by Lisa Ne ff
Wouldn’t it be great if love came in a bottle? And we don’t mean little blue pills. Birds do it.
Bees do it. But why do we fall in love? How do we stay in love? What do we gain from love? To explore those questions and more, the Wisconsin Gazette poured some wine, unwrapped a box of truffles, lit a candle and delved into a year’s worth of science and health journals.
Sex or no sex? Jesse Hollister and colleagues at the University of Toronto were captivated by the elegant, showy evening primrose because 30 percent of the species in the genus have evolved to reproduce asexually. This made the primrose the right plant to test a theory that biologists have long promoted: Species that reproduce sexually are healthier over time than species that reproduce asexually, because they don’t accumulate harmful mutations. The researchers, working with teams in Canada and China, examined 30 pairs of the primrose species. One in the pair reproduced asexually; the other sexually. “What we found was exactly what we predicted based on theory,” Hollister stated. “This is the first genetic support for the theory that a significant cost to being asexual is an accumulation of deleterious mutations,” said University of Toronto professor Mark Johnson. “This study has allowed us to unlock part of the mystery of why sex is so common. It’s good for your health, at least if you are a plant.”
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FEBRUARY 26, 2015
Going pitter-patter? Falling in love really does make the heart go pitter-patter and takes one’s breath away, say scientists with the Loyola Sexual Wellness Clinic at Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago. Clinic co-director Pat Mumby said falling in love releases a flood of feel-good chemicals—dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine. “This internal elixir of love is responsible for making our cheeks flush, our palms sweat, and our hearts race,” said Mumby. Credit dopamine for that euphoric feeling. Credit adrenaline and norepinephrine for that pitterpatter of the heart and the pre-occupation with that other person.
Not so total recall Think you remember the details of a love at first sight? Maybe. Maybe not, according to research from Northwestern University that was conducted with the support of the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The researchers showed that fragments of the present get inserted into the past to form faulty memories. Memories get adapted and updated, reframed to fit the now, according to lead author Donna Jo Bridge, who led the research at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
For the study, people viewed object locations on a computer screen with varied backgrounds. When asked to place the objects in the original location, the participants always placed them incorrectly. Next participants were shown the objects in three locations on the original screen and asked to choose the correct location. They placed the objects in the misremembered location because they had reformed the memory.
The look of love, or lust Researchers with the University of Chicago, working with the University of Geneva, analyzed the eye movements of test subjects studying black-and-white photographs of strangers. They found that people tended to fixate on the face, especially when they said an image elicited a feeling of romantic love. However, subjects’ eyes moved from the face to the rest of the body when images evoked sexual desire.
Marital investment Professors with the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, examined changing expectations of marriage and relationships— from the 18th century to the 21st. They reported that Americans, on average, are making smaller investments of time and energy in their relationships than in the past and they have very different expectations from the couples of yesterdays.
