STONY BROOK, N.Y., March 23, 2006—Dr. Helen Fisher, a Research Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of the best-seller Why We Love, which explored how romantic passion is hardwired into our brains by millions of years of evolution, has extended her research in collaboration with Art Aron of Stony Brook University and Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to focus on how rejection registers in the brain and how it can trigger socially inappropriate activity. Dr. Fisher will reveal these findings at this year’s celebration of the 10th Annual Swartz Foundation Mind/Brain Lecture Series, to be held at the Staller Center for the Arts on Monday, March 27 at 4:30 PM. This talk is open to the general public.
The Foundation’s Mind/Brain Lectures are designed to bring leading researchers in neurobiology before the University community. Its purpose is to communicate the latest brain science insights and advances in understandable terms to an audience that includes non-scientists. The Lecture Series was established by Jerry Swartz in 1997.
This year, Fisher further extends the boundaries of neurobiology research. In her book, as in this lecture, Fisher’s seminal work distinguishes three primary drives that evolved for reproduction: the sex drive, romantic love, and long-term attachment. She will discuss how the associated hormones and the chemical neurotransmitters in the brain interact to shape our mating and reproductive strategies.
Fisher will also present the early results of her latest research, which reveals that men and women who have been rejected by a romantic partner show increased activity in areas of the brain that link to anxiety, obsessive/compulsive behaviors, high-risk decision making, muscle pain and anger management. These recent findings may help us to understand and explain the cross-cultural phenomena of stalking, homicide, suicide, and clinical depression.
The nine previous Swartz Foundation Mind/Brain lecturers are leading researchers in the rapidly developing field of neuroscience: Antonio Damasio, author of the ground-breaking Descartes’ Error, who proved that emotional and logical processing are equally crucial to decision making; Terence Sejnowksi, a pioneer and leader in the newly emerging computational neuroscience; Michael Gazzaniga, who discovered left brain/right brain theory in the 1970’s; Paul Churchland, a philosopher who critiques reliance on “common sense”; Michael Merzenich, a leading expert on learning disabilities and plasticity theory; V.S. Ramachandran, well-known for his work in evolutionary psychology; Joseph LeDoux, an expert on sleep and the fear system of the brain; Chuck Stevens, who explained how the brain’s circuitry is more powerful than a computer’s; and, Daniel Wolpert, who pursues studies related to the brain and human motor performance.
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At Stony Brook, Dr. Fisher and her colleagues use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of men and women who had recently been rejected by a romantic partner. They saw which brain regions associated with this function are highly active. Fisher said, “These people are suffering physical pain. They are obsessively ruminating on the intentions and actions of their rejecter; and they are trying to control what is known as abandonment rage. No wonder recently rejected people are so willing to take big risks.” She added that “the basic brain system related to romantic love is much stronger than the sex drive---indeed, it can be stronger than the will to live.”
President Shirley Strum Kenny believes that greater knowledge of the fundamental principles of how the brain works will create new career paths in both med tech and high tech. She stated that “Stony Brook University is well positioned to advance research in neurobiology, as well as to develop the curricula necessary to train future generations of computational neuroscientists on this path of human understanding. Jerry Swartz’s longstanding commitment to neuroscience research and to Stony Brook, inspires and challenges us to build the necessary interdisciplinary bridges going forward between scientists from our med school and psychology department to neurobiology, physics and applied math to electrical and computer engineering. Stony Brook is proud to be a part of the Mind/Brain Lecture Series.”
Kenny also announced that State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle had secured $22 million toward the establishment of a Center for Computational Neuroscience.
The Swartz Foundation was established by Dr. Jerome Swartz in 1994 to explore the brain/mind connection. Swartz stated that “Computational neuroscience—the convergence of evolution and physics, which integrates traditional neurobiology, mathematical physics, computer science, and systems analysis—is a frontier that continues to fascinate me.” The Swartz Foundation supports research on basic principles and mechanisms of brain function through Computational Neuroscience Centers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, and UC San Diego, and in partnership with the Sloan Foundation at five Centers for Theoretical Neurobiology at Salk Institute, Cal Tech, NYU/Courant, Brandeis, and UC San Francisco. Additional information about The Swartz Foundation can be found at www.theswartzfoundation.org.
Stony Brook University is one of the leading public research institutions in the world. One of only 10 universities awarded a National Science Foundation recognition award for integrating research and education, Stony Brook also is one of only 16 Leadership Institutions as selected by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The University co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, joining Princeton, Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of California-Berkeley as the only institutions involved in a research collaboration with a national laboratory.
