The second brain system is attraction or romantic love, also known as being in love, passionate love, obsessive love, or infatuation. This is the one that I've studied myself. My colleagues and I, and several others have now put 40 people who are madly in love into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner, and we've begun to see some of the brain circuitry of romantic love. I'm going to talk a little bit about that.From an anthropological point of view, this is regarded as a universal human phenomenon. In a study of over 150 societies, evidence of it was found in every single one; there was no evidence to the contrary. Everywhere in the world where you look for evidence of romantic love, you find it. Love magic, love poems, love songs, myths, legends, suicide, homicide, and reports from people themselves testify to it. Indeed, the hard data go back almost 4000 years to Sumerian poetry.There are several main traits of romantic love. I've canvassed the psychological literature of the last 25 years, and have, in fact, done a study of my own in Japan and in the United States. Of course we all know it, but here's what happens when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is that a person takes on what we call "special meaning." Indeed, George Bernard Shaw once said, "Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another." Indeed! Then you focus your attention on this person. Most people who are in love can list what they don't like about their sweetheart, but then they sweep that aside and just focus on what they do like. As Chaucer said, "Love is blind."
Also involved is intensely heightened energy, elation when things are going well, terrible mood swings when things are going poorly, and an intense motivation to win this preferred individual. There also is something that I call the frustration attraction: when there are real barriers to the relationship, like the person dumps you or they don't call or send you an e-mail or something, you just love them harder. In fact, in Roman times, people knew that phenomenon of frustration attraction. |
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