The brain is shaped by love. You knew that, you can feel it, you miss it when you don't have it. In the first few months of love it's obvious. Now research is showing that love's affect on the brain starts in the womb and impacts us our whole life.
The Brain on Love By DIANE ACKERMAN
A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you. All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self... Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose ... Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby's first attachments imprint its brain...
The patterns of a lifetime's behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible... When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun "I," a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other's assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we're not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don't just get under a mate's skin, we absorb him or her...
To find out how pain and love are connected in the brain, what happens when we form a couple and how it is possible to rewire the brain, read the entire article from the NY Times online "Opinionator."
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