Amerika

The unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics.

In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers think form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

So the scientists studied the brains of the recently heartbroken and found additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is even more strongly associated with addiction. “The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I’ll call craving,” said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist also at Einstein medical college. “Similar to craving the drug cocaine.”

The team’s most recent brain scans were aimed at people married about 20 years who said they are still holding hands, lovey-dovey as newlyweds, a group that is a minority of married people. In these men and women, two more areas of the brain lit up, along with the VTA: the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

Seattle Times

I think they have romance misunderstood and much as they have the human brain misunderstood.

First, the human brain is a computing machine. It will have mechanisms. Some of those will be designed to produce an override signal to all other signals, so that we don’t lose track of the big picture. It’s like signs on the wall of a factory to remind you, no matter how hung over or panicked you are, not to smoke around the napalm. These are retention methods for something decided elsewhere.

Second, people do not fully understand the brain — so our conjectures now are limited to “yep, when we let the boar rape him, this part of the brain lights up.” We don’t know how the decision to be in love is created, and that could be what sets up the reward process. For example, you decide that every time you ride your exercise bike for 30 minutes, you can beat senseless one (1) multi-level marketer. Reward follows good behavior, even internally to ourselves.

A long-married couple’s claim that they are still as much in love as they day they wed is usually met with more than a pinch of disbelief.

Couples who are still deeply in love after more than two decades of marriage experience the same sense of euphoria as those in the first flush of love, brain scans showed.

Those newly in love also showed activity in a part of the brain associated with obsession and anxiety, whereas the long-timers were using parts linked to calmness and the suppression of pain.

Dr Fisher said: ‘The difference is that in long-term love, the obsession, the mania, the anxiety, has been replaced with calm.

Other work by the same researchers has shown that the brain can differentiate between sex and love.

The Daily Mail

Finally, people don’t understand romance. Romance is not the idea that you fall madly in love without control, and that there’s no biological basis to it. Romance is that, knowing all of what’s gross and ickily biological about life, two people are able to find transcendence in the decision to love one another. Love is a form of friendship. Friendship is a hybrid between trust and respect. It has nothing to do with blousy passion, and everything to do with two computing machines — minds — coming together in agreement that the other is awesome.

Chiasmatic patterns of this nature baffle people under a certain level of g, so they remain esoteric. But still it’s advisable to un-spin this “shocking, ironic, unique” news from the blathermouth mainstream media.

Love exists.

Something in this universe loves enough to create love, and to leave sweet delight there for those who can discipline themselves enough to see it.

Sex, sweat, money, symbols and tokens are NOT the things they seem to be effects of.

Love, and love for life, alone are immortal.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, g, mind/body dualism, self-deception