The rest of the findings are so interesting, and will move you so powerfully with memories of your own past loves evoked by intuitively satisfying descriptions of their neural substrates, that you should just go and read the entire thing. Even more exciting are the next steps in this research:You just can't tell where you might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love.
The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and "drive" aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sex drive. Brain systems were activated that humans share with other mammals. So the researchers think "early-stage romantic love is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates, and that it has an important influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic consequences."
How sweet is that? True too - love 'feels' different as it evolves, right? It's not just your relationship that has to change, it's your BRAIN. From there, FuturePundit goes into full-on futurist mode and things get a little freaky:Another breakthrough, Brown noted, was that "we found several brain areas where the strength of neural activity changed with the length of the romance. Everyone knows that relationships are dynamic over time, but we are beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love relationship matures."...
"Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated brain systems for mating and reproduction – the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment to a long term partner," Fisher said, "and our results suggest how feelings of romantic love might change into feelings of attachment. Our results support what people have always assumed – that romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences. It is definitely more powerful than the sex drive."
OH shit! The boy Randall's amazing, throwing out free, awesome themes for any aspiring sci-fi writers to grab:What does the future hold for love? Greater knowledge of a phenomenon very often brings with it the ability to manipulate and control it. I expect the development of drugs and other treatments that cause people to fall in and out of love and to recover more easily from lost love.
Some people will choose to immunize themselves from love by using treatments that prevent the love process from developing in the first place. A person with history of heart breaks might decide that the possibility of a new love is just too painful to bear. Or someone who wants to devote their time to career might decide to innoculate themselves from the risk of romantic distractions. Still others of a more cerebral sort will decide that love is just a costly cognition distorting evolutionary vestige that they are best off without.
The ability to manipulate love medically will inevitably lead to misuse via surreptious reprogramming of the love state of others...
The ability to surreptitiously cause people to fall in and out of love will inevitably lead to suspicions by those falling in and out of love. Can they trust their feelings as legitimate? Is pharmaceutically induced love less legitimate than natural love? If so, why? Will it be possible to develop technologies that check for unnaturally induced feelings of love?
Glad I am loving natural-style while it's still an option, that shit is complicated enough, you know? Though maybe all this will make things easier, if we can manage our feelings a bit more rationally - does anyone really NEED to spend heartbroken months stuck pining over unrequited love? NOT ME
Anyway, I've excerpted too much already, read it all, and be sure to check out the links to his previous posts on this subject at the end. This shit is seriously poking at my heart in the way that heart-tuggin movies and books do - love is real, powerful, universal, and here's a great new story about it being written by a new author called NEUROSCIENCE
UPDATE: WOW, this English couple are celebrating their 80th wedding anniversary today! He's 105, she's 100!
The Arrowsmiths, who have three children, six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, claim the key to their long marriage is not to go to sleep on an argument. They say they always kiss each other and hold hands each night before going to bed...