is right or wrong, the idea of love has sparked all of these theories and more. As Dr. Eshleman said, love is a mystery, and the mystery continues.