After struggling for over a week, I finally finished reading this book. It is a great tour of 21st century biology research into explanations of attraction between humans. I did not like the authors’ tone and harsh judgments at the beginning of the book when they presented and ripped apart early research. But my hackles lowered as the tone became lighter and more humorous. I started to really enjoy the book towards the middle as the dry, Southern wit & wisdom dominated. The end is fantastic.
The book was hard for me to get through because there is so much information to assimilate and keep top of mind as more new details are piled on. You must remember all the hormones in a complex cocktail, the effects of each, the regions of the brain in which they are needed, and in some cases the shapes of their molecules and the DNA sequences that code for them. And then you need to follow the differences in the complex sequence of hormone stimulations in the brain and the different areas of the Amygdala where the key stimuli that cause the “love” behaviors occur.
When I studied biology in the 20th century, I had not learned about exogenesis, functional “junk DNA” that codes for aggressive behaviors, gene splicing, details of regions of the Amygdala and nuances in behaviors caused by hormones. I remember some of the popular culture crazes over Oxytocin and Dopamine from popular science but I never looked into the real science. This book goes deep.
Before you make the investment to read it, watch the TED talk by one of the authors (Larry Young).
