Thus, according to Dr. Fisher, love may come with a kind of neuro-chemical fingerprint, and is by extension, a real, distinct thing. Certainly, others have made convincing (and increasingly uncontested) arguments regarding the more widely agreed upon basic emotions such as fear, anger and joy. Note, for example, the groundbreaking work done on the neuroanatomy of fear by New York University Psychologist Joseph Ledoux. On the other hand, fear, anger, and joy are pretty specific constructs, and by comparison love remains mysterious and multifaceted. Are Dr. Fisher’s research participants feeling love when she snaps images of their brains? I don’t know. Are they not feeling love when they look at their close friends? I can’t help wondering what emotions they are feeling, no matter who they are looking at, and that’s the problem.

That is, the problem is that love is so reducible. And since reductionism is the bedrock of science, one has to chop love up into what it’s made of if one wants to understand it. Just so with fear, but fear is not so easily reduced to other emotions. Try this: Ask a friend to break down the components of one of their fear experiences. You will hear things like, “I wanted to run away” or “my chest was pounding.” Then try this: Ask the same person to break down the components of their feelings of love. You will hear some reports similar in quality to those of fear, such as “I wanted to kiss so-and-so,” and “I couldn’t eat all day.” But you will also hear things like, “I was afraid they didn’t love me too,” and “I’m so happy to see them when they come by,” et cetera. Love, it seems, is pretty easy to reduce to constituent, more basic emotions. And so I find myself feeling skeptical of Dr. Fisher’s claims regarding love per se, and would like to ask her to evaluate the possibility that my colleague suggested that April afternoon in Tucson--that the term “love” is a way of poeticizing the crazy jumble of emotions we feel as we negotiate our fundamental drives and conflicting needs regarding our various sexual attachments to other people.

Perhaps there are ways in which our common understandings of the word love are even culturally prescribed. For example, could romanticized notions of love be used to persuade us to adopt and adhere to cultural norms regarding monogamous, long-term relationships? After all, we don’t, as a species, appear to be strongly monogamous, even though we appear to have undeniable, and, again, cross-cultural, tendencies in that direction. Such an idea seems at least to be a possibility, and this is coming from a big fan of many evolutionary and biological explanations for these kinds of things. Perhaps love is both a chemical process with its own “fingerprint” and a poeticized enforcer of cultural norms, the difference being only a matter of degree.

I suppose we’ll see. In the meantime, I would like to run my own experiment: let’s chemically increase people’s levels of dopamine and norepinephrine while depleting their level of serotonin…and see if they report feeling love.