Brain Chemistry And Trust Unlocked

Most people would assume that Oxytocin in a bottle, a marketing fantasy, would be lumped in with the fountain of youth and the claims that fad diets make about melting away untold pounds with no real effort. Assume what you like, but Swiss and American scientists working together in Zurich have demonstrated with recent experiments that this could be a reality. What caused such wild reactions? A liquid trust spray of sorts containing oxytocin, a hormone naturally found in the human body.

A few squirts of this magic trust potion and human subjects were overwhelmingly more trusting and willing to invest more money than subjects given a placebo. This is all without any promise of return on the investment.

The researchers were very quick to acknowledge that their research could be easily abused by con artists, criminals, and politicians who might use liquid trust sprays to sway votes by misting large crowds with the hormone.

"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, who was the senior researcher in this oxytocin study, which appeared in an issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."

Could oxytocin also be a therapy for social phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other psychological problems? Some scientists say that this new research brings about questions concerning oxytocin and the potential it has in terms of therapy for conditions ranging from autism to social phobias where trust receptors are diminished or altered. Perhaps the hormone and the effects it causes could be used to treat more rare diseases like Williams Syndrome or Asbergers where children are sometimes willing to approach strangers and other dangerous situations with no inhibition or fear.

"Might their high level of trust be due to excessive oxytocin release?" asks University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio. Damasio researched the finding published in Nature and said, "Little is known about the neurobiology of trust, although the phenomenon is beginning to attract attention."

Oxytocin is a hormone in your brain. Tissues in the brain secrete the hormone for your hypothalamus to synthesize. This little part of the brain is extremely important. It controls engrained reactions like hunger and thirst as well as body temerature and your fight or flight response. The hypothalamus is associated with some of the most basic of instincts and emotions as well, including fear and anger.

Before this research, oxytocin was not well researched and considered nothing more than a simple reproductive hormone found present in both sexes. In mammals including humans, this chemical hormone stimulates contractions in labor and sends the message to the female body to begin production of milk. Oxytocin is released in situation where the body is under social stress as well and has calming effects. These are all arguments for the validity of liquid trust.