BRAIN

A JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY
BOOK REVIEW
The neuroscience of love, mysticism
and poetry
Ill teach you differences! says Kent to the rascal Oswald in
King Lear. And neuroscientists attempting to make correlations
between love and the brain would do well to heed Kents
lesson. For, there is a tendency in such enquiries to seek, and to
nd, localized common denominators as if the seat of love were
an organ like the kidney and passion no more than a wayward
hormone.
But here, at the outset, is another kind of difference. Not so
long ago, in conversation at the Salk Institute with neuroscientist
Prof. Terry Sejnowski, I asked what difference the discipline had
made to his view of human nature? Neuroscience teaches he
replied, that much of our behaviour normally viewed as the
result of manifestation of individual responsibility, is hidden and
determined. In consequence, he had become less judgmental
of his fellows.
To what extent then is love hidden and determined in
the recesses of the brain and CNS? The impetus to explain the
neuroscience of affections, sexuality, romantic love and its
associated emotions has grown apace in recent years, resulting
in a fascinating, although at times obtuse and ever-expanding
literature. It would be true to say that the value of many of the
research conclusions remains questionable. It was at the Salk for
example, that Prof. Simon le Vey had been working in the 1990s
on the difference between the homosexual and the heterosexual
brain revealing, in his view, the importance of the similarity of
hypothalamic structure in homosexual attraction. Elsewhere,
researchers have been working on correlations between falling in
love and phenylethylamine (PEA); while others have studied the
density of peptide binding sites in the formation of emotional
attachment. A central problem in these enquiries has involved a
secure denition of that much used and abused word love itself.
Some hilariously reductive characterizations have emerged, as
for example: love is a cognitive-affective state characterized by
intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of the
loving feeling by the object of affection.
The inescapable problem about love, however, remains as the
issue raised, yet hardly settled, by Prof. Sejnowski. Is the human
mind and body a kind of secret chemical factory that determines
our behaviour, or do we have a measure of control over our
chemicals, especially when it comes to human relationships? The
question, in relation to love, is hardly new. The story of Tristram
and Iseult, which nds its origins in early Celtic myth, has at its
heart a passionate love affair prompted by a magic potion which
neither of the lovers can withstand. Early Medieval versions of the
poem made much of the dilemma that arises when people engage
in illicit sexual behaviour, while their capacity to behave freely has
been suspended. The idea of romantic love as something that
assails its victims from withouta form of infection, possession
and poison even (deriving, of course, from the word potion)
was as familiar in the folk literature of the rst millennium as it
is in popular culture today. Queen Iseult sighs in her chamber for
Tristram whom she so much desires, writes Gottfried von
SPLENDOURS AND
MISERIES OF THE
BRAIN: LOVE, CREATIVITY
AND THE QUEST FOR
HUMAN HAPPINESS
By Semir Zeki
Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell
Price: 16.99 (Paperback)
ISBN: 9781405185578
POETS ON PROZAC:
MENTAL ILLNESS,
TREATMENT AND THE
CREATIVE PROCESS
Edited by Richard M. Berlin
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Price: 14.50/$21.95
(Hard cover)
ISBN: 978-0-8018-8839-7
doi:10.1093/brain/awp180 Brain 2009: 132; 31873190 | 3187
Received and Accepted June 3, 2009
The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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Strassburg in his 12th century rendering of the story. She can
think of nothing else in her heart save loving Tristram. She has
no other wish or love, nor any other hope. And Tristram, of
course, is equally obsessed. Other early versions offer mutually
contradictory descriptions of the power and longevity of the
love potion. One declares that its effects last for the entire lives
of the lovers; another insists that it wears-off after 3 years, leaving
the lovers free to exercise their responsibility for continuing
their affair, or ending it.
Out of the proliferating stories, legends and mythologies of love
come well established denitions and differences. C. S. Lewis
celebrated literary history, Allegory of Love (1936) traced the
early Western ideals of romantic love from the 13th century
poem Roman de la Rose, with its notion of a knights choice of
a single love object, as in the choice of a single rose in a garden of
beautiful blooms. Lewis goes on to explore the difference between
sacred and profane love: the Christian love of agape, with its
self-sacricial, non-judgemental ideal of universal respect, as
opposed to the erotic romantic ideal of exclusive, self-interested
possession. Yet, understandings of love and relationships alter with
the wheel of history. How different Prof. Terry Eagletons secular
version of agape, severed from its religious origins, as the capacity
to allow others to ourish, expounded in his book The Meaning of
Life (2007). How different again, from the romantic tradition
traced by Lewis, is the version of romantic love promoted
by sociologist Prof. Anthony Giddens. In his notable essay
Transformation of Intimacy (1993), he argues that modern
notions of romantic love stem from the kinds of novels that
became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, eventually
shaping the romantic themes of 20th century movies and TV
soaps. These narratives, he maintains, brought external pressures
to bear on the formation and maintenance of love bonds. With
the breakdown of religion, however, feminism and the availability
of contraception and easy divorce, romantic lovehe maintains
has been shaped increasingly and narrowly by the emotions of the
two people concerned. In the familiar parlance of the post-modern
sociologist, Giddens asserts that lovers today behave as aneurs,
their commitment lasting as long as the feelings or the rewards.
Hence commitment, Giddens notes, becomes a scarce virtue,
yet we have gained by what he calls the democratization
of love. Such a viewlove as a serendipitous individual
emotion, uncomplicated by social, familial, imaginative, religious
or cultural forcesmay well make life simpler for neuroscientists
seeking simple correlates by rounding up the usual hormonal
suspects.
Yet for one highly cultural and literary scientist, the task of
dening love and its probable brain correlates are by no means
uncomplicated, reductive tasks. Semir Zekis courageous and
carefully considered book Splendours and Miseries of the Brain
starts out by accepting the existence of a repertoire of differences
between notions of love. He grants that we have an inherited
concept of what love should be, as well as an acquired one that
might be different from the former. He concedes, moreover, that
the troubadour concept of love is perhaps a little different from
that prevalent in Elizabethan England. It is obvious, he goes on,
that the sort of person that one might want, love at one stage in
ones life, might be different from the sort of person one may
desire later. But these differences, he insists, are trivial compared
with the more enduring concept of love celebrated in poetry and
art. That concept, he declares, can be summarized in one word,
unity. It is the desire of lovers to be unied with one another,
to become one. In support of his universalized unity-in-love
contention, Zeki cites a circuit of literary, religious and philo-
sophical texts, including Plato, Philo, the Upanishads, Virgil,
Dante and Rimbaud. But can this unity idea form a basis for a
neurobiological correlate for love? Love, he concedes, is of
course a complex emotion that includes and cannot be easily
separated from other impulses. He goes on to make the crucial,
albeit modestly grandiloquent, qualication: there is a general
neurological axiom (which I atter myself to have been the
source of, although it is likely that many others have had similar
thoughts) that if you can tell the difference it is because different
brain areas, or cells, are involved. This, one assumes, takes care of
such differences as depression and sadness. Nevertheless, holding
in mind his belief in love as unity, Zeki comes to the salient point:
neural structures that correlate with romantic love in all its
complexity are very distinctive even if they share brain areas
with other, closely linked, emotional states. He identies these
areas as in the cortex (the medial insula, anterior cingulate and
hippocampus) and the subcortex (parts of the striatum and
probably also the nucleus accumbens), which together constitute
core regions of the reward system. The thinking behind this is
that love creates feelings of exhilaration and euphoria, of a
happiness that is often unbearable and certainly indescribable.
The areas that are activated in response to such feelings, he
asserts, are largely co-extensive with those brain regions that
contain high concentrations of dopamine, a neuro-modulator
associated with reward, desire, addiction and euphoric states.
What is more: like oxytocin and vasopressin, dopamine is released
by the hypothalamus, a structure located deep in the brain and
functioning as a link between the nervous and endocrine systems.
The hypothalamus and pituitary gland are also involved as well as
discharges of blood especially during orgasm in both sexes.
We learn, moreover, of the importance of frontal, parietal and
middle temporal cortex as well as a large nucleus located at the
apex of the temporal lobe, known as the amygdala. Nor does
Zeki neglect the decrease in activity, or inactivation of certain
cortical zones in sexual performance. For example: the amygdala
is known to be engaged during fearful situations and its
de-activation, when subjects view pictures of their partners as
well as during human male ejaculation, implies a lessening of
fear. One cannot help wondering as to quite how scientic
these onanistic experiments are, not to mention what they have
to do, ultimately, with the focus of Zekis enquirylove. Other
experiments reveal that the all-engaging passion of romantic love
is mirrored by a suspension of judgement or a relaxation of
judgemental criteria by which we assess other people, which is a
function of the frontal cortex.
Granted that there may be at least remote correlations between
these localized natural chemicals and some forms of erotic
behaviour, how would they play out in relation to sacred love?
Zeki, citing Dante and Bernard of Clairvaux, argues that there is
ample evidence to show that loveas a desire to be wholly united
with the love objectis as common in the realms of religious
3188 | Brain 2009: 132; 31873190 Book Review

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experience as it is in romantic love. He maintains, moreover, that
there are even coincidences between mystical states and sexual
orgasm, using as his exemplar not only the writings of Teresa of
Avila but Berninis notorious statue in RomeThe Ecstasy of Saint
Teresa, the great saint looking for all the world as if she is in an
erotic delirium.
Zekis book is wide in its sympathies and sources, and it
deserves attention as part of a fascinating enquiry set to continue
for many years to come. Where it suffers, in my view, is in the
failure to teach differences in elds where he betrays less insight
perhaps than in his chosen scientic expertise. Apart from the fact
that the Ecstasy is a pure Bernini fantasy, the case he makes on
the basis of the writings of Bernard and Teresa illustrates these
difculties. In the realms of mystical theology, the kinds of
contemplative prayer experienced by these two prolic writers
have been long recognized as exceptional rather than the norm
he assumes. In fact, there are whole libraries of ascetical and
mystical theology counselling precisely against the orid ways of
prayer practiced by the sublimated eroticism of a Teresa and John
of the cross who routinely employed profane love metaphors
to explicate the ineffable and the sublime.
This brings me to a general weakness pervading neurobiological
explanations of complex human behaviour: namely, a failure to
address the nature and power of imagination as the fundamental
impetus of human relationships. Does the imagination reside and
reign in the brain, or does it reside, as Wittgenstein argued on the
surface of our faces, in the light of our eyes, in the resonance of
our voices lipsin other words, in the world in which we live and
have our being? As John Henry Newman puts it: The heart is
commonly reached. . . through the imagination, by means of
direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by
history, by description. Persons inuence us, voices melt us,
looks subdue us, deeds iname us. The chemistry, then, is
subsidiary to imagination as the molecules of paint on canvas
are subsidiary to a painting.
The neglect of imagination in any discussion of powerful human
emotions, such as love, is as much a failure in the realms of the
humanities as it is within psychology and neurobiology. Under the
inuence of literary theory, of the kind expounded by Jacques
Derrida, emanating from France in the early 1970s, the death
of the imagination was condently announced as a new form
of enlightenment in which the author became no more than a
series of multiple drafts. The rich critical commentaries on imagi-
native literature and the faculties of imagination, running from the
18th century down to I.A. Richards and Frank Kermode in the
1960s, were discarded in the mania for critical deconstruction.
By the 1980s, neuroscientically informed philosophers-of-mind,
such as Prof. Dan Dennett, were following the lead of the literary
theorists, the neuroscientists and articial intelligence specialists in
localizing, mechanizing and explaining the mindbrain
relationshipnot least consciousness. Hence, Stephen Pinkers
latest book on metaphor and the imagination, The Stuff of
Thought, could traverse 500 pages without quoting a single
poet, save Shakespeare ironically, or critic of imagination of
the past 200 years. What is the need of aesthetics when the
mindbrain works like a computer? What is the need of mystical
theology when one can localize and identify ecstasies, sacred and
profane, with the release of neurotransmitter substances? Which
leads us to a matter of increasing interest in the question of
pharmaceutical enhancements and procurable emotionsa
modern day version perhaps of the Tristram and Iseult story.
An example of Zekis neglect of wider differences in mystical
experiences is illustrated by a correspondence from the 1950s
between the American writer on mystical prayer, Thomas
Merton, and Aldous Huxley who believed that mystical states
could be procured by drugs such as mescaline. Conversely,
Merton held that authentic states of love and mysticism cannot
be procured for one very profound reason:
What I would call a supernatural and mystical experience . . . has
in its very essence some note of a direct spiritual contact of two
liberties, a kind of ash or spark which ignites an intuiton . . .
plus something much more which I can only describe as
personal, in which God is known not as an object or as
Him up there or Him in everything nor as the All but as
the Biblical expression I AM, or simply AM. . . this is not the kind
of intuition that smacks of anything procurable because it is
a presence of a Person and depends on the liberty of that
Person.
This is a far cry from Zekis sense of love, sacred or profane, as a
loss or annihilation of self in unity with the love object. It is about
the preservation of personal integrity in a loving relationship, and
an act of choice on the part of both independent parties.
The unprocurable aspect of mystical experience, and indeed
love, is perhaps less relevant to Zekis scheme of things than to
a curious collection of autobiographical essays on treatments for
mental illness and the creative process, titled Poets on Prozac
(edited by Richard M. Berlin). The 16 poets featured here hardly
amount to an organized thesis on the topic, but the contributors
are united in their insistence that being traumatized, depressed or
psychoactive, is emphatically no aid to artistic creativity. So if
treatment is on offer, take it!
There are two problems with this kind of exercise. The rst is to
do with the importance of life experience in artistic achievement,
including experience of darkness. Should the traumas of life out of
which great literature has emerged be medicalized as suitable for
treatment; or regarded as a natural and necessary condition of
the work?
Dostoyevsky suffered the loss of both parents (it is believed that
his father was murdered) and in his thirties he spent 5 years in
prison, including several months on death row, and 4 years as a
convict in a labour camp. He was an epileptic, a state of mental
health not helped by being subjected to a mock execution, facing
a ring squad from which he was reprieved at the last moment.
Clearly, there is a profound link between his great novels and
his experience. It is widely accepted, moreover, that the form of
epilepsy he suffered aided an extraordinary capacity for making
imaginative connections. Whether his writing would have
beneted from psychotropic medicine or anti-depressants is
perhaps unknown and unknowable; but it seems doubtful.
The poet informants of this collection, however, all regard
themselves as somehow recovering, medically, from experiences
they would rather have not endured. Jesse Milne, for example,
Book Review Brain 2009: 132; 31873190 | 3189

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reports her sense of guilt as a bad Baptist kid, her shame over
a failed rst marriage, her resort to alcohol abuse with more
concomitant guilt, followed, nally by this: I feel guilty for
taking Prozac, which seems to be helping but feels like cheating.
What is important in this dreary catalogue is that being lifted from
depression through talk-therapy and an ever popular selective
serotonin re-uptake inhibitor has enabled her to write. I began
seeing a therapist last spring. And in May, at a writing residency in
Wyoming, the darkness began to lift. One can only hope that her
depression stays lifted and that she keeps writing. But is there not
a difference between writing as therapy and writing as art? Again,
the issue of imagination arises. Dostoyevskys novels were not so
much a kind of therapy for his various traumas, as the exercise of
a unique, dynamic imagination, creating a world with its own
internal, artistic integrity.
One of the strangest, and most original, contributions
to the collection is by Caterina Eppolita, a recovering anorexic,
who manages to see poetry itself as a form of medicalized
syndrome:
Poetic form is an anorexic form of writing. Literally, poetry is
the thinnest form of writing. Poetry is so thin that by its very
denition it cannot t across the page. So instead of restricting
calories, I was restricting words. Instead of controlling what was
left on my plate, I was controlling what was left on the page.
Instead of spending hours trying to rid myself of extra food,
I was spending hours ddling with words trying to rid myself
of verbal excess. Still there was that obsessive drive for
perfection with each additional revision.
I suppose Eppolita is right; up to a point good poetry is econom-
ical. As Aristotle puts it, the right words in the right place.
Yet surely one would not describe a poem like Paradise Lost as
thinmore like a wide and endless stair carpet. But the real
question is whether Eppolitas poetry is any good, and I have to
confess that I rather liked it if for no other reason than it was
indeed extremely, thinly, brief.
One supposes that it is possible that a depressive person might
decline treatment in the belief that it would ruin their writing
talent. But those who have suffered serious depression consistently
conrm that any treatment promising relief is better than none.
My late friend, Prof. Stuart Sutherland, author of Breakdown,
used to say that, offered the choice between cancer and depres-
sion, he would take the cancer. The contributors to this collection
generally concur. And while many of them confess to having
taken drugs or alcohol in the past, they see their medication,
and talk-therapy as a means of achieving a state of mood
and health approximating normality. And that teaches us the
difference between taking Prozac for therapy, and taking Prozac
as a means of procuring literary talent.
John Cornwell
Jesus College, Cambridge
Advance Access publication September 8, 2009
3190 | Brain 2009: 132; 31873190 Book Review

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