This is What Love Does to Your Brain
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
June 2018 Part 2: This is What Love Does to Your Brain
I came across this article by Sean Illing about love and the brain from Eric Barker’s Barking Up The Wrong Tree weekly email. It was so interesting that I decided to make it my second addition to my Best Reads of the Month for June. The article is from Vox and is called This is What Love Does to Your Brain.
Sean interviews Helen Fisher who is a biological anthropologist, author of six different books, and chief scientific adviser to Match.com. Helen answers several thoughtful questions on how our brains react to different circumstances of love. The questions relate to casual sex, differences in gender sexuality, brain scans of humans falling in love, what makes a happy marriage or relationship, suicide after breakups and others.
Here are some interesting parts below:
“You can think of love as an intense obsession, but it’s really an addiction. You think about [your partner] all the time; you become sexually possessive; you get butterflies in the stomach; you can read their emails and texts over and over again.
But I say it’s an addiction because we found that, in addition to the dopamine system being activated in the brains of people in love, we also found activity in another part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.
This part of the brain is activated in all forms of behavioral addiction — whether it’s drugs or gambling or food or kleptomania. So this part of the brain fires up in people who have recently fallen in love, and it really does function like an addiction.”
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“Sean Illing: What do we, as a culture, get wrong about male and female sexuality?
Helen Fisher: A lot. We think men want to have sex with everything that walks, but that’s not true. They’re much more picky than people think.
I think we also got it wrong that women are not interested in sex. Among people under the age of 40, women are apparently just as adulterous as men. Women in college have more sex than men in college do, largely because women have the pick of the place when they’re in college, and men don’t.
But the idea that men need or desire sex more than women is a fantasy.
I’ve been telling women’s magazines for 30 years that men fall in love faster than women do because they’re so visual, and they fall in love more often. Men like public displays of affection more regularly, which sounds romantic but isn’t.”
If you would like to read the whole article, click the link below:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/23/17247932/love-sex-science-marriage-psychology-brain
