flowers

Happy Valentine's Day!

Listen to your heart. 

It might be on your left. But it is always right!

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Wishing you lots of love on Valentine's Day and always!

Falling in Love Only Takes About a Fifth of a Second

A new meta-analysis study has revealed that falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second. What's more, it can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of your brain.

When you fall in love, 12 areas of your brain work together to release euphoria-inducing chemicals. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

Science Daily reports:

"The study also shows different parts of the brain fall for love. For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image."

Reposted from Dr. Mercola

Related Links:

  Love Really Can Cure a Broken Heart 

  All You Need is Love 

  Love is a Drug 

Emotion’s Alchemy

New insights into the science of emotion unravel the seeming neurological magic that turns emotions into social expressions. 


Our brains can “mirror” the actions of those we watch. We feel our muscles clench when we watch a figure skater twist in the air, or when we crack a smile as a stage performer grins. That’s the work of the proposed “human mirror neuron network,” part of our visual brain. Basically, swaths of neurons in the human premotor cortex activate both when we are performing an action and watching someone else perform that action. The young science of our mirroring ability is rapidly gaining a spot in emotional neurobiology. After all, “motion” and “emotion” live just one letter apart.


Laughing and crying provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

For centuries, philosophers and physiologists have puzzled over the phenomenon of emotion. Where are joy, sadness, fear located in the “gelatinous substance” of the brain? wondered nineteenth century phrenologist Franz Gall. How is emotion’s expression related to subjective feeling? In the 1890s, psychologists William James and Carl Lange suggested we don’t cry because we are sad, rather, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” but other theories reigned. And though the James-Lange theory has had a resurgence in recent decades, not until fMRI technology revealed images of the emotional brain could we begin to empirically explore Shakespeare’s musing in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head?”

>> more at: Emotion’s Alchemy