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I previously wrote a posting on love as well. I find this topic to be very interesting. Recently, my boyfriend and I have been getting serious and using the “love” word, which is what normal couples do after a while (I have to keep telling my self this to not be weirded out). Anyways, we both have had one serious relationship in the past and recently we’ve been dreaming about our past partners. I was thinking about why this may be and thought that maybe being in love for the second time triggers the release of neurons to be triggered that were triggered the first time around - similar to how memory is accessed. Also when reading Sarah Powers post regarding the input for love, I began to think of my own experiences. I remember how things that smelt like my boyfriend or reminded me of him released something to make me feel that “intense elation” that Steph talks about. I do think that it’s a combination of inputs.

Then I thought of love as whole. Although the study presents the chemical explanations of the emotion, I feel that it is an oversimplification of the experience and almost trivializes it. Like Sarah, I believe the concept of love varies from individual to individual and I remember asking a bunch of my friends how they knew they were in love and got a number of answers. The combination of inputs needed varies.

Now tying this into proprioceptors- I know people who’ve felt that their significant other “is the one”. Maybe knowing who our “soul mates” or “true love” is can be associated with proprioceptors. Learning about proprioceptors and all that other mind-blowing stuff about the brain makes me feel anything’s possible. But because proprioceptors are not controlled by our I-function, we might not know if the input is accurate or not as in the Phantom Limb syndrome. That’s when we need to step back and wonder if we’re in love, lust, or if our proprioceptors are lying to us, because we’d not want to make poor decisions about something as serious as love.