> http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2005-11-29T183827Z_01_MCC967073_RTRIDST_0_OUKOE-UK-LOVE-MOLECULE.XML
Free of the sensational headine, the study suggests only a positive correlation between NGF and the initial stages of romance: correlation does not equal efficient causation; moreover, assigning NGF a causal role would, more than likely, simply hitch a further element to a self-determining causal nexus... e.g. the stimulation of L- receptors in the retina is not seeing-a-sunset.
File this with similar brazen exercises in nuerophysiologic reductionism. My personal favourite was the conclusion of a paper featured in Psychology Today in the mid-eighties the upshot of which was that romantic bonding is contigent upon the exchange of neuro-hormones in partners' saliva (seven years till biochemical tolerance, after that... finito).
"There is no such thing" said Belacqua wildly "as a simultaniety of incoherence, there is no such thing as love in a thalamus. There is no word for such a thing, there is no such abominable thing."
--Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women