• Question: Are we supposed to believe that love and other emotions are just chemicals?

    Asked by altomo101 to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      I am sure that you could reduce all human sensations and emotions to a description involving electrical impulses and chemical gradients if you wished to!

    • Photo: Mark Vesey

      Mark Vesey answered on 20 Mar 2011:

      I personally don’t think so – they’re much more than that to me. I don’t think our feelings can be completely explained by the activities of chemicals & hormones alone.

    • Photo: Melanie Stefan

      Melanie Stefan answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Yes, you can think of love as being “just chemicals”. The same way as you can think of the scent of a rose as just a bunch of molecules, a sunset as a change in the refraction angle of sunlight in the atmosphere or a comet as a big lump of dirt. As far as I am concerned, that doesn’t take anything away from the wonder and beauty and fascination of it all!

    • Photo: Luna Munoz

      Luna Munoz answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Yes! Just because there is a process by which our cells communicate to us how we feel doesn’t make it any less amazing when it happens to us! One of the hormones that is being studied in relation to human connections (like love between partners or between mother and child) is oxytocin. Now we know that oxytocin makes us look at the eyes of other people, so now we kind of get an understanding of why we say “the eyes are the windows to the soul.”

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