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Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships
by Kayt Sukel. Free Press, 2012
Consider this ubiquitous yet poorly understood affliction: love. It is likely to cause drastic changes in behavior, difficulty concentrating and rapid mood swings. Even after it ends, the sufferer gains no respite. Instead more erratic behavior emerges, and the afflicted often report a loss of appetite, crying and obsessive thoughts. Yet we all want it.
In Dirty Minds, journalist Kayt Sukel takes on this nearly universal brain scrambler. She tackles provocative questions to determine why love can relieve us of our sanity, why we seem to pick the wrong people, and why the turmoil of a relationship can induce feelings resembling both love and hate. She sprinkles in personal anecdotes from her recent divorce, her trials on the dating scene and advice from her friends.
On her investigative journey to uncover the truth about the brain in love, Sukel also interviews scientists and combs through the literature. A highlight of the book comes when Sukel bravely agrees to participate in a study that requires her to bring herself to orgasm in the claustrophobic confines of a functional MRI machine while researchers look on.
Dirty Minds is not short on moments of insight, such as when Sukel discovers that an orgasm involves as many as 30 different areas of the brain. She learns that cheating likely has a genetic link, which lends some credence to her married friend’s idea that his biology requires him to take lovers. Moreover, she finds that many of the same parts in the brain become active when people feel both love and hate, a confusing phenomenon she admits she got to know well during the dissolution of her marriage.
Sukel, however, is quick to caution that although today’s studies on the subject of love may indeed explain a thing or two about one’s patterns in relationships, they cannot serve as an instruction manual any more than DNA discoveries can predict the diseases you will contract. In other words, when it comes to love, much of the mystery remains. That, Sukel says, is just the way she likes it, even if it means her newly single future will involve plenty of awkward dates and false starts.
A fun and insightful read, Dirty Minds manages to evoke the feel of both a wine-laden conversation with an old friend and a great neuroscience lecture from your favorite college professor.
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7 Comments
Add CommentA fascinating topic, one that has preoccupied poets and philosophers for eons. Another good book about the same topic is "Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love," published in 1979. There's a big literature out there: Wikipedia has an informative entry on "limerence," for example.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI forgot to mentn the author of Love and Limerence: it was Dorothy Tennov.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI told my wife, "Finally a book about me", she took a look and replied "Not to worry, that there was not 30 different areas of our combined brains left". Hmmm .... .... was she insulting me?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is a excellent book!
The problsm may have to do with trying to maintain an unantural monogamy and a social system coercing one into it... given that humans can have sex all the time not just during a perisod of fertility it seems like sex and its associated emotions may have an important function for developing multiple interconnectivity but monogamy reinforces a survival strategy of war instead... we seem to be in an internal state of war with oursleves and our social environment over this. So the make love not war movement at just time when birth control and ability to assign paternity arrives but its impact has been driven back by the old romantic monogamous model. Group marriage may be much more useful in the coming age allowing more shared resources and a flexible parent to child ratio and less fears of abandonment and associated jealousy due to difficulty of finding mates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wish people would proofread their postings. All the errors, run on sentences, and so on, make me think of my long years reading student papers when I was the first and last person to read the epistle at hand. Maxsmart (what a narcisstic handle!) might have an idea in there, but it's so poorly written that it's hard to discern.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would have expected an enlightened science writer not to fall prey to the nonsensical Christian conflation of sex and dirt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood point! Why DID she choose that title, anyway?
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