This Is Your Brain on Sex Read Online Free PDF

that track, neuroscientists can see what areas of the brain are active in response to different stimuli and tasks.
    Who first thought to try to map the neural correlates of love is up for debate. In the late 1990s both Andreas Bartels, a newly minted PhD at University College London, and Helen Fisher, that savvy evolutionary anthropologist from Rutgers University, believed there must be some neurobiological evidence of love in the brain. It just had to be tested. But since the days of phrenology, no one had really tried.
    Fisher had been studying the anthropological aspects of human sexuality, monogamy, and love for decades. Her research convinced her that romantic love was not an emotion, as so many others had postulated, but an actual physical drive like thirst or hunger. “It just came to my mind that romantic love was a very powerful physical experience,” she said when we discussed her first study about the brain and love. “And that if I looked at brain functions, I might be able to establish what was going on in the brain when someone falls in love.”
    After speaking about this idea at several conferences, Fisher linked up with Lucy Brown, a neuroanatomist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Arthur Aron, a social neuroscientist from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The group hypothesized that there were three distinct brain systems for love: one for sexuality and sexual behavior, a second for feelings of deep attachment, and a third for romantic love. 4 “It seemed to me that there were three basic feelings that go with love, and all others sort of derivefrom them,” said Fisher, her voice thoughtful and calm. “I thought romantic love would be the easiest one to measure. It’s such a dramatic feeling, with strong elements of focus, energy, and motivation.”
    Fisher is right; love’s symptoms are both physical and dramatic. Those afflicted by it are often distracted, constantly daydreaming about their intended. They are emotional, too, prone to exaggerated laughter, tears, and fears. One cannot forget the actual physical manifestations of this condition: new lovers may feel butterflies in the stomach and experience an elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, and weakness in the knees. These individuals may exhibit signs of anxiety, loss of appetite, and slight obsessive-compulsive tendencies, as well as poor decision-making ability. They may sneak out of the house at night, be consistently late for work, drop out of college, or move to a new city for no other reason than to be with their lover. In my case, I blame my irrational purchase of an obnoxiously purple couch solely on the fact that I was head over heels with the object of my affection while shopping for it. Fisher was strongly convinced there was a biological explanation underlying these extreme changes in behavior. She and her colleagues set out to find it.
    But before the group completed their testing, Bartels and his former advisor, Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroaesthetics (a department of Zeki’s own design focusing on the neural basis of aesthetics) at University College London, published their own study comparing passionate love and friendship in the fMRI scanner in the November 2000 issue of Neuroreport . Zeki was inspired by mentions of love in art. How often, in the throes of passionate love, have you thought that Rumi poem or Elvis Presley song must have been written for you? How many times have you looked at a painting and thought it represented a deep and true feeling you experienced? Think about all the descriptions of love that are out there—I mentioned quite a few in the introduction. Zeki believed that if the feeling could be captured and understood in these artistic contexts (or as a tire iron, as the case may be), there must be something common about love and other emotions inside each of us. Something that is an intrinsic part of our makeup, passed from generation to generation, that allows us to share