This particular trope of equating romantic love and substance addiction is annoying and fundamentally confused. It doesn't take neurology to understand that any activity from which we derive pleasure could, given the right circumstances or wrong attitudes, lead to a self-destructive spiral. And if one is aware that dopamine and other neurotransmitters are how pleasure is "implemented" in the brain, research which correlates a pleasurable experience with adaptive dopamine responses is pretty yawn-inducing.

Even if one doesn't agree that the factual content of this research is boring, rather than salacious, I think the conclusions drawn here are vastly premature given our current understanding of the brain. Imagine that somebody with a tool to "see" electrical currents (an oscilloscope? CAT scan? I don't know) was looking at my computer, first as I unleash a massive DDOS attack on some unsuspecting evildoers, and then as I put my latest philosophical writings on my ftp server for all my rabid fans. In both cases they'd see my NIC go crazy, working itself to death to blast out packets to either badly configured DNS servers or badly confused human beings (as it happens, these human being strongly resemble cocaine addicts when it comes to reading highly digressive rants composed by yours truly). So, is hosting an essay on an FTP server "the same" as initiating a DDOS? Yes, I suppose either one could fry my network adapter, but that's pretty contingent. So, how exactly are they different, and what does this have to do with cocaine?

Restricting ourselves to what's happening inside the computer, the differences reside atop a massive tower of abstraction. And what's more, these differences put down shallow roots. Even with an understanding of the von neumann architechure generally or my intel chip in particular, most physical ("neurological") measurements one could make would look pretty damn similar. One would have to understand the dynamic relationship between the cpu state register, my RAM chips, and my Hard Drive to even begin to grok what's "really" going on. I think neuroscience is in a state analogous to that of a man measuring currents in a modern computer. Even if it turns out that in certain neurological ways love and cocaine are completely identical, it may turn out that the similarities are completely overshadowed by subtler states in a different subsystem. We don't understand brain architecture, so who knows.

And really, the crux of the difference between the DDOS and rabid fans downloading my latest essay in beautiful LaTeX formatting has to do with the way the activity is situated in the relationship between me and the social world in which I exist. And the same is true of the difference between love and cocaine addiction. Courtship is a foundational human activity, one that profoundly shapes our cultural practices and understanding of ourselves. Of course it changes us! What the hell is meant by "Normal Altered State?" What is an "unaltered" human state? Being a human is inherently a state of profound embeddedness in a culture which originates in others. And another human being, who is also a rich and complex cultural creature, has immeasurably more to offer than the cruel, contentless, solipsistic chokehold of a drug addiction.

Take it from somebody who has both.