Helen Fisher's "The Brain in Love"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

For an assignment for my psychology class, I was assigned the task of watching one of Helen Fisher's two wonderful TED talks.
http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
Both of these talks are great old friends to me, and in fact Helen Fisher is one of the two people who inspired me to go into neuroscience. I thought I'd post the short essay I wrote up for the class, for comments and/or discussion.

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I revisited Helen Fisher's "The Brain in Love", which has been a source of profound inspiration to me ever since I first saw it about four years ago, in a state of heartbreak. The impact that Helen Fisher and her work had on me, on my acceptance of the pain I was in and the process of love and the hope for future love, on my compassion for people in love and for people in general, has been huge. Here is what I learned; love is real. Love is a biological process, a physical process, that is no less real than having a virus or an addiction or an injury or dreams or hunger or a child. For some people, this sounds terrible, mundane, and unromantic, but for me it was a revelation. Love is real. Love is manifest. It is not a mystical suffering visited on us by angry spirits, or a glorious reward bestowed on us by a benevolent God, it is a natural, inherent part of us, woven into the same cells and the same DNA that give us the hands with which we shape our world and the intellect with which we strive to understand it.

An ex-boyfriend once asked me what love is, and I, excitedly, started to explain Helen Fisher's work. He said, "Love can't be that simple; we can't understand it, it has to be more than that". I felt like I had failed utterly to convey that the world of beauty in her work is that it isn't that simple, because the mechanics of love are just as complex and opaque and mysterious as we, ourselves, are, and we have only just begun to understand ourselves as a species, as living organisms. That our bodies and minds are not two discrete aspects of our being, and that these bodies of ours are, truly, extensions of our amazing brains and not merely mechanical devices that our brains drive like machine operators is a relatively new idea in Western science, which loves to draw lines and divide and compartmentalize our interwoven systems.

Understanding love as a natural process, as a drive, when I was heartbroken, helped me make a little more sense of what I was feeling, and to be kinder and more patient with myself. Instead of castigating myself for hurting so badly when nothing was really wrong with me, and beating  myself up for having all these stupid feelings over somebody who really wasn't right for me, I understood that something was really wrong, and that it would take a while for the physical process of recovery to happen. I understood that even if he wasn't really right for me, love had happened anyway, and that wasn't my fault for not being smart enough to avoid it, it was just something that had happened naturally in the course of pursuing happiness, like almost drowning in the surf after catching the most magnificent curl.

Likewise, the madness that lovers engage in, and that all of humanity engages in in the name of love, becomes so much more understandable when we recognize that we are people in the throes of an intense process which, in a sense, hijacks our ability to reason, and our hearts and hands and digestive systems, giving rise both to some of the most stunningly beautiful art and literature conceivable by our species, and also to some of the ugliest spite and violence, born from our biologies being flooded with the chemicals of an emotion so strong that it can sweep us up and out of control like a river after a storm, and propel us to do things we would never, in our right minds, consider doing.

   I guess my takeaway can be summed up by relating a conversation I once had with an old friend, when he was bitterly heartbroken; he said "Love is nothing but a bunch of chemicals". The answer to that, of course, is "So are we". 

[Doktor Howl]

That's awesome.

To me, it doesn't change anything.  It doesn't ruin it.  The experience is still the same, it's still the thing I value most.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Agree, in those terms it seems even MORE profound.

[Freeky]

Nigel, I really like your essay.  I've always been on the samge page as you when it acme to knowing that love is a biological thing, and not some weird, inexplicable, strictly spiritual thing.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I understood that even if he wasn't really right for me, love had happened anyway, and that wasn't my fault for not being smart enough to avoid it, it was just something that had happened naturally in the course of pursuing happiness, like almost drowning in the surf after catching the most magnificent curl.

Whole thing was bang on the money but bonus points for the surfing metaphor 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I understood that even if he wasn't really right for me, love had happened anyway, and that wasn't my fault for not being smart enough to avoid it, it was just something that had happened naturally in the course of pursuing happiness, like almost drowning in the surf after catching the most magnificent curl.

Whole thing was bang on the money but bonus points for the surfing metaphor 

[Reginald Ret]

Those TED talks are great, as is your essay.

I especially like the conclusion:

   I guess my takeaway can be summed up by relating a conversation I once had with an old friend, when he was bitterly heartbroken; he said "Love is nothing but a bunch of chemicals". The answer to that, of course, is "So are we".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Thanks!