The neurobiology of love is not as simple to figure out as one may think. Throughout time, researchers have studied the prairie vole when looking to discover more about what exactly is going on in our brains when we fall in love. The prairie vole is used because they form monogamous relationships, in which they show empathy for and display actions that we would describe as love. The monogamy of prairie voles was tested and proven nearly 50 years ago, and since then, we have been researching prairie voles to discover the neurobiology of their love.
When first looking at exactly what happens in a prairie vole’s head when they “fall in love” the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin were found to play a key role in the bonding of prairie voles. These hormones work just as any hormone we have learned about in this AP Biology class does, they are peptides that bind to receptors, resulting in the change of the shape of the receptor, resulting in a change within the cell. This signal caused by oxytocin and vasopressin has been shown have the ability to change a solitary or polygamous prairie vole, into one that forms a monogamous bond with another prairie vole. This is unique to other voles, as the receptors for these hormones in prairie voles are in a separate location to those within other types of voles. This discovery opened up a doorway into understanding how the location and abundance of hormones receptors can affect the bonding of animals or even ourselves. In order to truly understand this though, researchers had to find a way to manipulate the ways that genes encode these receptors.
Vasopressin Oxytocin
Although this phenomenon has been well studied in the past, the invention of CRISPR technology has opened many more doors into studying the ways that these hormone receptors work. Throughout time, it has been accepted that oxytocin in the true hormone that controls the bonds of these prairie voles. But, after a research team used CRISPR to “delete the gene that encodes the oxytocin receptor in prairie vole embryos,” it was found that the genetically modified prairie voles were still able to form bonds as easily as their non-modified brethren. Scientists are now trying to really figure out what the biology of the love of these voles is, as their original hypothesis that oxytocin controls it has been found incorrect. Scientists are now looking to hormones such as vasopressin, to see if that was the missing part of the puzzle they need. This discovery that oxytocin is not the entire basis of the bonding of prairie voles does show that as usual, love is less complex than we may think, and that they must look at the neurobiology of love as having a much bigger scale than before thought of.
Currently, scientists are aiming to look at the activity of genes in the brain to further look to what causes love bonds. Recent studies like this have shown that after the voles have mated, genes important to memory and learning are turned on, and that their brain’s reward structure turns on after a stable amount of time with a bond. These studies have also proven that the voles brains become “activated,” once they have created a bond, as their neural activity “lights up” and their brains “re-wire themselves.”
“How does this relate to us humans?” you may ask. Well, the ways that prairie voles react to their bonds can show us what an evolved brain, which neurologically is wired to have a partner. The studies done on prairie voles inspired scientists to look back closer at the reward structures pf the brain looked at in studies for prairie voles, and it was found that humans had similar responses to the voles. Overall, with much more time to let research and technology develop, studies on prairie voles have definitely taken us one step closer in understanding the science of love.
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