Eros e neuroscienze. Una critica del riduzionismo cerebrale

Abstract

Eros and neurosciences. A critique of brain reductionism. Neuroscience tell us that the brain activity of people in love, or who have a more or less rewarding love relationship, is more intense than that of single people or of people whose relationship has just ended. Nowadays we know this above all thanks to the visualization of our brain areas through functional magnetic resonance or through the determination of the molecules and neurotransmitters involved. Neuroscience treats love as a physiological state of our body in the same way as hunger, thirst and sleep. The growing tendency to think that love is a purely chemical and hormonal phenomenon probably depends on the need to compensate, with a scientific explanation, for the irrationality it presents once it has been reduced to a mere passion. This paper analyzes the reduction of love to cerebral excitement, by posing some questions on the border between science and philosophical anthropology. Are we so confident that what happens to our body can explain our love as it explains our hunger, thirst and sleep? Is it what happens in the brain really a condition that is not only necessary, but also sufficient, to explain the experience of falling in love and of love?