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.'"
What if the secret ingredient in that cake is "love"? How do they explain that?
they have all the answers. Condition a system so that any unknown variables are in a state of gimbal lock and they begin to think that the variables they observe changing are the only variables. Impose your own notions as to cause and effect, and behold! you have an experiment with repeatable outcomes with little insight as to the nature of reality.
I have no formal education in this field so I may very well be talking out my ass, but I find it a bit of a stretch to equate monogamy with sexually transmitted diseases. STD being lethal is a much more modern thing [Yes syphilis does kill and it's been around for awhile] but I just don't see STD's being pervasive enough for this to occur. AIDS has only really become an issue for Homo Sapiens in the past 50 years or so, so clearly it was not a factor and with the exception of syphilis I can't think of another STD that is deadly [again, if you let things go they become worse but I don't see how this contributes to monogamy].
Your analysis, does not hold up in my mind, I'd love to read your response, maybe I'm missing something...
What will really burn your biscuits is whether every human action and drive a result of natural selection or the other way around. They still haven't established which way causality swings. Does spirit yield natural selection or natural selection spirit. An oversimplification, sure, but perhaps less of one than that made by tha scientific establishment.
I gotta say, I've never understood this... when people eat chocolate they actually FEEL something? They get the warm and fuzzies? I sure don't... it tastes nice and all, but that's it. Maybe in a similar way to how I'm immune to caffeine (Drink 3 Jolts and go right to sleep) I don't FEEL the chemical for love? People have said I'm cold and heartless a few times, I guess chemical sensitivity affects our personalities more than we think. Perhaps some don't feel love or other positive affections and simply have no desire to be a nice person. A new way to stay out jail perhaps? Instead of "He had a bad childhood" we'll hear "He simply doesn't have the chemical receptors for love."
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
1. the traditional romantic-type love, a crush. a person can't stop thinking about another person, many times a minute even, to the point of mental distress. this is very definitely like addiction
2. long-term love. this is when you operate on a day-to-day basis with the other person as if you were a unit, and you can finish each other's sentences and such. you don't think of the other person constantly, you just coexist with them fluidly (albeit with a certain level of conflict). if the person were to leave or die, you would experience great stress, as if you had lost a limb
i think evolution set this up pretty well. romantic love is the almost gravitational chemically-driven attachment you have with someone else that allows for the binding of two organisms together socially. then, as the chemicals subside, you are left with permanent neurogical patterns and structures in both organisms such that you function as a social unit
good design, i think, albeit with unavoidable failures such as:
1. chemically bonding with someone who does not like you (stalking, obsession), your classic unrequited love
2. ongoing long-term conflict that does not resolve, where you are bound to someone you have serious differences of opinion with. classic marriage counseling fodder and irreconiable differences divorce papers issues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Note that I said I believe this is a social meme, not an evolved trait. STDs do not have to be lethal to be undesirable. Perhaps ancient societies observed that monogamy seemed to reduce the occurrence of these diseases, and therefore changed their social norms to favor monogamy.
I'm not an expert, just putting out my ideas.
And...
I've eaten some pretty fucking good chocolate cake in my day. Ain't never wanted to die for the shit.
There are people who'd say things like that about their preferred batch of ingredients. We call them junkies, the chemical they use is called by many names -- not the least of which is junk. When a junkie is deprived of junk, they go through withdrawal. They experience physical pain, depression, and often behave irrationally or self-destructively in order to get their fix.
I (like most of you) have used oxytocin. Like heroin users, when deprived of their fix (or even when threatened with their supply of the drug being cut off), oxytocin users feel depressed, lethargic, some feel physical pain - right in the chest/gut area, and are also prone to self-destructive and irrational acts.
From TFA:
You can know every ingredient in heroin, and you can still sit down and - oh, wait. Once you know what heroin does to human neurochemistry, you can choose not to take the shit, and if you're a junkie, you still have the choice to stop.
Just because my former drug of choice happened to be secreted by my own endocrine system didn't make me any less a junkie.
Mercifully, the 2-3 year pair-bonding mechanism built into your brainstem puts a limit on the withdrawal: if you stay clean, that's about as long as you're physiologically capable of feeling oxytocin withdrawal symptoms. Once you're through that phase, the cravings disappear, and they stay disappeared unless you do something stupid.
Two things -- you have to be around girls, and you have to have the balls to talk to them.
... learn to dance. Ballroom dance. Lots and lots of girls, and you'll get lots of confidence in those tricky things like, "will you dance this with me?" Plus, if it's a good school, they'll have recommendations for decent places to go and actually dance and/or meet people. Oh yeah, and there's absolutely no competition. None.
:)
1 74958-0551820?v=glance&n=283155
As far as being around girls
BTW, dance is not gay. Yes, you can learn to wiggle your hips. Girls (some (many? all?)) love it, so don't discount it.
Confidence...that's a real tough one. Watch how others interact with girls, and see what you like and don't like. Lose the panicky feeling when you approach a girl. Best advice: talk to lots of women!
Oh yeah, and be upfront. If you want to "be friends," ok, but if you a "girlfriend," make sure there's no confusion.
Being in love is an amazing, spectacular experience. As high as it goes, there can also be an unbelievable low. Just don't do that suicide thing when you hit bottom!
Never confuse "lust" with "love." The two are very, very different. Yes, you can have "love at first sight," but usually, it's lust. Lust wears off somewhere between 3 minutes and 3 months. The lucky ones manage not to have kids/get married in those 3 months. Count on needing to know someone for at least 9-12 months before you have any chance of really knowing them enough to make a judgement call concerning kids or marriage.
I don't like to recommend books, but "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" is a good book about dating, why it sucks, and how to do it better. Much better. Also, "How to Make Someone Love You in 90 Minutes" is an excellent book. Scary effective, and it's an interesting introductory text to NLP and related ideas. Finally, on the totally tacky end, the Fleshlight people (google it) have an interesting little manual covering the basic "howto" of these things they give you after you buy their product. I can't really vouch for that last one as I'm still a virgin, but it seems effective. The one girl I got to 2nd base with was plenty happy. (The fleshlight people are discreet, as advertised.)
I Kissed Dating Goodbye
http://www.joshharris.com/ikdg/ikdgmain.htm
How to Make Someone Love You...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076112862X/103-2
Enjoy!
It's much harder to get out of a relationship than to get into one. Pick wisely.
cej102937
Heh. Those who have been successfully married for more than a year know this to be true. It's damn difficult to love a person sometimes, because sometimes even the best mate is almost unlovable. If love was no more than a kind of "wanna get some" reflex, most marriages would be annulled after the first week.
Note she didn't phrase it: "for your offspring", "for your family", or "for your partner after you'd reproduced". It becomes far less obvious that this is clearly just a survival trait. Yes, evolution works in mysterious ways, and that's about all you can say about evolution's role here.
(I'm all for a well-researched evolutionary explanation, but off-the-cuff natural selection claims like this are really no different from saying "It's the will of God".)
How did Sue and I meet?
A mutual friend volunteered me to help Sue move into her condo and hang the ceiling fan, hook up the stereo (man, what a cliché) etc... Sue said, "I feel guilty about you doing all this work", and I said, "Why don't you take me out to dinner".
First date: dinner at a local dive landmark near the boardwalk, lots of talking and a walk on the beach.
She was smart, educated (BA in English and an English teacher), funny, and warm with a pretty smile, and beautiful eyes. I was still in college studying CS (am a Unix SA and programmer), not bad on the eyes (not real good, mind you, but not bad), and fairly bright.
When it's right, it's right.
Got married 4 years later, celebrated our 16th anniversary on December 23, 2005. Sue fell into a coma 2 weeks later and died a week after that.
I'd do it all again in a second, even knowing how it would end.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .