Mike Tintner wrote:
[snip]
How do you think a person can fall in love with another person in just a
few minutes of talking to them (or not even talking at all)? How does
their brain get them to do that - without the person having any
conscious understanding of why they're falling? By analysis of a few
words that the other person says (& what if they don't say anything at
all)? Well, if you don't know how that process works, then maybe
there's a lot else here you don't know - and it might be better to keep
an open mind.
Oh, that's a fun question.
If you look at the literature (e.g. Aron, Fisher, Mashek, Strong, Li,
and Brown (2005), and the analysis that Harley and I did of their
conclusions, Loosemore & Harley (in press)) you will see that one likely
possibility is that when a person falls in love it is because there is a
specialized "slot" just waiting for the representation of the right
other person to fall into that slot, and when that happens all hell
breaks loose. It really doesn't need long for this to happen: that
little slot is like a spring-loaded trap.
Conscious of it? Heck no. The Fool could probably send the rest of
their cortex on an all-expenses-paid vacation to the moons of Jupiter -
leaving only the right ventral tegmental area and the right
postero-dorsal body + medial caudate nucleus in charge of business -
and the whole falling-in-love operation would come off without missing a
beat.
Richard Loosemore
References:
Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D. J., Strong, G., Li, H., and Brown, L.
L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with
early-stage intense romantic love. Journal of Neurophysiology, 94, 327-337.
Loosemore, R.P.W. & Harley, T.A. (in press). Brains and Minds: On the
Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl &
S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Philosophical Foundations of fMRI. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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