Checkin' in on Kel

Trying to recover from a long weekend in London - knackered. There are so many restaurants to sample the cuisine; countless bars/clubs/pubs to drink and dance in; a myriad of sites to be a tourist... I tell you, it's a fun place to visit. However, I really couldn't live there for squids. It's stupid busy. I know I was a tourist for most of the weekend, but the tourists would shit me. Imagine being a local!? Get out of the way! Stop your gawking and get moving!

There is a persistent haze over the city from the traffic jams and other sources of pollution leaving you crispy grey skinned as you exit the smog. Mmmmm. There's a pleasant image for ya. Oh, and don't blow your nose and check the contents... euuuwww... gross. If you decide to leave the rat race and live in the suburbs, the commute is a killer. Oh brother... don't get me started on British Rail... oh man, we had a nightmare journey down. Only a six hour delay you say - big deal. But it meant getting in to our final destination at 0400 as opposed to around 2230 the night before! Hey, I don't mean to be overly negative (although I have tendencies) as there are some great people and there's always something to see and do (if you have the spondoolies £££££££££). Any hoo, enough bagging poor ole London, she can't help what she's become.

The crap rail journey done with, we merrily took off later that morn to Wimbledon to discover we had a fantastic line up on Centre Court . Leyton Hewitt followed by Andy Roddick. It wouldn't be a Wimbledon experience for me if there wasn't rain and pour it did. Still, it gave us a chance to meet up with Eveyln and drink copious amounts of Pimms, take tea with scones and say 'Ya' a lot. We did miss out on seeing Clijsters and Federer, but the tennis we did see was dynamic and exciting.

Saturday made for a nice chilled afternoon. We started out at the British Museum. The new conversion for the Great Court and reading room were amazing architectural feats. I was chuffed to see the Lewis Chessmen, and Ben beelined it to see the Elgin marbles. We then decided to stroll along to Ben's old haunts when he was a kid living in London; his house and primary school.

A pleasant stroll along the Thames brought us to Kew Gardens. Enjoyed the Chihuly glass exhibition amid the plants and some live world music festival. Just a piece of advice from me... don't rush out for the latest CD from (any) Syrian band.

Later that night we met up with school chums of Ben's and had a fine Chinese feast in Soho followed by some quality jazz at Ronnie Scotts. We saw a unique Jazz violinist, Regina Carter. Made for a 3am finish. Luckily stayed with friends of Ben's, John and Juliet, which made for a brilliant walk home passed Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, and Horse Guards.

Sunday we wandered about the Tate Britain. I enjoyed the collections of two Georges: George Frederic Watts, and my fave piece was 'Brown Eyes' by George Clausen. Finished the day with a typically boozy and indulgently fun BBQ at my home away from home with the Beecher Family.

Monday we became tourists again. Visited some wee churches tucked away down the London lanes, passed pudding lane (the site where the Great Fire of London started), the Lloyd's building as well as the grand St. Paul's Cathedral. We whispered sweet nothings to one another in the Whispering Gallery... well, I think Ben whispered, 'You're a cheesy fruit fly'.. and I whispered back.. 'what was that about fruit flies???' I think we were supposed to be reverently whispering about the Lord, but ended up in hysterics. The view from the top was well worth the number of stairs to climb, and the crypt was fascinating (where Wellington, Lord Nelson, Reynolds the painter etc. etc. are buried). It was a glorious day on Monday to boot. We dined on seafood outside at 'Fish' restaurant in the Borough market. Even managed a not so touristy snooze in Postman's Park (seen the movie Closer?) to finish off a relaxing day in the city.

Nearly made it home on the train without incident, until we entered Newcastle and some yob threw what we presume to be a rock at our window. Thank God for double glazing as only the exterior window smashed, leaving us a little startled, but unharmed.

Ah.... home. You may have gathered that work has been particularly unproductive today - thus this long winded entry.

Next weekend is the Make Poverty History March targeting the G8 summit. I'll be on it and let you know how it went.

The Edinburgh Triathlon (last Saturday June 18th) was a fun day. One might almost go so far as to say a warm sunny day!! My times were by no means outstanding. But I was rather amused by this finishing photo. Me? Hung over and grumpy? No sweat!

Anyone for tennis? Guess who's just scored herself two centre court tickets and two ground passes to Wimbledon? That's right folks. Ben and I are off to London (not to visit the Queen - stuff her royal lowness) to watch the likes of Federer, Roddick and the William's sisters bash it out on centre court. The lucky recipient of the ground passes is one Miss Evelyn Cheah (and friend). As an aside, Evelyn and I met through an ad. in the paper. Believe it! She was looking for a room and it just so happened that my housemate of the time, Vicki, and I were trying to let one in a lovely villa in the suburb of Rose Park. I have to be honest that when I first met her, I wasn't so sure, and Vicki was not so keen. But we didn't want the hunk with the buff bod and chiseled chin to move in as we'd either be fighting over his attentions or forever sick of the trail of women that would undoubtedly walk through our doors. So Evelyn moved in... and good decision too. We've been mates ever since! I hardly hear from Vicki any more. Evelyn and I are well and truly international pals. In the first instance, we're dodgy foreigners living outside our countries of birth (Ev in particular, she has Malaysian parents, grew up in New Zealand, moved to Australia, then got a job in UK, then America and now back in the UK again!). Secondly, we've met up with each other across the globe. We travelled to Rhodes, Greece, and sailed across to Crete and Santorini together. Then she came to see me in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada. I went to stay with her and her Aunt in London/Wembley. She came up to Scotland two years ago to visit Castle Stalker with me... and now we're going to Wimbledon together. Always a pleasure, Ms. Cheah.

Gawd... my motivation to work right now is totally cactus. This is not a new phenomenon.. no, I have been known to drag my lazy ass on this PhD before. It's just a killer at the moment being so close and yet so far... Right now I'm ploughing through the case notes of a patient who seems to have the most commonly recurring varicose veins I've ever come across. Rivetting, isn't it?! Any one care to share a cheer me on?

When do you decide a friendship is done? Are there criteria we should be checking off? Should we come out and tell that person? Or should we just let it slide?

It's all go this weekend! Tonight a whole whack of us are catching the train over the Forth Rail Bridge to the seaside town of Kinghorn for the Black Rock 5. Fingers crossed for low tide! Apparently at the end we each get a beer and a banana! Perfect recovery nutrition...? There's a bit of a bash both after in Kinghorn and back in Edinburgh, so could be messy both on the beach and off it!
Tomorrow will involve a chilled potter around the Farmer's Market which can only be complete with a roast hog roll with crackling and home made apple sauce (I make no apologies to the vegetarians - this tastes droolingly divine). Early night before the Stirling Triathlon... in Stirling no less. Registration starts from 0645, and it's a good hour drive, so will be an excruciatingly early start for a Sunday morning! Again, there's a few mates doing it, so we should have a really good laugh and a fine feed as a reward after. ASide from the feel good factor of being fit and active, it's REALLY all about being able to eat what I want and not turning into the size of a small house, OK, say a one bedroom flat...

Let's analyse the fun out of sex and love....

Love's all in the brain: fMRI study shows strong, lateralized reward, not sex, drive
Links seen to stalking, suicide, clinical depression, even autism

BETHESDA, Md. (May 31, 2005) – You just can't tell where you
might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an
anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related
neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging
machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains
of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being
newly and madly in love.

The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense romantic
love may have more to do with motivation, reward and "drive"
aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sex drive.
Brain systems were activated that humans share with other
mammals. So the researchers think "early-stage romantic love is
possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue
preferred mates, and that it has an important influence on
social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic
consequences."

Diverse emotions occur, but reward response primary

"It's a stark reminder that the mind truly is in the brain,"
noted Lucy L. Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
"We humans are built to experience magical feelings like love,
but our findings don't diminish the magic in any way. In fact,
for some, it enhances the experience. Our research also helps to
explain why a person in love feels 'driven' to win their
beloved, amidst a whole constellation of other feelings."

The study, entitled "Reward, motivation and emotion systems
associated with early-stage intense romantic love," is available
online and will be in the July issue of the Journal of
Neurophysiology, published by the American Physiological
Society. The research was conducted by Arthur Aron, Helen E.
Fisher, Debra J. Mashek, Greg Strong, Hai-Fang Li and Lucy L.
Brown. Aron, Fisher and Brown contributed equally.

"Most of the participants in our study clearly showed emotional
responses," noted Arthur Aron of the State University of New
York-Stony Brook, "but we found no consistent emotional pattern.
Instead, all of our subjects showed activity in reward and
motivation regions. To emotion researchers like me, this is
pretty exciting because it's the first physiological data to
confirm a connection between romantic love and motivation
networks in the brain.

"As it turns out, romantic love is probably best characterized
as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various
specific emotions, such as euphoria or anxiety," Aron noted.
"With this view, it becomes clearer why the lover expresses such
an imperative to pursue his or her beloved and protect the
relationship."

Sexual arousal 'very different'; confirmation of questionnaire
methods

Aron added: "Our participants who measured very high on a self
report questionnaire of romantic love also showed strong
activity in a particular brain region – results that
dramatically increase our confidence that self-report
questionnaires can actually measure brain activity."

Aron also noted that the research answered the "historic
question of whether love and sex are the same, or different, or
whether romantic passion is just warmed over sexual arousal." He
said, "Our findings show that the brain areas activated when
someone looks at a photo of their beloved only partially overlap
with the brain regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex and
romantic love involve quite different brain systems."

fMRI confirms major predictions, yields "remarkable
implications"; autism link

Aron reported that, using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) and other measurements, he and his colleagues found
support for their two major predictions: (1) early stage,
intense romantic love is associated with subcortical reward
regions rich with dopamine; and (2) romantic love engages brain
systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.

Brown explains some of these findings, commenting that "when our
participants looked at a photo of his/her beloved, specific
activation occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA)
and dorsal caudate body. These regions were significant compared
to two control conditions, providing strong evidence that these
brain areas, which are associated with the motivation to win
rewards, are central to the experience of being in love."

Brown noted that "an important concept is that the caudate
probably integrates huge amounts of information, everything from
early personal memories to one's personal notions of beauty.
Then, this brain region (and related regions of the basal
ganglia) helps to direct one's actions toward attaining one's
goals. For neuroscientists," she said, "these findings about the
diverse regional functions of the basal ganglia in humans have
remarkable implications."

"Our data even may be relevant to some forms of autism," Brown
added. "Some people with autism don't understand or experience
any sort of emotional attachment or romantic love. I would
speculate that autism involves an atypical development of the
midbrain and basal ganglia reward systems. This makes sense,
too, because other symptoms of autism include repetitive
thoughts and movements, characteristics of basal ganglia
function. "

Surprise discovery: romance is on the right, 'attractiveness' to
the left

Another important discovery, Brown said, was that "to our
surprise, the activation regions associated with intense
romantic love were mostly on the right side of the brain, while
the activation regions associated with facial attractiveness
were mostly on the left.

"We didn't predict such a striking lateralization," Brown
reported. "It is well known that speech is largely a left-sided
cortical function. But our data indicate that lateralization
also occurs in lower parts of the brain. Moreover, different
kinds of rewards (in this case, the "rush" of romantic love,
compared with the pleasing experience of looking at a pretty or
handsome face) is also lateralized. These results give us a lot
to think about how the normal human brain learns and remembers
and functions in general," Brown added.

Love physiology changes over time; 'Romantic love more powerful
than sex'

Another breakthrough, Brown noted, was that "we found several
brain areas where the strength of neural activity changed with
the length of the romance. Everyone knows that relationships are
dynamic over time, but we are beginning to track what happens in
the brain as a love relationship matures."

Helen E. Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers
University, New Jersey, noted that not only did the brain change
as romantic love endured, but that some of these changes were in
regions associated with pair-bonding in prairie voles. The fMRI
images showed more activity in the ventral pallidum portion of
the basal ganglia in people with longer romantic relationships.
It's in this region where receptors for the hormone vasopressin
are critical for vole pair-bonding, or attachment.

"Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated brain
systems for mating and reproduction – the sex drive, romantic
love, and attachment to a long term partner," Fisher said, "and
our results suggest how feelings of romantic love might change
into feelings of attachment. Our results support what people
have always assumed – that romantic love is one of the most
powerful of all human experiences. It is definitely more
powerful than the sex drive."

Depression, murder/suicide, demonstrate strength of romantic
drive

For instance, Fisher point out, "If someone rejects your sexual
overtures, you don't harm yourself or the other person. But
rejected men and women in societies around the world sometimes
kill themselves or someone else. In fact, studies indicate that
some 40% of people who are rejected in love slip into clinical
depression. Our study may also suggest some of the underlying
physiology of stalking behavior," she added.

Fisher noted that their study, which took barely an hour for
each participant but many years for the researchers to process
and interpret the data, also found a "fascinating continuity
between human romantic love and the physiological expressions of
attraction in other animals. Other scientists," she said, "have
reported that expressions of attraction in a female prairie vole
are associated with a 50% increase in dopamine activity in a
brain region related to regions where we found activity. These
and other data indicate that all mammals may feel attraction to
specific partners, and that some of the same brain systems are
involved."

Study explains second half of Darwin's puzzle, sexual selection
& 'eyes of the beholder'

"Darwin and many of his intellectual descendants have studied
the myriad physiological ornaments that one sex of a species
have evolved to attract members of the opposite sex, like the
peacock's fancy tail feathers that attract the peahen," Fisher
noted. "But no one has studied what happened in the brain of the
viewer, the individual that becomes attracted to these traits.
Our study indicates what happens in the brain of the viewer as
he or she becomes physiologically attracted to these traits."

She added, "This brain system probably evolved for an important
reason – to drive our forebears to focus their courtship energy
on specific individuals, thereby conserving precious mating time
and energy. Perhaps," she hypothesized, "even
love-at-first-sight is a basic mammalian response that developed
in other animals and our ancestors inherited in order to speed
up the mating process."

Einstein's Brown concluded, "Our results suggest that romantic
love does not use a functionally specialized brain system. It
may be produced, instead, by a constellation of neural systems
that converge onto widespread regions of the caudate where there
is a flexible combinatorial map representing and integrating
many motivating stimuli.

"This passion may be an excellent example of how a complex human
behavioral state is processed. Moreover, taken together, our
results and those of Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, who studied
men and women in longer love relationships, show similar
cortical, VTA and caudate activation patterns, suggesting that
these regions are consistently and critically involved in this
aspect of human reproduction and social behavior, romantic
love."

###

Source and funding

The study, "Reward, motivation and emotion systems associated
with early-stage intense romantic love," is available online and
will be in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology,
published by the American Physiological Society.