So tell me the truth about love

What are the secrets of romance and physical attraction? The Science Gallery will reveal all at its Love Lab exhibition, writes DICK AHLSTROM

OUR HEARTS tell us when we are in love. . . or do they? You might think it is all about emotion, but in fact your genes are working away in the background helping you to find the ideal mate.

The science behind love, desire and what makes a person attractive will be on display next Thursday when Love Lab: The Science of Desire opens at the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Visitors will learn that the mystery behind romance isn’t all that mysterious. They will also be invited to participate in real scientific experiments, all designed to help learn more about the science of love.

You might ask what science has to do with some of our most intense emotions, but it turns out to be quite a lot, says Trinity College Dublin genetics lecturer, Dr Aoife McLysaght.

“There is so much that goes on in terms of falling in love and attraction,” she says. “It is quite interesting when you think of what is going on within your head when you are deciding whether you like someone or don’t.”

She and Trinity colleagues Prof Fiona Newell of the Institute of Neuroscience and biochemist Prof Luke O'Neill joined with the Science Gallery to put the Love Labexhibition together. They have developed a series of experiments to help understand why some people can make your pulse race while others leave you cold.

A woman can go into a room of 30 men, any one of whom might be a love mate. Yet she fixes on just one, as if there were a “chemical reaction to one another”, Dr McLysaght says.

Love Labvisitors will be asked to help sort this chemistry out by participating in real experiments, including sniffing a sweaty tee-shirt in support of the advancement of science.

There is much research showing that this “chemistry” comes down to picking up faint olfactory signals that indicate whether a person is a suitable reproductive match, she explains. “The curious thing is there seems to be something about smelling one another.”

Scientists in Sweden detected the first human “pheromone” more than a decade ago, a substance in sweat called androstenone. “It is women who react to it and homosexual men will react to it. Everyone has this odour receptor gene,” she says.

Androstenone “is something we can smell and there is genetic variability in how we react to it”, McLysaght says. One experiment will look at whether the subject either likes, dislikes or is indifferent to the smell of a given sweaty T-shirt and then use a DNA sample to match preference to genetic variation.

People should have no concerns about participation. “This is actually research conducted under correct conditions and with informed consent,” she says. The idea is to be in a position to publish the findings afterwards.

Newell will be involved in a number of experiments, given her expertise in human perception as leader of a group studying multisensory cognition.

“My research interest is how the human brain takes in information and uses that information to perceive the world,” says Newell, a Science Foundation Ireland principal investigator.

“What we really need to find out is what characteristics of a person make him or her attractive to us. How does multi-sensory information make a person attractive?”

Is it the face, the voice, their T-shirt or a combination of all of these? Her work suggests that in fact it is a mix, but with the face a dominant consideration.

“There are rules for attractiveness. Most people prefer average faces. The more average or typical the face the higher the rating for attractiveness.” This works the same for voices, she adds.

She will be looking at many possible attractants including face, voice and even gait, whether a person finds a particular walk attractive.

“We want to create a huge database of faces and voices. It is going to be great.”

She will also conduct experiments to see whether this changes as we age. She wants volunteers aged from 20 to 80 to come forward “to see do the features we find attractive change as we grow older”.

All of the experiments at Love Labwill be done in the best possible taste, but just to alert you, no one under the age of 15 will be allowed visit.

Love Labopens February 11th at noon. It runs through to March 12th, and is open Tues-Friday from 12pm to 8pm and on Saturday and Sunday from 12pm to 6pm. Admission is free but with an option of making a donation