I found this fun little article from the Economist off a link from slashdot.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2424049
This paragraph provided me with the most amusement.
- The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. "It is fascinating to reflect", the pair conclude, "that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex." The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. "We are literally addicted to love," Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.
No wonder my nose bleeds whenever I watch a romantic comedy.
So who's going to be the first to sell "love morphine: to get over a break up or just feel like you're in love"?
