Slashdot Mirror
Love Under a Microscope
smooth wombat writes "As today is one of the top five marketing-induced spending days, the obvious question is, what is love? Anthropologist Helen Fisher studied the brain's circuitry and found that the brain sees romantic love as a reward similar to chocolate, money or drugs. Does this mean that the mystery of love is less magical now that science has studied it under the microscope? According to Dr Fisher: 'You can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and you still sit down and eat that chocolate cake and it's wonderful,' she said. 'In the same way, you can know all the ingredients of romantic love and still feel that passion.'"
"Life is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while there's a peanut butter cup or an english toffee but they're gone too fast and taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits of hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're desperate enough to eat those, all you got left is an empty box filled with useless brown paper wrappers."
If you look at people around the world and throughout time, monogamy for life is the exception, rather than the rule. People have what anthropologists call "serial monogamy" -- they are monogamous for a time, and then break up and get new partners. They have sexual relationships with several people during their lifetime, but they are monogamous with each partner when they are with them.
I have a degree in anthropology and we spent a lot of time talking about the development of the state. Time was (about 6000 years ago), that there were no kings or any authority that could definitively tell another man what to do. Certainly, there were influential elders and other people who would make their voices heard, but ultimately men and women were free to do what they wanted. There was no judge or president that had ultimate authority to decide someone's fate. If someone wronged you, you could take revenge, and people might even agree with you, but it was ultimately your decision.
Then, at various times around the world, states develop, where there is someone who can ultimately force someone to do something -- on pain of imprisonment or death. It seems to be driven by the 'domestication' of a food crop as a farm staple (wheat, rice, corn), which can be stored, paid as tax, and then redistributed to men bulding pyramids.
I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities in order to get men working on pyramids instead of going hunting all the time and fighting over women. Remember, it's the state who marries people. In olden days, if someone slept with your wife, it was considered theft. So, the state was in charge of women and sexuality which freed up men's time and effort, so they could be sent off to construction camps or to fight in foreign lands.
So, the bottom line of this circular story is that Kings wanted as many young chlidren as possible so they could raise armies and conquer other kings, and have plenty of labor to build pyramids and other structures proclaiming their greatness. If you have farming and state intervention in re-production, this assists greatly in fertility.
If you look at hunter/gatherers, their reproduction patterns are like modern nuclear families. A woman might have 3-4 children. The 10-12 children was a part of the farming social structure.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
if you want to fall in love.
Of course, if you're a schizophrenic axe-murdering psychopath, um, maybe you don't want to fall in love.
or at least not until you go on a hunting party with our VP.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Call me highly skeptical. Helen Fisher is a physical anthropologist. As in population geneticists, primatologists, and paleoanthropologists. This is a far cry from being an expert in studying the "circuitry" that underlies love. In her book, she hooked up with some doctors from SUNY to use MRI brain scanning to "look at what love looks like", but the book is really mostly just anthropology. In truth, we have no idea what the circuitry of love is (yet), but we have long understood the effect of endorphins (caused by chocolate, heroin, running fast, and love) on the human brain and their relationship to one another. Thus her claim is both simultaneously old hat and inexpert.
Sue's meds had to be administered 4 and 6 times a day (precisely), 7 days a week -- one given IV, which I learned to do. Lack of REM sleep is a small sacrifice -- even over a month and a half.
Except for the GBM (Glioblastoma Multiforme) in her head, she was perfectly healthy. The only thing I could have donated would have been part of my brain (not possible), and it's of some debate as to whether that would have helpful or detrimental to either of us :-)
The ultimate sacrifice would be to switch places, but that's a double-edged sword. Yes she'd be here, but alone and very, very sad. At the moment, it feels like she got the better deal.
Thank you all for the kind words.
- Rick
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .