To
begin the lecture, Lucy Brown started off with a quote by Mumford and Sons: “In
these bodies we live; In these bodies we die; Where you invest your love, You
invest your life.” This quote is
essential because it conveys how love is important for survival not only for a
species, but also for an individual.
Love consumes everything we do because we want it to.
Brown
began the lecture by asking the question that human beings have been trying to
answer since the beginning of time: “What is love?” While many people think of romance and
infatuation when they think of love, there are many other types of love that
people can experience. There is maternal
and paternal love, which is the love a parent has for a child. There is companionate love, which is the love
for a friend that is merely platonic.
There is also positive association love, which is when we assert that we
love something such as a type of ice cream or movie.
Brown’s
focus in her studies is the Early Stage, Intense Romantic Love. This is when two people just meet, and are
starting to get to know and like each other.
During this stage, and individual may experience intrusive thinking
about the person they desire, special meanings of the persona and overlooking
their faults, intense energy making it hard to sleep, loss of appetite, mood
swings, craving to be around the person, and rearranging their daily plans to
be around the other person more frequently.
Love
is very complex in why people are so addicted to it. However, love, at least the beginning stages,
is a natural euphoria. In studies where
they examined the brain, the same parts of the brain lit up when someone was in
the beginning stages of love, which was similar to when someone was craving cocaine. Therefore since love creates that euphoric
feeling, so many people crave it as if it were a drug because it is a “natural”
addiction. Another interesting factor
about love is that it is a cross-cultural phenomenon. No matter what part of the world you are in
and no matter what the culture is, there is the desire for love in individuals
in each culture. This goes to prove that
love is built in our brains for survival.
Romantic
love is important because it is a mammalian drive. It is used to pursue a preferred mate, to
create a mating system, and it is a brain reward system. There are three different stages in romantic
love: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust
is the physical and sexual aspect of love, and it is what gets individuals to
put themselves out there in order to find a mate. Attraction is the romantic phase and it is
when you focus your attention on one individual and try to get to know them
better. Then the attachment aspect is
what keeps a couple together because they have reached a higher stage of love.
For
me, personally, I would like to believe in the concept of “love at first sight”,
so naturally I wanted to know if there is something in the brain that can prove
that it does exist. While we did not
learn of any definite aspects that would prove this correct in the lecture, we
did learn about a study, which shows how couples were able to stay
together. In the study, the scientists studied
couples in their beginning stages, and then they examined the relationships
three years later. What they found is
about half the couples split up and half stayed together. The interesting commonality between the
couples that stayed together is that in their brains, they suppressed negative
judgment and the concept of self. Therefore,
the couples learned to put the other partner first and not criticize their
partner. While this does not prove “love
at first sight”, it does give insight on how to keep a lasting relationship.
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