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EB Ver Hoeve's picture

The unique bond.

 

If love is in any way manifested in the neuronal circuitry of the brain, it could ONLY be understood in terms of a highly distributed system. As many have already mentioned, there is simply no one-way to “fall in love”. Love is a system that lacks a cause and effect relationship because it can be created from so many different paths, levels, and actions. I am intrigued by this love at first sight vs. love that develops from arranged marriages discussion because it does seem to indicate that romantic love can develop without sexual desire. Furthermore, it seems likely that these feelings of closeness/ close love are responsible for triggering sexual desire. But even if we could agree that there are many ways to fall in love, I think it would still be a mistake to begin searching for the location of love in the brain. As discussed a long time ago in class, even if we had the best brain scanning machines available, we would still most likely reach a point where we couldn’t explain everything that is going on in the brain and how it relates to behavior. We would get to a point where we could not reduce the actions of the brain any further. As discussed in class, this point may represent the part of every individual that is uniquely subjective and indefinable. I feel that if we try and search for love, we may end up in a similar situation. After all, people who are in love have difficulty explaining how they feel/ why they feel the way they do. Perhaps a person, in love, has connected to that “irreducible uniqueness” in their partner. They can’t tell you what it is exactly, but they know that they feel a deeply intimate bond with their partner, a bond that no one else can understand. If love is unique to an individual, then it kind of makes sense that when one experiences love, they experience a connection with something that cannot be localized and can never be fully defined.

 

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