Sex, Love, and the Prairie Vole

Kevin Hogan over at bodylanguageexpert.com just published a piece featuring the incredibly important 1997 article by Insel on "pair-bonding" in, of all things, the prairie vole.  But wait just a minute - what does a vole, I mean a vole of all the marsupialesque things, have to do with love, sex, and attachment?  Everything, as it turns out.  In his article A Neurobiological Basis of Social Attachment, Insel demonstrates that the little creatures operate in much the same way we do when it comes to sex, love, and attachment.  The neurochemicals dopamine, vasopressin, and oxytocin, are intricately involved in our ability (us and the voles) to mate, and bond, or as the case may, to bond and then mate.  Follow this if you will, "if mating facilitates pair bond formation and oxytocin is released with mating, does oxytocin influence the development of the pair bond?" The answer is "yes".  In other words, if we were to shamelessly inject you with a drug that would block your brain's ability to release the neuropeptide oxytocin, you would be able to engage in sexual activity (because of all that wild dopamine running around through your brain) with pretty much anyone who was remotely available and conscious and then you would be more than capable of moving on to the next available person just like you did with the first, and so on and so on - without so much as a tad of the "guilts".  In other words, "preference" or "selectivity" and "attachment" and "monogamy" would be moot points.  This is precisely what Ansel did with those marsupials.  Did you know those little critters are monogamous?  And did you know that the monogamous voles released different amounts of these neurochemicals, and distributed them to different regions of the brain, than did the voles that were not monogamous?  Oxytocin and vasopressin are neurohypophyseal peptides that are implicated in an array of complex social behaviors, attachment and bonding being among them.  Oxytocin effects or modulates maternal bonding behaviors, while vasopressin modulates paternal bonding behaviors.  Furthermore,  Oxytocin appears to regulate dopamine secretion, and dopamine secretion, without oxytocin, is like sex without any attachment.  And without attachment, the brain is free to continue producing dopamine, which directly (do not pass "go") hits the pleasure centers of the brain, with nothing to stop it or regulate it from continuing in a seemingly never-ending spiral of being dopaminergically stoned.  Think of a kid in a candy store and you understand what I mean.  Hmmm... sound like sex addiction?  Exactly like sex addiction!  And how might all of this neuropeptide soup go awry?  Since so much of it is released in the very early years of neurodevelopment to the limbic system, and since dopamine has such an abundance of projections into the prefrontal cortex (PFC), early childhood trauma can (and does!) easily dysregulate these neuropeptides.  Is it a done deal?  No.  As Kevin points out early on in his posting, there is hope.  But not just hope, actual remedy, and that is a wonderful thing...