Love 2.0 Read Online Free PDF

perspective, your smiles, nods, and other gestures of your own positivity and attunement don’t just exist “out there” in you. When we meet each other’s gaze, they also come to exist, in a very real way, inside me. Within milliseconds my brain and body begin to buzz with your enthusiasm and appreciation, and your attunement to me. The more this happens, the more I come to feel the same way as you, both enthused and appreciative, responsive and sympathetic. Soon enough these feelings surface on my face and emanate through my voice and gestures. As our eyes continue to meet, a parallel simulation process flows forth within you, as the dynamics unfolding within your brain and body begin to pattern mine. A back-and-forth reverberation stretches out between us.
    Increasingly, with each passing micro-moment, you and I come to
feel the same way
. We’re in sync, attuned. Positivity resonance has established a connection between us, as your and my brain activity and biochemistry increasingly become one and the same. A positivity-infusedinterweaving of our hearts and minds emerges, a momentary state scientists have called
intersubjectivity
. You can think of this as a miniature version of what
Star Trek
’s infamous Dr. Spock called a
mind meld
. Yet both expressions, in my view, are too focused on the mind, too heartless. For it’s vital, too, that the emotional tone of our momentary meld, our interweaving, is warm, open, trusting, and full of genuine care and concern for each other.
    Some would call what is happening between us
rapport.
Yet the more I understand the science behind positivity resonance, the more I think this description misleads.
Rapport
sounds optional, superfluous. Something you’d be just as healthy with or without. Given the vital role that positivity resonance plays in our survival, such states warrant elevation. That’s why I call them
love
, our supreme emotion. Micro-moments like these are those essential nutrients of which most of us in modern life aren’t getting enough.
    So what’s a smile for? Traditional views hold that smiles have evolved to reveal the inner state of the person who smiles. Indeed, when you call a smile a facial expression, you unwittingly subscribe to this view—that certain facial movements universally express a person’s otherwise unseen emotions. An opposing view shifts the spotlight onto the
recipient
of a smile and argues that smiles evolved not because they provided a readout of the positive emotion that the smiling person feels, but rather because they evoked a positive emotion in the person who meets the smiling person’s gaze. More recently scientists have taken this alternative view a step further, arguing that smiles have evolved to give us an implicit understanding—or gut sense—of the smiling person’s true motives. Building on these and other evolutionary accounts, I think it’s appropriate to widen the spotlight further still, to illuminate not just either the
smiler
or the
smilee
, but instead the emerging connection between the two people who come to share a smile. One person’s sincere, heartfelt smile can trigger a powerful and reverberating state between two people, one characterized by the trioof love’s features: a now shared positive emotion, a synchrony of actions and biochemistry, and a feeling of mutual care. Put succinctly, smiles may well have evolved to make love, to create positivity resonance.
    Love, then, requires connection. This means that when you’re alone, thinking about those you love, reflecting on past loving connections, yearning for more, or even when you’re practicing loving-kindness meditation or writing an impassioned love letter, you are not in that moment experiencing true love. It’s true that the strong feelings you experience when by yourself are important and absolutely vital to your health and well-being. But they are not (yet) shared, and so they lack the critical and undeniably physical ingredient of