Friday, May 04, 2007

The Psychobiology of Love and Hope

Yesterday I was meeting with my daughter's psychologist (aka my psychologist) and she was telling me about one of her graduate school class exams. She's not too much younger than I am so this was a few years ago. One of the exam questions in her class was "What is Love?". Students could only answer this question by using psychobiological terms and talking about brain scan images. She said she had not thought about it that way before and it was very interesting and thought provoking. (I thought it might be in poor taste to ask her what grade she got either on this exam or in general.)

I recently started to take an antidepressant *again* and was telling her that I was feeling slightly "omnipotent" at the moment--well, at least compared to how I was feeling the past 6 months or so. My concern was that I might be "going slight bipolar" and I wanted her professional opinion about this concern. Her question back to me was, "Could this possibly be Hope you are experiencing?"

It would be fascinating to have look at my brain scans -- let's say one month ago, Monday morning, and today--to view the changes in the neurotransmitters. No insurance company will be paying for that however! (Nor should they, unless I'm part of some pharmaseutical study funded by a drug company or the federal government. I don't want more people to become uninsured due to the rising cost of health care from unnecessary testing such as my intellectual curiosity about my brain science.)

Some people that I care deeply for say that there is no God--or at least not in their experience. What is happening to me now is simply a result of human intervention and drug interaction they would say. My question back to them is this--can science explain the mystery of what led to these interventions at this time? How will these interventions all play out in my ability to act differently and be more effective to myself and others in my life as a result?

To me this is God, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call IT...moving.

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