All in your head
December 24, 2002

You really do obsess when you are in love:

We know there's an inborn human urge to mate, after all. Love is a mystery, a promise, an arrow from Cupid's bow.Yet recent research suggests that romantic attraction is in fact a primitive, biologically based drive, like hunger or sex, some scientists argue. While lust makes our eye wander, they say, it's the drive for romance that allows us to focus on one particular person, though we often can't explain why. The biology of romance helps account for how we think about passionate love, and explain its insanity: why we might travel cross-country for a single kiss, and plunge into blackest despair if our beloved turns away.

This view of romantic attraction rests on observations of passionate behavior across cultures, studies of animals during courtship and, most recently, findings by scientists studying the human brain. Using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machines to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of early love -- that crazed, can't-think-of-anything-but stage of romance -- scientists have developed some of the first direct evidence that the neural mechanisms of romantic attraction are distinct from those of sexual attraction and arousal.

Our lives are our brains and our brains are our lives. Illuminating or humiliating? I guess that depends on your position regarding souls.

(Just for the record, those are in your head too.)

Posted by Jody at December 24, 2002 12:11 AM

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