Weekdays at 8:30 a.m. (9 NT)Thursday, February 14, 2013 | Categories: Episodes
Researchers at Oxford are proposing a so-called love drug to avoid breaking-up. (Photo:SeeMidTN.com aka Brent)
Oxford Researchers, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu
People have gone to great lengths to find passion ... and even greater lengths to hang on to it. All the while, we've tended to think of love as this elusive, inexplicable, almost magical thing.
According to Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu, that may be where we go wrong. They both work at Oxford University. And the trick to finding and keeping love, they say, is to think of love for what it is ... a neuro-biological process that runs deeper than chocolate, booze, salad or caterpillar fungi. Once you do that, they believe it will be possible to develop a drug that would help keep people from falling out of love.
Anders Sandberg is a neuroscientist at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute.
And Julian Savulescu is a bio-ethicist and the Director of Oxford University's Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
Journalist specializing in neuroscience, Maia Szalavitz
Shakespeare once wrote that "love looks not with the eyes but with the mind." And suddenly, those words feel a lot less romantic than they used to.
For her thoughts on our brains and love, we were joined by Maia Szalavitz. She is a journalist for Time and writes extensively about neuroscience, as well as addiction, love and empathy. She's currently working on a book about the limits of neuroscience. Maia Szalavitz was in New York City.
This segment was produced by The Current's Naheed Mustafa, Hassan Santur and Lara O'Brien.
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