As Valentine’s Day quickly approaches, scientists around the globe are frantically searching for the perfect place to take their true love. Although chocolate and flowers along with a romantic dinner is always an excellent option, why not show off both your romantic and scientific sides with a trip to Dublin’s Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), where you and your partner can participate in LOVE LAB: The Science of Desire.
The month-long exhibit, which combines research from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, genetics, physiology, and biochemistry, encourages visitors to explore and even participate in understanding the science behind romance and rejection.
“People relate to things like love,” Maria Phelan, Exhibition/Education Research and Development Coordinator at the Science Gallery, told BioTechniques. “This is a nice way to teach and for people to have fun.”
The gallery is offering a full weekend of Valentine’s-themed events, and a series of exhibits that will let the curious explore love like never before.
Flying solo this Valentine’s day because your loved one is far away? Check out the Mutsugoto—an intimate communication device that lets you share tender moments with your distant partner. As an alternative form of communication to texts, cell phone calls, and emails, the installation allows users to draw on each other’s bodies with light while lying in bed. Part the velvet red drapes in a darkened corner of the Science Gallery and put on the touch-activated ring. A computer vision system follows the ring’s movement and projects virtual pen strokes onto your body. Simultaneously, these strokes are transmitted and projected onto your partner’s body in a remote location. If you cross strokes with your true love, your lines of light will synchronize.
Does your smell keep your partner by your side? At the “Scentsational” event, visitors are asked to smell vials of the pheromone androstenone and rate the odor as pleasant, unpleasant, or no odor. Participants then go on to smell and rate a collection of T-shirts previously worn by male model volunteers; they also separately rate the visual attractiveness of those models’ photos. The experiment focuses on genetic variations in OR74, the odor receptor gene, and requires both the “sniffer” and the model to provide a cheek cell DNA sample for evaluation of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) compatibility. Researchers will then study the data to see if people are naturally attracted to mates with HLA profiles different from their own.
What’s going on in your brain when you’re attracted to someone? Or how about when your beloved doesn’t call after that first date? If you want to know the answers to such pressing questions, and maybe even find that special someone in the process, look no further than the Gallery’s neuroscience study on speed dating. Researchers from The Human Reward and Decision Making Lab in Trinity College Dublin’s Institute of Neuroscience will be applying the technique of functional MRI (fMRI) scanning to gather data on young speed daters. The goal is to better understand that ‘special’ initial romantic attraction felt between two people, and hopefully play matchmaker along the way.
Couples can even have their love documented for history in a scientific journal; the LOVE LAB team hopes that the participant data they collect can be used in scientific publications in the future. All the experiments scheduled for the month-long exhibition have received ethics board approval and participants must sign consent forms. “The specific goal of LOVE LAB is to bring the lab to the gallery. All of this exciting research is going on behind closed doors and we’re trying to expose it to the public…here at the gallery,” Phelan said.
The exhibit runs through March 12th.
