"Scientists are closing in on love. Before long there should be a framework in place which will help us explain the nature of love and understand its evolution," writes Rowan Hooper in The Japan Times Online:
It's quite easy to see why a mother who loves her child will be favored by natural selection. A deep degree of caring, nurturing and protecting -- in short, loving -- clearly helps the survival of a child . . . As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.
What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same regions of the brain. The implication is that maternal love is the evolutionary basis, the foundation, for romantic love.
[They] also found that love leads to a suppression of neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions . . . The work could provide a neurological explanation for why love makes us blind.
As with so much of our recent understanding of what happens in our brains, the new findings have been revealed by magnetic resonance imaging. In this kind of brain scanning, the subject is placed into a strong magnetic field. A scientist can then locate the precise areas of the brain that are operating at any time by measuring changes in the blood flow -- and thus oxygenation -- of the subject . . . The work was published in February's issue of NeuroImage. In a previous study (reported in this column), the authors identified the parts of the brain involved in romantic love.
The researchers found that the brain activity recorded in the two studies was remarkable similar. When young mothers gazed at their children, the same brain areas lit up as when young lovers stared at photos of their partners. Both types of love activate specific regions in the reward system, and both reduce activity in the systems necessary for making negative judgments.
Presumably the same areas of babies' brains light up when they gaze back at their adoring mothers, perhaps disposing us, whether female or male, to later on falling for someone who is -- in some important psychological way -- "just like the gal that married dear old dad."
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
well i believe what is said there, not understanding the scientific terms. i must say it is true its what u put you well get out.but what is love? and how does it start with some one you dont know.
Posted by: alex | September 27, 2005 at 08:36 AM