A leading neuroscientist has predicted that research on the effects of Oxytocin will lead to the development of love potions in the near future. Pointing to growing evidence of the role that the hormone plays in producing feelings of empathy and in social bonding, Dr Larry Young claims that oxytocin nasal sprays will soon be available to couples to assist in maintaining a loving relationship, as well as to treat interpersonal relationship disorders such as autism.
“I don’t think that it’s overstating it,” Dr. Young said. “As we know more about the chemistry…. I think it is very likely that we’ll be able to tweak our emotions, like love, through neurochemistry. We already tweak our consciousness with lots of other things: alcohol, drugs. If we could get the right mixture, we could enhance love, or turn it off.”
Dr. Young added a note of caution – if a chemical like Oxytocin can switch love on, another chemical could equally turn it off.
I thought it would be useful to summarise why Oxytocin is attracting so much scientific and media interest.
Oxytocin is a hormone, and therefore, a naturally occurring substance produced by the human body. Women have this hormone in their systems to a greater level than men, and it has been found to increase during and after child birth, giving scientists the first indication that the hormone may play a role in the psychological bonding between mother and child. Further research has found increased levels of Oxytocin are associated with feelings of less stress and greater trust and empathy, leading the hormone to earn the media tag of ‘the love hormone’ or ‘the cuddle hormone’.
There has recently been an explosion of research across various institutes across the world seeking to confirm the role of Oxytocin in creating empathic psychological states and its consequent possible benefits in treating psychological problems ranging from social anxiety to autism and schizophrenia.
It is unlikely that we will be seeing Oxytocin drugs or pills anytime soon, as it has been found that the only effective delivery method to get the hormone inside the blood stream is to inhale it through the nose. Thus, it is likely that any Oxytocin medical or commercial uses of Oxytocin in the near future will come in the form of Oxytocin nasal sprays.
Here is a brief list of what Oxytocin Nasal Sprays might do for individuals and for society :
Reduce social anxiety and shyness in individuals
Treat the symptoms of Autism and asperger’s syndrome
Treat the secondary and possibly even the primary symptoms (delusions) of paranoid schizophrenics
Help couples maintain relationships
Reduce levels of stress
Increase attractiveness to the opposite sex
Help businessmen make sales (by increasing trust and empathy)
Help people to pass interviews
Reduce anti-social behaviour in schools, crowds etc
Be (misused) by advertisers and politicians seeking to ‘sell’ their goods or promises
It’s not difficult to see why interest in Oxytocin is growing, not only are there big bucks to be made from successful commercial and medical applications, the hormone could have radical effects on society and culture itself. If you think back to the changes wrought in the 1960′s due to the widespread use of mood altering drugs such as LSE and consider that Oxytocin might become a safe and legal substance providing the positive social effects and more from such drugs, without the negative ones, then we really could be on the brink of a new flower power era.
A study carried out by the University of Michigan found that caregivers tended to have increased life expectancy. What is interesting about this study is that the results have been interpreted as indicating that the physiological benefits associated with caregiving bring are responsible for the increase and that those physiological benefits are caused by an increase in oxytocin.
Brown believes that the decreased risk of death comes from physiological benefits from caregiving instead of psychological ones. The authors suggest that stress regulation may play a role in this benefit. Helping others is associated with a release of oxytocin, a hormone that may help buffer the effects of stress, Brown explained.
We can talk about the possible medical benefits of using Oxytocin nasal sprays to treat disorders such as autism and schizophrenia but 9 out of 10 men want to know : will Oxytocin make me attractive to women?
Raise the Oxytocin levels of you and your partner in the stressful Christmas period by making sure you touch and sweet talk each other every day.
“Everyone knows how important it is to spend time with their partner, but 24 hours can go by and you realize you’ve barely noticed each other,” says sexologist Trina Read, author of Till Sex Do Us Part.
“During times of big stress, dealing with all the stuff around the holidays, make sure you touch your partner every day because it raises oxytocin levels.”
More evidence of the role that Oxytocin plays in regulating social behaviour has been uncovered by researchers at the University of Zurich. By giving a dose of the hormone Oxytocin to arguing couples via a nasal spray, they found that the stress hormone Cortisol would be reduced and that conflict levels were less than in those couples merely given a placebo.
Scientific investigation into the mystery of love might for some be analysing the rainbow to an uncomfortable extent, but for some researchers, the process of falling (and staying) in love, is as facinating and explorable as any other human phenomenon. Oregon scientist Larry Sherman has studied the neurological changes and hormone releases that love triggers (or should that be triggers love?) and, surprise surprise, he has found Oxytocin to be amongst the chief culprits! Primarily, it is beginning to appear that Oxytocin, ‘the love hormone’, gives us the urge to stay in love, to be committed to a particular partner.
“So could we make a love potion that makes you only monogamous, right?” asks Sherman.
Readers of this blog will be amongst the first to learn when it will be hitting the shelves..stay tuned Mrs Clinton!
Eric Hollander, a psychiatrist and expert on autism, is to give a talk on the latest research on the possible use of oxytocin in the treatment of autism. Hollander himself has recently led a team of researchers which found that oxytocin enhanced the ability to recognize emotions such as anger or happiness in the tone of a speaker’s voice. The talks will be held at the Seaver and New York Autism Center of Excellence at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York on November the 12th.
The corallation between the reduction of feelings of stress and the raising of oxytocin in the blood stream is seemingly borne out in a new study almost every day. There can be little remaining doubt that oxytocin is the chemical instrument that the body uses when it wants and needs to ‘feel good’. From reduced stress, lowered blood pressure, decreased social inhibitions, the evidence relating these to increased oxytocin levels can no longer be ignored. Just imagine the power to transform lives oxytocin may give us when we can efficiently manufacture and transport it into the body ourselves whenever we want.
The following link is to a story concerning a new study showing that touching and physical contact decreases a range of stress related symptoms whilst simultaneously increasing levels of oxytocin.
Oxytocin is appearing so often in the media of late, and getting everybody from scientists to entrepreneurs excited, is because of the power it might have to change both individuals and perhaps even society itself. An easily manufactured, in fact naturally produced, substance that has the potential to make anyone who comes into contact with it more trusting of other people. A possible transformative cure for children blighted with autism or adult suffering the mental torture of social phobia, perhaps even conditions such as schizophrenia. On the other hand, the potential for misuse of such a drug hardly needs to be spelled out. When you consider the lengths and costs that politicians and businesses go to make the voter or consumer ‘trust them’, then you can already hear them itching to get their hands on this stuff.
On a wider scale, if oxytocin does indeed live up to its present hype, it could perhaps generate social and cultural change on a scale even greater than that reputably triggered by the widespread use amongst young people of the original ‘love drugs’, such as acid and LSD, in the 60′s. A drug that could be used by a nefarious government to placate and manipulate a docile population or something truly transformative and liberating that could turn society into a lasting version of what the flower people could only dream about in the ‘summer of love’..
