Men have rather unique and peculiar genitalia. For their body size, the penis is slightly longer and thicker than other primates. Plus, in its flaccid state the human penis does not retract into the body, like many other species.

A popular explanation for this uniqueness is that “Size Does Matter,” or in the scientific vernacular, females use the size of a flaccid penis size to help choose a mate.

But, remarkably, there has been very little evidence to support this claim.
According to Bob Wong, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, previous studies either directly asked women what they liked, which is unreliable, or drew too much attention to the penis. For example, one study asked women to rate drawn images in which only the penis size was manipulated. “It was obvious exactly what trait was being tested,” says Wong.

It’s even unclear why women would be attracted to the bigger flaccid penises. Contrary to popular opinion, flaccid penis size is not correlated with the size of an erect penis, and so it is unlikely to influence sexual performance.

Now, Wong and his colleagues have generated over 300 3D computerized images of a naked male body, depicting variations in penis size, as well as body shape (shoulder-to-hip ratio) and height, the latter two traits are known to influence male sexual attractiveness.

Each trait had seven variations, all within the natural range. For example, the 7 flaccid penis sizes ranged from 5 to 13 cm, which accounts for 95% of the natural variation seen in men.

Over 100 heterosexual women from Australia were shown a selection of the images and rated their attractiveness. Crucially, the women were not told which traits had been changed in the images.

Bigger is better

They found that indeed a larger flaccid penis size influenced a man’s sex appeal. “We don’t know what size is best because the most attractive sized penis was actually outside the range we tested,” says Wong. “The relationship is positive and shows no sign of dipping.” That is, women liked the penis that was 13 centimeters long the best and if the trend continued, who knows where it would lead?

Curiously, co-author of the paper Dr Brian Mautz from the University of Ottawa in Canada, told Nature that there was a ceiling effect, and it’s likely the most attractive penis would be between 12.8–14.2 centimetres in its flaccid state.

Larger penises had a bigger effect on the attractiveness of taller men. “To put it bluntly,” said Mautz in a media release, who was also involved in the work, “If you are short and pear-shaped, a large penis is not going to increase your attractiveness.”

But, why is bigger and flaccid better?

“It is not exactly clear why females would prefer larger flaccid penises,” says Wong. On average, women rated the images in 3 seconds, suggesting they were not aware of their attraction to larger penises. “This is way too fast to consciously note the differences but, rather, would be based on an overall assessment of ‘attractiveness’ of the image,” says Wong.

The team speculate that fashion and culture, which has historically drawn attention to male genitalia, may have influenced our obsession with penises and their size. “In the 15th and 16th century, for example, codpieces were popular fashion items in Europe,” says Wong. “Penis sheaths, similarly, are worn by men in many cultures for example in the highlands of New Guinea”.

Although there might be a lot of talk about penis size, the study found that the most important attractiveness trait tested was body shape. Shoulder to hip ratio – which tests how wide shoulders are relative to hips – accounted for almost 80 percent of the variation in relative attractiveness scores, while height and penis size only accounted for between 5 to 6 percent.

Still, the study surely suggests that men can thank women for their relatively large penises.

Journal Reference PNAS: Doi/10.1073/pnas.1219361110

“Right now, we’re inside a computer program?” Asks a very a perplexed Neo in the 1999 classic, The Matrix. He has just realised that the world around him is virtual reality. While The Matrix is fictitious, according to some scientists, it’s very easy for us to confuse virtual reality for, well, reality.

The quote opens the book “Infinite Reality”, which is co-written by Stanford researcher, Professor Jeremy Bailenson. “With that monotone query,” he writes, “a very confused Neo… convinces hundred of millions of viewers that virtual reality could be so real that people have no idea they are actually living in a simulation.”

Our Virtual World

Nearly a third of the world’s population is online – that’s well over 2 billion people connected to the virtual world. This mass of eyes are now staring at increasingly realistic and connected images, thanks to high definition screens, high speed computing and sensor-enabled devices such as the Nintendo Wii.

Bailenson argues that our virtual experiences will become even more immersive, eventually giving people the sensory information that makes it feel like they are “inside” virtual worlds. And when this happens, we will have to ask ourselves, what is “real” anyway?

What is reality?

Reality is not what’s in our environment, argues Bailenson in his book. Rather it’s constructed in our mind. We see all the colours of the rainbow – but there are many colours that we don’t see, such as infrared light. There are also more smells than the human nose can sense. And our idea of motion is completely subjective, too. Take for example, when you’re driving in a car, a speeding motorcycle will seem to be moving slower, than if you are standing still. The list of how our perception is fallible could go on, but we get the point.

This all means that what we take as reality, is really just what our senses are detecting. This makes the mind rather vulnerable to buying into experiences that aren’t “real”, so long as we are shown the right sensory information. As Jeremy Bailenson says, “The mind buys into an experience it deems it real.” Enter virtual reality.

Welcome to the “Holodeck”

To find just how confused the brain can get between virtual and reality, Bailenson has set up a Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory at Stanford University in California . This is one of the closest experiences you’ll get to the Holodeck. People inside are given head-mounted displays capable of an overall field of view of almost 120 degrees. While moving through the lab, which can project images of anything from an underwater swimming experience to a cityscape, subjects are being tracked. An infrared lighting diode sitting atop their head is detected by a nearby camera that feeds information into computers calculating where – within approximately 30mm – they are, and when you got there – to 100th of a second. Images are updated 100 times a second to reflect their movement – making it rather easy to get confused with reality. Among other snazzy devices, the room also has a clever sound system with 22 speakers, hidden behind the wall and beneath the floor.

By shoving people into this set up, Bailenson has discovered that people easily fooled by virtual reality. People walking a tightrope over a chasm in the lab can get frightened, even though if they know there is no chasm really there. Clinical psychologist, Dr Robin Rosenberg, told ABC’s Catalyst, “Your heart starts beating. You know intellectually that this is just the virtual world, that you’re in a room, that you can’t get hurt, but your body does not know that. Your brain is sending it all these signals.”

Avatars

Bailenson also creates an avatar of his subjects, to see how people react when they see themselves in a warped reality. He found that giving people taller avatars made them feel more confident in the lab. And, remarkably, this confidence boost stuck around for a few hours once the people entered “the real world”. Similarly, a more attractive avatar made subjects act more warm and social outside of hte lab.

Keep in mind, many of these studies were pretty small, and they didn’t look at the results overtime. Still, they suggest that people can change their behaviour and attitude after spending a bit of time in virtual reality.

Creepier still, is this experiment. Bailenson’s team created avatars of children. He showed the kids’ avatars swimming with whales. Interviewing them a week later, half of the children developed false memories – and believed that they themselves had gone swimming with the cetaceans.

Bailenson reckons there are huge implications for this work. Of course he does, it’s his work, but still. “We think virtual reality is a way to change very entrenched behaviour,” he told New Scientist Magazine. For example, in small studies he’s found that people are more likely to go to the gym and exercise if they’re shown a 3-D avatar losing weight while they exercise.

Kathy Cleland at the University of Sydney, who is the director of the digital culture, says the behavioural changes from virtual realities shouldn’t be overstated – as it’s unclear how long term these effects last. “It’s an interesting and new way of experiencing new worlds,” she says. “But the more time I spend in the virtual world, the more impressed I am by the complexities of the physical world.”

As a kid, I figured that adults knew all of the big things in life: Why is the grass green? Why do zebras have stripes? How the moon was born? … and so on. I didn’t know the answers, but I was sure the adults did. So, it came to my surprise to realise that them adults are still working out a thing or two. For one, they don’t even know how that big rock in space – the moon – came to be.

For a long time, it was thought the moon formed around 4.5 billion years ago, when the Solar System was in the midst of a violent game of planetary billiards. At around this time baby-Earth was hit by an object about the size of Mars, and spewing from that impact was a mass of debris.

Eventually, some of the cloud of astronomical dust congealed to become solid. It also became trapped in the Earth’s gravity, and so that large rock started hoola hooping our home planet, and our moon was formed.

If true, the birth of our moon is different to those on other planets. For example Mars’ two puny moons, Deimos and Phobos, were passing through the Red Planet and got stuck in its gravitational pull.

In an episode of ABC’s Catalyst that I co produced, Prof Brian Cox described the process rather elegantly, “What we think happened was that in the early history of the solar system, a planet, a big planet, probably almost Mars-size, was involved in a glancing collision with the Earth. So they bounced off each other, chunks of the Earth were knocked out, and it’s that rubble that then coalesced into the moon.”

According to Cox, we think this because there is evidence from the Apollo missions, which studied the moon rocks, showing they have very similar chemical composition to Earth rocks. But there are some key differences between the two spaceballs. “There’s very little iron in the moon,” says Cox. “An the explanation for that is that because the blow was glancing, it didn’t hit the cores of these two planets. And the core of a planet is where all the heavy elements and the iron is.”

That theory was looking good, but there were a few issues with the details of the collision – and where the dust came from. As BBC reports “the early models indicated that much of this debris would have originated from the impactor, whose composition would most probably have differed substantially from that of Earth. This is not reflected in the analysis of Earth and Moon rocks – for example, their oxygen isotope, or atom type, compositions are identical.”

Hm, what are the adults missing? In October last year, a study was published proposing a new theory of the moon’s birth. Dr. Robin M. Canup from Southwest Research Institute calculated that our moon, and Earth, were born out of a collision with two rocks that were about the same size. No “glancing collision”, but rather an almighty thwack that threw up debris everywhere – eventually congealing into the same sort of rock. There’s a nice video of the model here.

So, where does that leave us? “The ultimate likelihood of each impact scenario will need to be assessed by improved models of terrestrial planet formation,” said Canup in a press release. In other words, watch this Space.

For more information:
- “Alternate Theories of Moon Formation”

Clinicals trials are currently underway for a “female viagra”. For some, this is exciting news – that could bring a lot of fun into their bedrooms. But, others are concerned that the hunt for female viagra is merely a cash cow for pharmaceuticals.

Tefina is a nasal spray being developed by Trimel Pharmaceuticals to help women experiencing anorgasmia – a difficulty experiencing orgasm. Currently in clinical trials, Tefina is a testosterone-based drug that would be used like Viagra, that is, when women are anticipating a bit of rough and tumble (rather than an ongoing treatment).

Dr. Susan Davis, Professor of Women’s Health in the School of Public Health at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, is a lead researcher on Trimel’s trials. She told The Current, that the drug works by dilating blood vessels in the genitals and so, increasing sensation there. “This dilation increases the capacity for women to experience an orgasm,”” she said.

Meet FOD

FOD is ‘‘Female Orgasmic Disorder’’, and it’s a bit controversial. One of the troubles with the “disorder” is defining what it is, and that’s because the female orgasm is an engima unto itself. “Unlike orgasm in the male, which is usually accompanied by ejaculation, there is no equivalent objective ‘‘marker’’ of orgasm experienced by women,” writes Cynthia Graham at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, in her paper about diagnosing the condition.

Still, the condition is definable enough to make it into the psychiatrists bible for diagnosing conditions – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). According to the DSM, one of the essential features of FOD is the “the persistent or recurrent delay in, or absence of, orgasm following a normal sexual excitement phase”.

It’s unclear how common the disorder is, but surveys tend to find that around one third of women might be affected.

Will it work?

Tefina is currently being trialed throughout Australia, the US and Canada. In a press release Davis noted that, “We have previously shown that for women with low sexual interest, testosterone therapy not only improves sexual desire and arousal, but also enhances a woman’s ability to reach orgasm.” So, things are looking promising.

But, according to The Atlantic “Similar treatments have been tried in the U.S. and failed.”

Also, not everyone is excited about this kind of research. Elizabeth Canner, who made a documentary in 2009 about “the fevered race to develop the first FDA-approved Viagra for women” told The Atlantic, that diagnosing sexual dysfunction and even giving the condition a name like Female Orgasmic Disorder, is part of a pharmaceutical lobby to sell drugs and unnecessarily medicate women.

While no good can come of snorting medication that’s not needed – I have to say that a female drug to make orgasm easier, would be wonderful for a lot of women. Fingers crossed for the trials.

British intelligence agents think it’s impossible to decipher an encrypted message written in WWII, and recently found attached to the leg of a pigeon.

The bird’s skeleton was discovered in the chimney of 17th-century home in Surrey, UK in 1982 when the home owner, David Martin, was restoring his chimney. David Martin, told the The Guardian “I started finding bits of a dead pigeon. We thought it might be a racing pigeon until we spotted a red capsule.” Martin opened up the red capsule. “I wondered if there was a secret message inside, and indeed there was!”

“Inside the canister was a thin piece of paper with the words “Pigeon Service” at the top and 27 handwritten blocks of code,” reports BBC.

According to Discovery News, it’s believed the bird was released by allies in Nazi-occupied France on June 6 1944, during the D-Day Invasions. At the time, Churchill had instituted a radio blackout, so homing pigeons were used to carry secret information back to England.

Codebreakers at Government Communications Headquarters, told the BBC that “without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, the message will remain impossible to decrypt.”

Gone Crackers?

Curiously, a Canadian fellow named Gord Young’ claimed to have cracked the code in 17 minutes using a code book he inherited. His solution, however, has since been poo-pooed by Michael Smith an historical advisor to Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire home where the German Enigma code was cracked during World War II.

Turns out Young’s book was for cracking WWI codes. “The idea that a World War One code would have been used during the second world war is just silly, frankly,” said Smith. “It wouldn’t have been used because it would have been well known to the Germans and insecure.”

Hero Birds

According to Discovery “birds played a very active role in World War II (the RAF trained 250,000 birds, forming the National Pigeon Service) and, between 1943 and 1949, 32 were awarded the Dickin Medal, Britain’s highest possible decoration for valor given to animals.”

Bombers would drop military pigeons behind enemy lines, where resistance fighters picked them up, attached secret messages to their legs, and released them homeward.

Discovery News speculates that this bird was heading toward Bletchley Park, which is around 80 miles from Martin’s house, but before reaching his destination tried to rest on the chimney, and died from the fumes of a fire below. Perhaps not Dickin Medal material, then.

Remember the days before Google?

We’d sit around the dinner table, and wonder about things. Why is the sky blue? Who won the first Academy Awards? Can riding a bike cause erectile dysfunction? Y’know. The big questions. And we’d keep on wondering, until someone could be bothered walking over to the Encyclopedia to look it up. These days, our handy phones are waiting on the table, ready to answer any questions that we have of them.

Having satiated our curiosity, we’ll now all sigh at the response, and promptly forget any answer that we’ve recently obtained.

This strange habit is making many people wonder if Google, and its fair-weather friends – Facebook and Twitter – are destroying our minds and turning into multitasking fiends with some sort of attention deficit disorder.

Multitasking

There is some evidence that youngsters, who largely grew up on Google, are more prone to multitasking and diverting our gaze, than adults. For example, a study published last year from the Carroll School of Management in Boston College found that when students and staff were placed in a room with a television and a computer for half an hour, students, with an average age of 20, flicked their eyes back and forth between the devices more often than the staff.

Overall, staff (average age 47) switched nearly 100 times in 27.5 minutes; while students flicked 144 times. Both groups displayed rapid-fire glances, however, suggesting we all might be prone to multitasking when stimulating devices are thrown in our face.

Is multitasking affecting our attention span?

But does it matter that our eyes are bouncing around all the pretty displays on offer? According to Baroness Susan Greenfield, yes. She believes that being constantly connected to the web “might have a very profound effect on your actual thinking powers”.

While her theories could come to fruition, for now, there’s no strong evidence that multitasking is reducing our attention span. For example, a study came out this year, which found that children of today have the same attention span as kids in the 1980s.

The study gave kids the “Gordon Diagnostic System” test, which looks at people’s ability to sustain concentration. The test has been used since the 1980s and it consists of a box, with a button, and a display with three digits. There are three different tasks but the main one test’s our ability for sustained attention. The goal is to watch a series of numbers and quickly press the button whenever a “1″ is followed by a “9″. Sure it’s easy, but you’ve got to concentrate to do well.

Blog Neuroskeptic describes the study: “Over the period of 2000-2006, the researchers gave the GDS to 445 healthy American kids, not diagnosed with any learning or behavioural disorder and not taking medication. They compared their scores to the standardized norms – which were based on a sample of American kids back in 1983.”

On average, children of today scored the same as healthy kids from 1983 . As expected, children diagnosed with ADHD, as expected, scored much worse.

The authors concluded: “Children are no more or less inattentive and impulsive today than in 1983, suggesting that inattention and impulsivity are stable neurobiological traits largely unaffected by cultural, educational, and environmental factors.”

Rebecca Eynon, who works for Nominet Trust, told me “I don’t have strong evidence that people are less able to concentrate. It’s just easier for us to find things to distract us.”

Given that, I better stop this post here, thus letting you watch TV, and check your Twitter account, in relative peace.

Growing up in the 1990s, I remember when the internet was starting to reach into our homes.

I remember printing penguin photos from The Web on paper with awkward holes on the side. I remember the the first time I flirted with boys it was online, and I remember my mother stopping dinner to check facts on The Home Computer.

But by the time I finished high school, my fascination with the internet was gone and my reliance on it kicked in. I couldn’t complete an assignment (or flirt) without it. Now, it squeezes into my pocket and never leaves me. So, how did this digital revolution begin?

The Birth of the Internet

On Tuesday, September 2nd 1969 the equipment for the first computer node arrived at Len Kleinrock’s lab in the University of California, Los Angeles. Kleinrock eagerly set up the equipment, but then sat down. Today, these devices can link computers, mobile phones and ipads up to networks, but back then, Kleinrock’s single node had no network to connect to. “It was a one node network, which his not interesting,” Kleinrock told me, very practically, over the phone a few months ago.

So on October 1969, a second node was set up in Stanford Research Institute. Now it was time to send a message – the first message – between two computers. “It was an uneventful occurrence,” said Kleinrock. “The aim was simply to login to a terminal over the one high speed line. To do this, all we had to do is type in LOG and the computer would type in IN.”

His colleague, Charley Kline typed the L and on a telephone call to Stanford, the team eagerly asked “Did you get the L?”. Yes. Next the O was received. Things were looking good. “But then it crashed,” remembers Kleinrock.

“The people who sent the first telephone and telegraph message, they were smart and understood the importance telecommunication. But, we didn’t. So that was our first message 10:30p at night, on October 29, 1969.” Lo.

Kleinrock mused that maybe Lo wasn’t such a bad first message. “It’s like Lo and Behold,” he said. Ah, very good.

When I asked him if he expected that the internet would become the pervasive wonder that it has, Kleinrock sighed. At the time, he thought it had the potential to revolutionise the flow of information.

“The part that I missed, was that my 99 year old mother, whose died now, as well as my 9 year old granddaughter would use it to communicate,” he said. “I missed the social aspect; it’s about societies and bringing people together.”

Lo and Behold, indeed.

The Nodes of the Internet in 1969 – between Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara.

The Internet Today – Hundreds of thousands of nodes linking the 2.2 billion people (via Cosmos)

Love is a many-splendored thing. There are many splendid hormones and chemicals that flood your brain and induce that curious, almost drug like state, of “going gaga”.

Indeed, a bunch of intriguing human and animal experiments have unraveled the key processes involved in love. And they tell us that there is no magic to the sickening feeling – it’s just chemistry. The studies also open up a tantalizing proposition: that we could mimic the chemical cocktails of love in a pill, so creating the ultimate “love drug”.

Love 101

Love is, of course, an incredibly complicated feeling. Unlike the visual cortex, which sits at the back of your brain and processes the information you see, there isn’t a “love cortex”. But, experiments have found that when people in romantic love are placed into a brain scanner particular areas of their brain do light up.

This increased activity in particular areas of your brain, is caused by a release of “love” chemicals and hormones. Back in 1999, Donatella Marazziti of the University of Pisa in Italy found that levels of the brain chemical, serotonin, drop below normal in people claiming to be in love. Serotonin has a calming effect, so seeing levels fall could explain why we get a little overexcited when we start falling love.

Intriguingly, people with obsessive compulsive disorder suffer the same chemical imbalance, and perhaps that’s not too surprising. After all, both groups spend large amounts of time pining and obsessing over something or someone.

More recently, Marazziti found that the sex hormone, testosterone, also gets mucked around during love. Testosterone is linked to sexual desire, and aggression. Generally, when people are given the hormone they report thinking more about sex, having more sex and being more satisfied after sex.

Curiously, men who recently fell in love had lower levels of the stuff than other fellas. But, women stung by the love bug had higher levels of testosterone compared to their emotionally stable compatriots. It’s not completely understood why this happens – but could explain why some women get more randy in the first stages of love, while some men are keen to cuddle.

Other things happen as we fall in love. Particular areas of the brain – so called “reward centres” – become inundated with the chemical dopamine. This also happens when we eat chocolate, take addictive drugs, and have sex. The boost is thought to birth an intoxicating link between feeling damn good and the object of our affection. So, when we feel good – we start of think of our lovers. Just like a drug, we soon start to crave them, and want another hit. Indeed, Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta and his colleague Miranda Lim, described the brain activity of people looking at their “schnookums” as being “remarkably similar to those observed after cocaine”. (pdf)

Long term love

Overtime, something curious happens. The initial excitement of the relationship drops away and a stable, satisfying, but somewhat irksome situation emerges – a long term relationship. This begins what scientists call, “pair bonding”. And now, a new suite of hormones kick in.

Meet oxytocin, also cringingly dubbed the “cuddle chemical”. Oxytocin is believed to have an important role in stimulating love-dovey behaviour in gals. Its close cousin, vasopressin, has been implicated in getting males to do funny things to express their love – like getting aggressive toward potential rivals.
While these chemicals were also getting pumped out when you started your relationship, their main role seems to be for creating long-term partnerships. Like dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin also move through the reward system of the brain, hitchhiking off the same circuitry used by drugs, chocolate, and sex to give us a high.

Voling around

Oxytocin’s role in bonding is thought to be incredibly powerful. We think this thanks to a bunch of guinea pig-like rodents called voles. North American prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are pillars for a modern family. They form lifelong partnerships, the males help raise the kids, and females help build the nest. Plus, the couple have more sex than they need to make babies – which is pretty rare in the animal kingdom. Not only do these cute little animals create great animal models for what is involved in long term partnerships, but they also have interesting cousins: montane voles (Microtus montanus). The two species are similar in every aspect of their lives, except one, montane voles like to slut around. They are polygamous. Turns out the chaste and floozy voles respond to oxytocin and vasopressin very differently.

As soon as scientists infuse the brain of the demure female prairie vole with oxytocin, she quickly becomes attached to the nearest male around. Similarly, getting vasopressin into the monogamous males also encourages so-called “pair-bonding activity” like spending time together – just the two of them – and driving away sexual competitors. But, if scientists boost the levels of these hormones in the philandering montane voles it doesn’t really affect their behaviour. Why are the species so different?

Oxytocin and vassopressin change our feelings by docking onto specially designed receptors found in particular sites around the brain. The voles’ brains have receptors for these chemicals in different places around their noggin. For example, monogamous voles have more receptors for vasopressin in front parts of their brain, compared to the strumpets.

Remarkably, when researchers tweaked the genetics of the montane voles so their brain receptors looked more like the chaste prairie rodents, the modified voles became monogamous. That is, when the males had the chance to go with three gals, they preferred to “huddle” with just the one.

There is human version of this gene, and there are slight modifications of it in different men. Blokes with a particular version of the gene are more likely to be unmarried than men without it. And if men already tied the knot, those with the “Mr Wrong” genes are twice as likely to report a recent crisis in their marriage.

Motherly Love

But is it so bad to be unmarried, or polygamous? And, why do we feel “love” at all?

Looking to the animal kingdom, long term partnerships are rather rare. It’s believed that less than 5 percent of mammals are monogamous – so obviously you don’t need to survive in the wild with a partner in tow. Evolutionary biologists believe that love wasn’t meant to exist in its popularised Shakespearean form. Rather, the brain mechanisms that allow us to feel the euphoria of love were supposed to be for mothers to bond with their infants, but later hijacked and used for lovers.

Without getting Freudian, this does explain some very curious phenomena: such as why the female breast is considered erotic for males, and why stimulating the cervix and nipples can feel quite nice. There are a few bits of evidence to suggest why this might be the case. Unlike the rare partnerships that humans form, motherly love is seen in a fair few animals – including a ewe and her lamb, and a female macaque and her offspring.

Plus, the same chemical cocktails that create romantic love also drive the love of a mother and her kin throughout the animal kingdom. For example, humans, rats and sheep release oxytocin during labour, delivery and nursing.

Love Drug

Once love stops becoming ethereal, but instead is whittled down into a chemical formulation brought to you by evolution – it opens up some exciting, and rather frightening, possibilities. Could scientists actually create a “love potion”? A squirt of oxytocin, a dollop of dopamine, and a smattering of testosterone sounds like a good start.

Indeed a squirt of oxytocin into the nose has been shown to enhance trust and make people more generous and empathetic. Already, you can go online and buy oxytocin perfume spray. But, when it comes to love, nothing is simple.

Studies have found that while the “cuddle chemical” encourages trust and cooperation amongst compatriots, it make people more suspicious of those from different nationalities. Inhaling oxytocin can also make people more envious, and gloat more vigorously over the misfortune of others.

There are some practical problems with a love perfume. Adam Guastella, a clinical psychologist at the University of Sydney who studies the effect of oxytocin nasal sprays, points out that it is a very fragile chemical. It will break down incredibly quickly if sprayed like cologne on clothes, and is unlikely to do anything for your relationships – except possibly boost confidence. For any effect, oxytocin needs to be rammed right up your nose.

In the future, however, a sophisticated love drug could be invented. There are some rather creepy uses for such an invention, which were carefully canvassed in Harry Potter. But, such a pill also could open up lines of communication in troubled, but once, loving relationships.

In fact, Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg both at the University of Oxford make a rather convincing argument that modern marriages are in great need for such a concoction (pdf).

Stable and loving relationships are known to improve the mental and physical health of the couple and any children produced. But sticking out an unloving partnership, does little for anyone’s health.

Savulescu and Sandberg note that throughout most of human history people survived for around 35 years, and assuming half of the couples got together when they were 20, many “mating alliances” would have ended within 15 years. “This figure is surprisingly close to the current global median duration of marriage, 11 years,” they wrote in an article written for New Scientist Magazine earlier this year. According to the team, given that our modern life spans are much longer, a chemical antidote to fill the gap with chemicals might be very useful.

No one is suggesting that chemicals will be the panacea for long-lasting and happy relationships, but slipping a “love pill” into a spouse’s drink every now and then after twenty years of marriage doesn’t sound so bad.

All this talk of hormones and chemicals, shouldn’t wipe out the romance of love. Perhaps, understanding what’s happening to your brain as you fall hard will help you find your perfect match. Maybe, you’ll be less likely to become victims to oxytocin, and douchebags, if armed with an explanation for your feelings.

But, maybe we just can’t control who we fall in love with – even if we can name the chemicals that are responsible for it.