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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.'"
From TFA:Since the odds of survival for a human child with two parents is (or at least was) much higher than the odds of a single-parent child, it shouldn't be surprising that humans have a strong drive to forge lasting relationships. Natural selection in action, and all that.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
What if the secret ingredient in that cake is "love"? How do they explain that?
When asked to confirm the above findings by Dr. Haddaway, a pair of scientists dressed in bright purple and blue labcoats nodded furiously, in rhythm.
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Roses are red
Violets are blue
All of my base
Are belong to you
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Love is like a box of chocolates. You sneak one or two before you decide to buy. Then eventually you do buy, take it home and eat them all in one sitting. Finally, your left with your body feeling sick, your wallet feeling light, and holding an empty box.
Demented But Determined.
It's like I knew I will get fired one day for reading Slashdot during office hours, I still read it.
It's like I knew the next story will only be out in 20 minutes, I still hit F5 every second.
It's like I knew a story is a dupe, I still "read more" and reply to it.
If this is not true love, what is?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
This touches on the issue of mind / brain duality.
Is our mind something that's simply a meta-effect of the brain, so that for instance if you view/control my brain you can fully know / control my mind?
Also note that the answer to this has serious implications for free will, the justice of retributive punishment, etc.
We are a very loving nation apparently...
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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.
It says in 65nm letters (soon 45nm at Intel) And some time after I posted this original poem on
I don't know what to think.
A later version dedicated to Rob and Kathleen (in 2002) can be found here
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That chocolate cake analogy is good. Just like a cake you can mix all the right ingredients and still make a big mess of it instead of something good.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
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
The Greeks had four words for love: agape, phileo, eros, and storge. We English speakers seem to conflate everything around eros and thereby miss the point. Love is the act of the will whereby another individual is placed ahead of yourself. That's why Christians are commanded to "love their enemies" and why the Apostle Paul wrote that the greatest act of love was when God gave His Son as the sacrifice for the sins of the world.
No naturalistic scientist could ever write:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
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
"Fisher studied the brain's circuitry and found that the brain sees romantic love as a reward similar to chocolate, money or drugs."
Explains why when we pursue romantic love our bait often consists of one of chocolate, money or drugs.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Asking this question on Slashdot is like asking a group of chimpanzees whether they prefer Spanish Red or White Zin.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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.
You are on the right track, young padiwan. Now you must get another person involved.
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
We were an unconventional, but very happy couple (I am 42, she was 61).
If romantic love is a reward, it's a reward for something deeper.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
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! --
You might feel like you're correct but there is no absolute right or wrong when a person alters their brain chemistry. If you're judging me from a moral basis, then I have no argument. You will always be right and I will always be wrong. But why are you wanting to pick a fight with people that have no problem altering their own conciousness? It's theirs, not yours. Do you make the same arguments with your friends (if you have any) that consciously and willfully alter their brain chemistry/nervous system when it's caffiene? or chocolate? Or maybe they have passion for bubble baths. You're arguing against a completely natural and healthy need for human beings to transcend the daily reality they live out. What you're doing is completely unhealthy and probably causes more brain damage to yourself than cannabis will ever do.
Now I'm sure you live a very healthy and productive life. You probably don't smoke, don't drink coffee, will never sky dive or eat chocolate and live a perfectly celibate life. I respect that, I never attacked what you make of your life did I?
For the rest of humanity, for the people that have not graduated with honours from their local high school DARE program like you have, we will continue to enjoy what life has to offer us. I have no problem with your personal choice, but please don't be so quick to judge people based on what you personally believe is a moral failing. Your morals are not mine.
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.
...very much like deciding that tears explain sadness.
I know subjectively, that even my simple emotions are complex, multilayered things. There's the sensation-level feedback which lets me know I'm experiencing an emotion. There's learned-behaviour changes like reinforcement (of love, happiness, etc) or disincentive (from pain, shame, etc). There's thought-ability changes, belief-prioritization changes, even memory recall changes. All in parallel. And that's leaving aside the experience, belief and attention context that triggered the emotion. So, it looks to me like what these guys are doing is picking at one strand (new love's pleasure/reinforcement/habituation mechanism) and thinking they have the totality. Which is just ignorant, and I'd guess it's not accidentially ignorant. More people pushing the "mind is nothing but meat" idea. Not an opinion I share!
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. . . .
A very interesting post, but I wonder:
I suspect that the ideal of a lifetime monogamous commitment was developed by the new State Authorities
Is there any actual evidence that a group of people got together in a back room and actually consciously invented lifelong monogamy? Because the idea seems to me just a little bit far fetched. I don't think that people are quite that insightful and forward-thinking.
At any rate, just to support what you said about serial monogamy, there is strong evidence that it was (subconsciously) an invention of women. Men, I think, would be happy roaming about like nomads, and just mating (forcibly if necessary) with any female they happen to meet. Monogamy was like a contract that women made with men. "I will stop resisting and you'll actually have more and better sex IF you agree to stick around and help with the kids." And then once the kids had aged five or six years, the contract stopped serving its purpose and both parties moved on to their next contract.
I think that lifelong monogamy just evolved out of that, as the contract term kept getting longer and longer. The more complex the civilization, the *more* support that children need. Now you've got to buy them clothes, you've got to put them through school, you've got to teach them the complex behaviors that will allow them to fit into this civilization. That takes more than just a few years.
I just think this is a better explanation for lifelong monogamy than the idea that it was invented for a purpose. I think it evolved.
Nonetheless, what you said about the state supporting marriage for its own selfish reasons, I certainly agree with. I just don't think the state invented it.