This Is Your Brain on Sex (37 page)

Love and hate of an individual can often be linked. Think about it: How easy is it to hate a person you once loved, especially if your relationship ended on a sour note? As much as we are taught from an early age that hate is bad, it almost seems easier at times to summon that kind of intense emotion for someone you held so dear. Could there be a connection? I asked Zeki that very question. “There is so much ambiguity in the relationship between these things,” he said. “Beauty can often lead to desire, which can lead to love. That’s an interesting topic from the point of view of neurobiology, understanding that progression. Similarly, how love may transform into hate is equally as interesting. Certainly [love and hate] are often linked.”

Zeki and his colleague, John Paul Romaya, scanned seventeen healthy individuals as they viewed photos of someone for whom they expressed a strong hatred as well as three acquaintances for whom they had neutral feelings (matched for sex and basic appearance as much as possible). To measure hate-based feelings and actions, Zeki and Romaya created a new survey measure. In writing the questions, they focused on three elements they saw as necessary to the feeling of strong hate: a negation of intimacy, or the desire to be as far away as possible from the hate object; a feeling of passion, or a demonstrable anger or fear of the hate object; and a “devaluation” of the hate object based on expressions of contempt. The resulting hate score could range from 0 (no hate at all) to 72 (hating with an all-consuming, fiery passion). Sixteen of the seventeen study participants confessed to intense hatred for an ex-lover or a work colleague. Number seventeen was a little different—she saved her hate for a famous politician. Though one could easily argue that these types of hate are very different, they were grouped together, since, in all cases, that hate was directed at a single individual.

Once participants were in the magnet, they viewed each face individually, the hated face as well as the three neutral faces, for approximately sixteen seconds each. Each participant was instructed to click a button once the face disappeared; there were no additional instructions about what the participants should feel or imagine when viewing each photo. It was just a simple passive viewing task.

As expected, all faces activated the fusiform gyrus, a brain area that
has long been implicated in the perceptual processing of faces. When Zeki and Romaya compared the face of the hated object with the other faces, they found additional activation in several unique areas, including the medial frontal gyrus; the premotor cortex, an area necessary for the preparation of motor planning and execution; and the frontal pole, a structure implicated in predicting how others may act or react. Zeki interpreted this activation as evidence that the neural pathways for hatred are distinct from those of love. He further hypothesized that these areas make up a network, one that is important in focusing attention on the hated object, predicting potential behaviors, and preparing to attack or defend oneself against that person.

Zeki and Romaya also found some overlap with their previous love studies. Both the insula and the putamen, two regions that have shown up in several romantic love neuroimaging studies, also lit up when participants looked at a person they hated.
²

Brain areas activated during a hate task. The insula and putamen (not shown) are also activated in neuroimaging studies of love.
Illustration by Dorling Kindersley.

I did not find this last result such a surprise. As
my ex and I are sorting out the details of our divorce, there are times I am incredibly angry with him. I might even go so far as to say there are times I kind of hate his lousy guts. Arguing over money issues can do that to even the most saintlike person, which I decidedly am not, but the truth is, when I see his photo, particularly pictures in which he is smiling and laughing with my son, I feel something altogether different. I almost hate to admit it, but what I’m feeling is love. Whether I am simply remembering my past love for him or still carrying a bit of a torch, I cannot tell you. I’d imagine, whatever that feeling might be, it could have the power to confound the results if I were to participate in a study like Zeki’s.

“Do you think perhaps you saw that putamen and insula activation because so many of the study participants were ex-lovers?” I asked him.

“I can’t tell,” he replied. “This was very much an initial study. I would like to carry on with these studies and compare people who hate someone because perhaps they disagree with them or have been harmed by them to those who hate someone because they loved them in the past.”

“And would you say the results of this initial study support the idea, as the saying goes, that there’s a thin line between love and hate?”

“I don’t know,” he said simply.

“No speculation?”

“No. I’m being very conservative about this. Now, there is obviously some connection. But what that might be, I don’t know.”

When I asked Zeki which finding in this study most surprised him, he was quick to reply. “The absence of deactivation in the cortex surprised me,” he said. “Hate, like love, can lead people to irrational behaviors and actions. I was surprised we didn’t see the same kind of cortex-wide deactivations as we did in the love study.”

What might account for that lack of deactivation? Zeki is not sure, but it may have something to do with anxiety. The area of deactivation is close to one that has previously demonstrated involvement in obsessive-compulsive states. Perhaps the lack of deactivation has something to do with the obsession and compulsion necessary to keep hate alive. Let’s face it, hating does require a bit of effort.

I couldn’t help but also notice that the overlap between brain regions in love and hate fits in with animal studies showing the role of oxytocin in both pair-bonding and aggression. I asked Zeki if he thinks
oxytocin is involved, if perhaps these brain areas are facilitated by oxytocin release. “I believe not only is oxytocin involved but also chemicals like dopamine, vasopressin, and serotonin,” he said. “These are all strongly linked to one another, together in a fine balance. And that balance between the three seems to be very critical to determining states of love and hate.”

To date Zeki and Romaya’s study is the only one that has looked at the underlying neural correlates of hate. A unique study, it is one that, Zeki freely admits, calls for some follow-up work. He plans to continue looking at different kinds of hate, ranging from ex-lovers to racial divides, in future studies. As Ferris said, context is important—critical, really—to understanding what might be happening in the brain. A great love that turns into hate seems very different from a defensive posture against a hated out-group or a coworker who stole one’s promotion.

Once again I nudged Zeki about the idea of a thin line between love and hate. Does he think the statement is true? Perhaps it is the backdrop of my divorce that prods me to keep pushing for an answer to this. Perhaps it’s that I’m astonished to have a neuroscientist simply reply, “I don’t know,” without the benefit of some added speculation. Zeki chuckled when I asked again and then answered my question with a question. “How do you account for the ambiguity? That’s another thing you must account for. There is a relationship between love, beauty, and desire. Hate too. Beauty often leads to desire, which can lead to love. Love may lead to hate. This transmutation is very interesting from the point of view of neurobiology.”

“Definitely,” I agreed. “Can we say anything about how that transmutation might occur, neurobiologically, that is?”

“That asks yet another question. Do we have adequate tools to study these questions?” he said. “I think we have some tools, but not all the tools we need. And science, good science, can only exist through having the proper tools to study particular questions. Right now, I don’t know that we have the tools to address those questions. But, for now, we can say that hate, at least that which is directed at an individual, has a unique signature in the brain.”

Chapter 16

The Greatest Love of All

A few weeks ago I picked up an airport rental car in Indianapolis on a
brisk Sunday morning to make my way to the Kinsey Institute. I was too busy trying to find my way out of the multiterminal labyrinth to fiddle with the radio, and it was not until I found myself safely on the interstate that I realized it was set to a Christian station. Despite a preference for a little rock and roll when I am on the road, I listened for a few moments as a woman with a thick southern accent offered some religious testimony.

“My love for Jesus, like his for me, is all encompassing,” she said. She then told the story of her spiritual rebirth, a tale of how she overcame the many bad decisions she had made before her salvation by letting go and allowing Jesus to lead the way. The details in her story aren’t important, except that she credited her faith (and only her faith) for her life’s turnaround. Her final words are what stuck with me; she ended her account with another proclamation of love. “There is nothing else on earth like opening your heart to a close and personal relationship with Jesus,” she exclaimed. “It is true
ecstasy
.”

I could not help but notice her choice of words throughout her testimony: love, all-encompassing, close and personal relationship. It was the last, ardent employment of the word
ecstasy
that really got to me. Change the context and this woman might well have been talking about a new boyfriend with a hot bedside manner, not her Lord and Savior. There seems to be a fair amount of overlap between the words we use to describe romantic love and those we employ in discussions of religious
devotion. If we take a page from Semir Zeki’s book, this correlation, present in religious writings and statements for the past few hundred years, may suggest comparable brain areas underlying these phenomena. Not for one faith, mind you; this is not just a Christian or Buddhist thing. It’s that internal quest to understand something beyond ourselves and our world, however we happen to do it.

“Religion is very much related to culture,” Mario Beauregard at the Université de Montréal told me. He is a researcher in the blossoming field of spiritual neuroscience, sometimes referred to as neurotheology. “But spirituality is different. The possibility of spirituality is in your genes, in your brain. By and large, it’s something that is biologically possible.”

Debates about the nature of the soul are outside the scope of this book. There are several other tomes out there that can take you through the long and somewhat strange neuroscientific history of the mind-body connection and how it may intersect with the soul. The focus here is more on whether religious devotion deserves the name “the greatest love of all” (as defined in my childhood Sunday school class, as opposed to the more popular Whitney Houston tune reference)—whether religious love shares some of the same neurobiological traits with some of the other forms of love we have discussed.

The “God Module”

Why do some people think religious, spiritual, or mystical experience has the power to make changes to the brain? Because everything does—these kinds of experiences are no exception. “There’s nothing unique about religious experience in that respect,” said Jordan Grafman, a neuroscientist who studies belief. “Any exposure to anything will change your brain a little bit. It’s how you adapt and reorganize in accordance to new experiences that allows you to make it through life. No one should be surprised religion is any different.”

Religion, like any other experience, has the power to change the brain. But what may be more interesting is that religious experience may involve specific brain areas. In 1997 Vil
ayanur Ramachandran, the director of the Brain and Perception Laboratory at the University
of California, San Diego, made headlines when he presented evidence of a so-called “God module” in the brain during that year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting.
¹
Individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition marked by spontaneous and repeated seizures, often show intense religious devotion. Some have even proposed that religious prophets like Joan of Arc and Joseph Smith Jr. suffered from the condition, though those are posthumous diagnoses and therefore only conjecture. Regardless, there is a long history of epilepsy being paired with intense religious zeal.