You walk into a room---and there he is.
He turns and, spotting you, grins, and you light up.
Your heart flutters, your fingers tingle, you grin back.
You feel no threat; indeed, you feel oddly safe.
His face reminds you of your beloved father's.
He has the same smile, and, like your father, he seems kind and funny.
He also looks a bit like that movie start you lust after, the one with the blue eyes, broad shoulders, and sculpted abs. You cannot stop staring into his eyes.
Hmmm, very sexy...
You move forward, and so does he.
You shake hands, then stand together, chatting.
After a while, you begin to mirror the way he stands and moves his hands.
When he shifts weight to his left foot, you shift yours to your right.
When he crooks his arm and sets it on his hip, your arm soon finds its way to your own hip.
He mentions a hassle at work---and you know, just what he is feeling.
Suddenly, you feel close, connected.
You are falling in love.
We feel love in our skin and, we say, in our heart. But as new science is making clear,
the true locus of love is the brain.
That would have shocked the ancients, who almost uniformly held the brain in low esteem. Egyptians mummifying the dead scrupulously preserved the heart and other organs for use in the afterlife but were so unimpressed with the brain that they routinely scooped it out and threw it away.
Aristotle ruled the brain "an organ of minor importance" whose duty it was to cool the blood. Hundreds of years later, Descartes concluded the brain was a kind of antenna by which the spirit commuted with the body.
Today, thanks to new research techniques, we have gained more knowledge about the brain in the past twenty years than we had in all the centuries before.
We also know that the three pounds of furrowed, jellylike matter that rests inside our skull is
integral in the process of dancing lovingly with another.
Indeed, the brain is a profoundly social organ, oriented towards making and managing connection with others. From our earliest days, our brain grows and develops in response to our love relationships, and as we mature,
our brain actively works to fasten us to our loved ones.
Indeed, says psychologist Dan Stern of the University of Geneva, the brain is so relational that our nervous system is actually "constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience other as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own."
Love Sense - Sue Johnson
He turns and, spotting you, grins, and you light up.
Your heart flutters, your fingers tingle, you grin back.
You feel no threat; indeed, you feel oddly safe.
His face reminds you of your beloved father's.
He has the same smile, and, like your father, he seems kind and funny.
He also looks a bit like that movie start you lust after, the one with the blue eyes, broad shoulders, and sculpted abs. You cannot stop staring into his eyes.
Hmmm, very sexy...
You move forward, and so does he.
You shake hands, then stand together, chatting.
After a while, you begin to mirror the way he stands and moves his hands.
When he shifts weight to his left foot, you shift yours to your right.
When he crooks his arm and sets it on his hip, your arm soon finds its way to your own hip.
He mentions a hassle at work---and you know, just what he is feeling.
Suddenly, you feel close, connected.
You are falling in love.
We feel love in our skin and, we say, in our heart. But as new science is making clear,
the true locus of love is the brain.
That would have shocked the ancients, who almost uniformly held the brain in low esteem. Egyptians mummifying the dead scrupulously preserved the heart and other organs for use in the afterlife but were so unimpressed with the brain that they routinely scooped it out and threw it away.
Aristotle ruled the brain "an organ of minor importance" whose duty it was to cool the blood. Hundreds of years later, Descartes concluded the brain was a kind of antenna by which the spirit commuted with the body.
Today, thanks to new research techniques, we have gained more knowledge about the brain in the past twenty years than we had in all the centuries before.
We also know that the three pounds of furrowed, jellylike matter that rests inside our skull is
integral in the process of dancing lovingly with another.
Indeed, the brain is a profoundly social organ, oriented towards making and managing connection with others. From our earliest days, our brain grows and develops in response to our love relationships, and as we mature,
our brain actively works to fasten us to our loved ones.
Indeed, says psychologist Dan Stern of the University of Geneva, the brain is so relational that our nervous system is actually "constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience other as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own."
Love Sense - Sue Johnson
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