There is so much time of our life we dedicate to loving, thinking about love, searching for love or suffering from it that we all end up, eventually, thinking what the hell love actually is. I wondered about this myself and I ended up with a potential answer...
One of these days I was watching a presentation about phantom limbs and about "learnt" paralysis (http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html). It somehow seems that our brain creates stable paths between different areas, connecting certain stimuli with specific responses, through the pure repetition of the the succession of gestures. Like this, somebody who had a paralyzed painful limb eventually amputated still feels his limb, as painful and as paralyzed as when it was attached to his body, because for quite a long while he felt as such.
No, I did not come to the conclusion that love is like the phantom limb symptom, but I saw a potential answer coming from this medical presentation. We all differentiate between "falling in love" and "loving" and attach a certain stability to the idea of love. If falling in love can be a temporary loss of reason, to put it like this, then time cements this falling and transforms it into real love. Or some crap like this...
However, what if it's a simple chemical and, later on, neurological thing? What if we "fall in lust," due to some hormonal and chemical signals we exchange with our potential mate and, if this falling gets actuated, we start to create stable paths of communication between the visual and the emotional area of the brain? What if we actually teach ourselves to associate a certain person with the idea of love due to simply practicing the connection between the respective areas of the brain?
To me it seems like a quite decent explanation for love - I've never understood (in myself and others, not to be hypocritical) the idea that "love endures". Hell, I was talking about this in an earlier post and I was highlighting about the intrinsic connection between "lasting" and "enduring", on one hand and the concept of "true love" on the other. Why does love have to endure in order to assert itself as such, is a different question. However, how can we actually endure a lot of shit and still think that we love?
In almost everybody who can say "I have loved" you can check this - after the couple has been going through a lot of crap and of mutual miseries, resulting from living in common long after lust has ended, they still say that love is what holds them together. Some separate and leave, sick and tired of this endurance of love, but they still miss their former partner and attribute this feeling to the idea that "I still love him/her". But what if, in fact, it's nothing about love but it's just a path your brain created, in those times in which your chemistry was talking too loud for you to be able to hear your reason? What if that path, which became, in time, dug into your brain makes you think that you actually "love" somebody? Or (and this is even better) love IS this path and we just invented a name for it and then transformed it into a cultural pillar of our social and moral life?
I can only hope it is like this... I mean, wouldn't you want to invent a medicine against "loving" and against "missing" and live through rather short but fulfilling and rewarding relations, which can end when the "falling in lust" ended and leave no regrets, no disappointment and no bitterness? We lie to ourselves that "at least we feel that we are alive if we suffer from love", in order to allow ourselves to live on without permanently wondering "how could I be SUCH an idiot?" But I, personally, would swallow any pill that would allow me to stop missing. And yes, I would slip such a pill into my actual partners glass, to stop myself form having to deal with their past.
One of these days I was watching a presentation about phantom limbs and about "learnt" paralysis (http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html). It somehow seems that our brain creates stable paths between different areas, connecting certain stimuli with specific responses, through the pure repetition of the the succession of gestures. Like this, somebody who had a paralyzed painful limb eventually amputated still feels his limb, as painful and as paralyzed as when it was attached to his body, because for quite a long while he felt as such.
No, I did not come to the conclusion that love is like the phantom limb symptom, but I saw a potential answer coming from this medical presentation. We all differentiate between "falling in love" and "loving" and attach a certain stability to the idea of love. If falling in love can be a temporary loss of reason, to put it like this, then time cements this falling and transforms it into real love. Or some crap like this...
However, what if it's a simple chemical and, later on, neurological thing? What if we "fall in lust," due to some hormonal and chemical signals we exchange with our potential mate and, if this falling gets actuated, we start to create stable paths of communication between the visual and the emotional area of the brain? What if we actually teach ourselves to associate a certain person with the idea of love due to simply practicing the connection between the respective areas of the brain?
To me it seems like a quite decent explanation for love - I've never understood (in myself and others, not to be hypocritical) the idea that "love endures". Hell, I was talking about this in an earlier post and I was highlighting about the intrinsic connection between "lasting" and "enduring", on one hand and the concept of "true love" on the other. Why does love have to endure in order to assert itself as such, is a different question. However, how can we actually endure a lot of shit and still think that we love?
In almost everybody who can say "I have loved" you can check this - after the couple has been going through a lot of crap and of mutual miseries, resulting from living in common long after lust has ended, they still say that love is what holds them together. Some separate and leave, sick and tired of this endurance of love, but they still miss their former partner and attribute this feeling to the idea that "I still love him/her". But what if, in fact, it's nothing about love but it's just a path your brain created, in those times in which your chemistry was talking too loud for you to be able to hear your reason? What if that path, which became, in time, dug into your brain makes you think that you actually "love" somebody? Or (and this is even better) love IS this path and we just invented a name for it and then transformed it into a cultural pillar of our social and moral life?
I can only hope it is like this... I mean, wouldn't you want to invent a medicine against "loving" and against "missing" and live through rather short but fulfilling and rewarding relations, which can end when the "falling in lust" ended and leave no regrets, no disappointment and no bitterness? We lie to ourselves that "at least we feel that we are alive if we suffer from love", in order to allow ourselves to live on without permanently wondering "how could I be SUCH an idiot?" But I, personally, would swallow any pill that would allow me to stop missing. And yes, I would slip such a pill into my actual partners glass, to stop myself form having to deal with their past.
