I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

Candie wrote: »

While I appreciate the information, I know of another explanation for the whole love thing that I much prefer.

Magic.

I'm sure that magic is easily explained with chemistry, too

Something to be careful of is that these chemicals are correlated with these emotions, but not causal. There are people who feel intensely in love but show no signs of elevated levels of any dopamine etc when studied clinically.

Also the chemicals themselves are quite complex, Dopamine has a tendency to show up when one concentrates and focuses on anything. So for example you might be seeing Dopamine because you're focused on the person, rather than it being the reason you are focused on them.

Of course this ties into deeper issues like the "binding problem" etc where we don't know how or in what way the mind and brain are connected, i.e. from where your first person experiences come.

EDIT:
A decent explanation:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/10/27/is-love-possible-without-serotonin-oxytocin-and-dopamine/#695abe537d00

Fourier wrote: »

Something to be careful of with is that these chemicals are correlated with these emotions, but not causal. There are people who feel intensely in love but show no signs of elevated levels of any dopamine etc when studied clinically.

Also the chemicals themselves are quite complex, Dopamine has a tendency to show up when one concentrates and focuses on anything. So for example you might be seeing Dopamine because you're focused on the person, rather than it being the reason you are focused on them.

Of course this ties into deeper issues like the "binding problem" etc where we don't know how or in what way the mind and brain are connected, i.e. from where your first person experiences come.

EDIT:
A decent explanation:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/10/27/is-love-possible-without-serotonin-oxytocin-and-dopamine/#695abe537d00

I know that the whole affair is more complex than my explanation above.
But it was conceived as a Valentines hangover (in a good way) and meant as fun.

I'm still convinced that all our emotions are interlinked with chemistry. One way or another.

Carry wrote: »

I know that the whole affair is more complex than my explanation above.
But it was conceived as a Valentines hangover (in a good way) and meant as fun.

Oh don't worry Carry, it's not so much to say anything is wrong with your post, just pointing out the complexities of the area. Never take what I say as a critique, think of me as an autocorrect robot

I'm still convinced that all our emotions are interlinked with chemistry. One way or another.

Oh they are, it's nature of the linkage we don't know, i.e. which causes which, when, how many ways can one emotion be caused, etc

Probably the answer can vary wildly depending on the emotion, in some cases the chemical might cause the emotion, in other cases the other way around.

New Home wrote: »

Unless your name is Marvin and you're a paranoid android.

I had to google Marvin, found a pizza place and this on Urban Dictionary:

Marvin is a generally sweet guy, falls in love easily. He's soooooo funny, he can be cocky.
That guy doesn't always make the smartest decisions, though.
He has a great body physique, amazing talent at making out, most likely tall.
He has a nice cock. =
Marvin is one of those guys you'll never , ever forget. He's an amazing friend, boyfriend...just a great companion of the opposite sex.

Can you please elaborate?

Ah, looked further: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy! Not on my cultural radar, I'm afraid.

Fourier wrote: »

Oh don't worry Carry, it's not so much to say anything is wrong with your post, just pointing out the complexities of the area. Never take what I say as a critique, think of me as an autocorrect robot

I always take your comments as constructive critique. And please keep doing that. I knew while writing this love chemistry comment somewhere someone knows the proper science behind all that. I'm glad it was you because I trust you know your stuff (I'm going all dopamine now... )

Fourier wrote: »

Oh they are, it's nature of the linkage we don't know, i.e. which causes which, when, how many ways can one emotion be caused, etc

Probably the answer can vary wildly depending on the emotion, in some cases the chemical might cause the emotion, in other cases the other way around.

In this love case I think that originally the hormones came first and created situations to ensure that the procreation of a species or/and the food provision is secured. After all the idea of romantic love in our modern European society was only invented a few hundred years ago.

Though here you are right, because then it gets complicated.

Looking at my cat that entered my life as a starved and injured little kitten a few years ago, and that I never wanted (had a beloved dog), that little bugger made me fall for him badly eventually.

I didn't find another home for him so I kept him, brought him to the vet, fed him with the finest food (:rolleyes:) and he just charmed me with his affection. He cuddles up (oxytocin), makes me feel happy when he is happy (endorphines), makes me silly when I'm worried because he is out and about all night doing whatever cats do (dopamine, adrenaline).

So how come? I wasn't "in love" with him in the first place, but eventually with his behaviour the neurotransmitters got working.

And no, it wasn't love magic, I resisted a long time, it was his behaviour that created those hormones/neurotransmitters that made sure I cared for him.
Bloody bugger. He is like furry chocolate...

I know, scientifically it's even more complicated. I have degrees in psychology, sociology and political science and still know feck all how people tick.

Sorry for the delay, this required a bit of thought to write without a neurology info dump. Note I am not a neurologist, this is from reading neurology texts and talking to neurologists. Also my knowledge of biochemistry is an extension of my knowledge of chemistry from a physicists perspective and might not accurately reflect how a true biochemist would view things. This is especially important as currently we don't know if chemistry reduces to physics (a topic about which several books have been written)

Carry wrote: »

In this love case I think that originally the hormones came first and created situations to ensure that the procreation of a species or/and the food provision is secured. After all the idea of romantic love in our modern European society was only invented a few hundred years ago.

Though here you are right, because then it gets complicated.

Looking at my cat that entered my life as a starved and injured little kitten a few years ago, and that I never wanted (had a beloved dog), that little bugger made me fall for him badly eventually.

I didn't find another home for him so I kept him, brought him to the vet, fed him with the finest food (:rolleyes:) and he just charmed me with his affection. He cuddles up (oxytocin), makes me feel happy when he is happy (endorphines), makes me silly when I'm worried because he is out and about all night doing whatever cats do (dopamine, adrenaline).

So how come? I wasn't "in love" with him in the first place, but eventually with his behaviour the neurotransmitters got working.

And no, it wasn't love magic, I resisted a long time, it was his behaviour that created those hormones/neurotransmitters that made sure I cared for him.
Bloody bugger. He is like furry chocolate...

I know, scientifically it's even more complicated. I have degrees in psychology, sociology and political science and still know feck all how people tick.

So the first thing to say is that Neurobiology is a complex subject (duh! you say). I'll start with an example that isn't Neurotransmitters like Dopamine.

A good example is the so called "optimism bias" humans are supposed to experience, the idea that we are unrealistically optimistic. This was originally supposed to be shown by studies from T. Sharot and her team around 2011 and is often mentioned in discussions about human cognitive biases. However later authors found that the same methods would also find a hypothetical perfectly rational agent to be "too optimistic" and so there was doubt that humans actually were too optimistic. Even later studies found that if there is an optimism bias it's not a result of us thinking we are special, i.e. "I'm going to win that car, get that scholarship, get that lad to go out with me", but just an accidental biproduct of a slight error in how we sample data for learning. Then an even later study showed that that "slight error" in our learning varied from person to person in such a way that groups of people balanced each other out so that the group as a whole learned extremely efficiently. A bunch of people biased in a variety of ways resulted in a group that achieved solutions faster than a group of 'unbiased' individuals:

Lefebvre et al, Nature Hum. Behav. 1:0067(2017) wrote:

An intriguing possibility is that multiple ‘sub-optimal’ reinforcement learning strategies are maintained in the natural population to ensure an ‘optimal’ learning repertoire, flexible enough to solve, at the group level, the value learning and exploration–exploitation trade-off

So in the popular media what one hears as
"Humans are overly optimistic"
is actually:
"Humans potentially possess evolved distributed learning biases to optimise group learning strategies, in certain individuals this learning bias may at a high level result in overly optimistic thinking when isolated from the group as an individual"

Such complexities are at play in all supposed human cognitive biases, this is just the simplest. Often the original authors had a mathematically flawed or overly simplified model of "being rational". Also the problem is that there are many mathematical ways of modelling rationality. A well known example is the research of Z. J. Wang who studied the human bias known as the "carry over" effect. I don't want to overload the post and explain what this is, it doesn't matter too much, it was just my entry into the subject since it connected with my area. When modeled using what's called Kolmogorov probability (the kind used in betting on horses and most other applications of probability) this behaviour was irrational. However when the probabilities were changed to be more like those in Quantum Theory the "carry over" effect was perfectly rational.

So cognitive biases are subtle, debated and hard to pin down. You'd think that being rational would be easy to assess, not so.

The function of neurotransmitters is 100 times as subtle, debated and hard to pin down.

Imagine a sequence of connected computers that all day long control a massive farm and communicated via over 500 different signal frequencies. When you ask the computer cluster to describe the cows, you notice that the cluster on the NorthEast of the farm starts communicating 1.4 times faster with the SouthWestern one and ups the strength of the 2.4 GHz signal (Bluetooth) and lowers the strength of signals between 1.1 and 1.3 GHz. Now imagine you're somebody who doesn't actually know how computers work, you can just measure signal strengths and frequencies and where the signals are going. That's were we are with the brain.

Dopamine is simply one of over 500 Neurotransmitters. It's the analogue of the 2.4 GHz signal. It's upped in some situations in some people. In certain situations it's upped in nearly all people. However what does it do exactly? Is it the cause or just the mechanism used? We don't know. My computer uses bluetooth frequencies to talk to my microphone and wifi frequencies to talk to my modem, however Bluetooth frequencies don't cause Skype to work they're one mechanism or part of its functioning. Similarly with Dopamine and its associated behaviours.

It's even more difficult when connecting these things to experienced emotions, due to the Subjective Unity of Perception problem, the 2013 article of J. Feldman of Caltech university describes this well:

Feldman wrote:

At the other extreme, the Subjective Unity of Perception (Third section) is an instance of the mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) and remains mysterious. There is no plausible neural story on why we experience the world in the way that we do, although there are promising results on the neural correlates of consciousness.

Biases are complex, Neurotransmitters far more so. Your actual experienced feelings? Currently off the map in terms of "Here be dragons"-level ignorance.

The Mars rover Opportunity just finished its 15 year mission. The original plan was for 90 sols (Martian days); it actually ended up doing 5352 sols. That's 8 Martian years.

It is the rover with the most driving distance, either on the Moon or Mars, having driven over 45km. The Soviet lunar rover Lunokhod 2 held the record previously, at just under 40km.

It officially ended its mission on the 12th of February, having been non-responsive since June last year. It's thought that a storm might have caused its solar panels to become covered in sand, starving it of power.






(comic for another Mars rover, Spirit, but the sentiment works

I read a National Geographic article the other day about early NASA Earth and Moon satellites and the photos they took. It has never occurred to me that in the 60s, these satellites they used to take photos of the moon and of places on earth had to use actual film. It's obvious when you think about it, but it just never occurred to me.

The CORONA program was a spying operation taking satellite photos of the Soviet Union. To get the film back, the satellite would drop a heat-shielded capsule, complete with thrusters and parachutes, with the roll of film inside. An airplane would then hook the parachute as it came down; failing that, a helicopter would retrieve the capsule from the ocean.

For the Lunar observer satellites in the lead up to the Apollo program, they couldn't send the actual film back. Instead, the film was developed directly on the satellite. Once developed, a scanner recorded the exact brightness levels of the photograph, in tiny sections. The levels were then transmitted via radio back to Earth, where the data would be analysed, allowing NASA to re-create the images. Some of the images are stunning, it's crazy to think they were taken in the 1960s, developed on a satellite by a completely mechanised process, and then sent back to Earth via radio waves. The film used was 70mm Kodak film, which is really high resolution. The vertical lines are an artefact of the scanning and image recreation processes.

45km covered by the robot in over 5000 days doesnt seem very impressive?

Chancer3001 wrote: »

45km covered by the robot in over 5000 days doesnt seem very impressive?

It's not. However, considering it's 45km over rough terrain while being remote controlled with an 8 minute lag, and with no possibility of a do-over if it got stuck, it's bloody marvelous.

No fantastic stuff to impart, just a wow! This is a great thread.

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Did the invention of romantic love suddenly create these hormones? All that happened a few hundred years ago in Europe was that aristocrats, to a limited extent, started to accept love marriages rather than arranged marriages. I suppose that peasants just fell in love.

Even in countries with arranged marriages and polygamy love stories abound in fiction and in real life, for instance the Taj Mahal is a monument to love.

Some nice Chinese love stories here.

http://www.chinawhisper.com/10-greatest-chinese-love-stories-ever/

Love is very much over-rated. Respect in a relationship beats love for me.