Love is...

[lagilman]

May 31, 2005
Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain
By BENEDICT CAREY
New York Times

"New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

A new study suggests that an area of the brain known as the caudate is associated with passion. Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.


read more...



For someone (okay, me) writing about characters in a newish relationship, this is frickin' writer-catnip....

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Fascinating!
Especially, "among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character"

[vincam.livejournal.com]

romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection.

I thought everybody knew this. Seriously. IMHO, it's what causes certain kinds of fandom.

[lagilman]

I thought everybody knew this.

It's been hotly-debated theory based on clinical (and non-clinical)observation, yes. Now they're claiming to have scientific backup -- and even more. Of course, now we can get guys saying "baby, I just don't have genetic commitment available..." I mean, more than they do already. *wry g*


hrm. "Yes, we can test you for a get-out-of-commitment-free' gene, but you also have to take these other tests, including HIV..." It would be like shopping for a purebred puppy -- "let me see his/her papers."

Okay, now I'm getting borderline silly/dangerous. Going back to work...

[vincam.livejournal.com]

Of course, now we can get guys saying "baby, I just don't have genetic commitment available..."

To which we then reply, "Thank you for telling me this, so I don't waste my time on you. Ciao bella."

[dianora2.livejournal.com]

The bit about turning voles from promiscuous into stay-at-home dads was scary. Behavior modification ahoy!

[lagilman]

Unless of course you're not looking for a commitment-minded guy at that time...

("it's not so much about 'happily ever after' as it is about 'happy for now', to quote a pleased-to-be-single friend of mine)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Geez, yeah. There's a dystopian story premise for you: the Stepford Husbands

[deire.livejournal.com]

Is there research material that is not in some way writer catnip? :wry g:

[lagilman]

Sometimes it's just Useful to Know.

Sometimes you want to roll in it until you pass out in bliss.

*blink* What? I KNOW it's not just me...