As much as we'd like to believe that love is a matter of the heart, it's in fact very much a matter of the brain.
In a report that was published late in 2010, The Neuroimaging of Love, some interesting facts were noted:
* You can fall in love in one-fifth of a second;
* As you fall in love, 12 areas of the brain work together to form a biochemical torrent that sweeps you away in euphoria-inducing chemicals, including dopamine, oxytocin, adrenalin and aldosterone;
* Falling in love activates similar areas of the brain to cocaine and elicits the same euphoric feelings;
* Widespread changes are experienced in the body, including an increase in tolerance to pain.
Falling and being in love is thus a very real and even measurable phenomenon on the physical level, but there are also psycho-spiritual elements that come into play.
In the first one or two years of being in love, you have a real sense that you and your lover have melded into one. Psychotherapist M. Scott Peck explains in his best-selling book, The Road Less Travelled, that this sense of merging into one as we fall in love is a kind of psychological trick to get us to make a commitment. He says, 'The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. For Peck, this very process is the source of the ecstasy of falling in love.
In a report that was published late in 2010, The Neuroimaging of Love, some interesting facts were noted:
* You can fall in love in one-fifth of a second;
* As you fall in love, 12 areas of the brain work together to form a biochemical torrent that sweeps you away in euphoria-inducing chemicals, including dopamine, oxytocin, adrenalin and aldosterone;
* Falling in love activates similar areas of the brain to cocaine and elicits the same euphoric feelings;
* Widespread changes are experienced in the body, including an increase in tolerance to pain.
Falling and being in love is thus a very real and even measurable phenomenon on the physical level, but there are also psycho-spiritual elements that come into play.
In the first one or two years of being in love, you have a real sense that you and your lover have melded into one. Psychotherapist M. Scott Peck explains in his best-selling book, The Road Less Travelled, that this sense of merging into one as we fall in love is a kind of psychological trick to get us to make a commitment. He says, 'The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. For Peck, this very process is the source of the ecstasy of falling in love.
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