I find the hinterland between behavior and biochemistry fascinating - and how you can boil down behaviors such as love, sex and monogamy to mere, impersonal, neurochemistry.

Mrs. Gagg, in a well-intentioned way, bought me a bunch of books. “Oh god” I thought, this could be awkward. But, of course, skeptic that I am, when I came to read them there was some great stuff - amongst which was ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’ by Norman Doidge, M.D. who is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York

Some Lovers Become Dangerously Oxytocic - see below.

This is a learned treatise on the plasticity of the brain and how it can change its structure by thought or action. He talks about the neurochemistry of love - how that euphoric bliss, where everything is right with the world, is mediated through the “pleasure centers” in the limbic system of the brain - where activation produces large amounts of the “reward neurotransmitter”, dopamine.

The actual mechanism is a lowering of the threshold required for the limbic system to activate, so that any slight stimulus turns it on, and then everything is seen through rose colored spectacles. But the more cynical side of this is that cocaine and the manic phase of bipolar disorder (which used to be called ‘manic depression’) do the same thing.

That expert on love, namely Freud, was also an expert on cocaine - being a bit of a user. There is an instance where he was writing a letter to his fiancée, Martha, having just taken some cocaine (for which he would surely be roundly chastised in this day and age). It sounds like a great example of seeing him gradually getting stoned as the character of the letter changes. But he notes the “romantic intoxication” of being with Martha as akin to what he feels from the cocaine.

The bad news is, that, like tolerance to cocaine, one develops tolerance to the blissed out state of love. You no longer see your lover through the rose colored spectacles, and you’d better hope there was something else about him or her that will hold your attention - else you will be off with your wild oats, playing the field. Then maintaining that righteous monogamy will challenge you.

I have always thought it a terrible restriction to have to confine oneself to one lover. Norman Doidge sort of backs me up on this. “Concentrating our adult hopes for intimacy, tenderness and lust in one person until death do us part is not common to all societies and has only recently become widespread in our own”.

People seem to get a little upset if one dares to promote polygamy, but I always liken monogamy to being a gourmet, but having to restrict oneself to just one restaurant.

But Mother Nature is working against my immoral yearnings it seems.

Another part of the neurochemical soup in our brains is “neuromodulators” - which are different to neurotransmitters (that carry the nerve impulse across the synapse from one neuron to the next). Neuromodulators enhance or diminish the overall effectiveness of the synaptic connections.

One neuromodulator of note is Oxytocin. This is released when lovers connect and make love and especially at orgasm - and the scary part about it is that (talking as a male - with classic entrapment anxieties), oxytocin engenders a calm, warm mood and feelings of tenderness. It is known as the “commitment neuromodulator” - and incidentally is one of the principal hormones/neuromodulators involved in the “tend and befriend” reaction - which is the, usually female, counterpoint to “flight or fight” reaction to stress.

So now Mrs. Gagg is not only making me beholden to her by buying me gifts/books, but if I happen to have sex with her I shall become her neurochemical slave.

                                                                                                                                                    A Real Man contemplates his neurotransmitters

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