From Cuddle Chemical to Love Drug

When oxytocin is released in the brain, it increases trust, decreases anxiety and somehow helps joyously connect mother to baby—and lover to lover. No wonder it's often called the "cuddle chemical" or the "love drug."

New research suggests that drugs made to simulate oxytocin could be useful to treat everything from anxiety disorders to autism.

The stuff love is made of

Oxytocin is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter. During labor, it produces uterine contractions and later spurs the "letdown" of milk for nursing. In fact, many pregnant women are given a synthetic version during childbirth (Pitocin) to speed things along.

Anyone who has had this experience tends to be shocked when they hear that they were given the "love drug"—intensified contractions don't tend to inspire that emotion!

In the brain, oxytocin has very different actions than in the uterus.

Most famously, research on mouse-like voles has shown that it is involved in creating pair bonding.

In prairie voles, oxytocin seems to wire in a connection between one particular partner and pleasure (another chemical, vasopressin, is needed as well in males); prairie voles are monogamous creatures.

But promiscuous montane voles don’t have much of these crucial chemicals in their brain's pleasure areas—to them, any partner goes.

So, at least in voles, oxytocin and vasopressin are the stuff that love is made of.

There has been much speculation that humans taking oxytocin together would fall in love—but in experiments with hundreds of subjects, so far this hasn't happened, in either women or men.