State, Sweat and Pleasure in a Neural Reward Circuit

The Prairie Vole, featured in a story published recently in the AP is studied more than any rodent out side of mice and rats because it takes part in that most sacred human behavior. The species a engages in monogamous social pairings that resembles the pairing of human sexual partners. In that species and in ours, love forges molecules of social complexity through a tacit neural contract.

But unlike the English Philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbs, this modern biology implies the ultimate in materialism and shows directly that chemicals can construct the foundation of love. What is more, the same brain system, here implicated in voles, also has a phenotype in humans. An artifact of a primal love, the center is profound and powerful but also poisonous and perverted; it serves both beauty and a whore. The mesolimbic reward circuit is a group of neurons that release dopamine, that neurotransmitter which encodes pleasure and Parkinson's, hopes and habits, and here, love and psychotropic chemical addiction

This work was presented in a course on genetic neurobiology at Brown University, taught by professor Giliad Barnea. A former Israeli solder, the man seems like a giant especially when he is compared to the mice he studies.

They had it coming for scheduling this topic on valentines day. In a prepared lecture, I told the class that pair bonding is the root of capitalist ideology, the stump of religion, and like opium to the masses.

Nonetheless, there is a real study of vole neurobiology that centers on a series of experiments performed in the lab of Young and Wang (2004). These scientists marked the peptides Oxytocin (not to be confused with the synthetic opiate derivative) and Arginine Vasopressin (AVP) as pheromones that dictate a repertoire of behavioral commands. In the lab and in nature, these chemicals switch voles from polygamous rodents into wild romantics who remember love for a life time.

This animal love is material needs and chemical desires. But defined by its boundaries, all love is pains and promises, specially formulated to control us. In the very way that they delight us, at the very moment that they dig us the the deepest yet the highest euphoria, and most of all in those seconds when they decide that nothing else matters, then, men women and men and women become tacit in a domination.

In political theory, the social contract is an experimental construction, a thought test where men put themselves on the shoulders of some ideal type yet impossible ancestor. From thought experiment, they extrapolate an ever present force of chaos implicit in the relations of men. In the contract, men exchange their rights for protection, nature for order, freedom for slavery.

In the contract State catches man. It is by the contract that a corrupt city may is tolerated because he is a friend to each, even while a parasite of all. It is by the contract that a dead end job gives enough to live in poverty, but squashes all hopes and dreams. It is by the contract that a system of prolitarianism lays rooted in the small oppressions.

In modern political thought, social contract theory influences both the far right and the far left. It is at the heart of neoliberalism and guides that invisible genius, the market. It is the parent of freedom but also the project of ideology.

Yet as in man, also in nature.

In an analysis of behavior and brain complexity, Dunbar and Shultz (2007) argue that another social contract occurs when animals live in pairs. Within a group of related species, animals that engage in pair bonding tend towards a larger brain than those of relatives which exhibit other mating strategies. Dunbar and Shulltz contend that an evolutionary force makes bonded individuals smarter because, contracted by love, they are better able to cooperate in a social system. Is not the brain in love that most ripe for prostitution to society?

But make it explicit here, this is not a genetic analysis of humanity. Neural plasticity is the transformation of man by his environment. The physiology of a brain is controlled by its history, its beliefs, its comrades and its master.

To be sure, the capacity for human complexity, that intricate wiring which we connect as worst fears and greatest dreams, this is the product of miracle evolution. But just as propaganda can be written on the same paper as poetry, and words themselves are nothing but the place holders for their real meanings, the human brain is the raw material which by living, we transform into art and argument, romance and horror, thought and forgotten, commodity and slave.

Genes do not encode an ideology, but paper is not the laws that are written on it. Our brains are the media of society. This is the view that pair bond evolved as a means of organizing social complexity. By creating a molecule out of atoms, pair bonding forms the crucial bridge between individual gain and group well being.

Economics terms these relations "public goods" and considers them to be the one great failure of the market. But the pair bond, a genetic phenotype, serves in animals the role of the state in modern society.

In the circuitry of the mesolimbic reward system, that highest emotion is manifest in a soup of cells and ions. Best represented in the diagram, these neuclei are arranged so that together with pleasure felt during copulation (1), pheromonic signals detected by the olfactory system get stored in the nulceaus accumbans, the prefrontal cortex, the lateral septum, and the amygdala. Here, written in the strength of synaptic embraces, the physical root of love is manifest.

But in humans, this same dopaminergic pathway from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleaus accumbans is also the site of addiction. These same cells store our most intimate relations and our most oppressive objectification. With that same potency that lover binds to lover, parent binds to child, brother binds to brother, drug addiction makes man object, chemicals master.