Dr. Lucy Brown's Lecture

Love is such an abstract thing that it seems strange and almost wrong to break it down into something that can be quantified and analyzed. It is such an over powering emotion that it consumes us whether we want to or not. Words of love have been written into diaries and letters claiming that no one could ever feel the way that we do when we are in love. Love is historically expressed through arts and music in ways that show the audience that we are so consumed by love that we are unable to stop thinking about our beloved. In the lecture from Dr. Lucy Brown a clinical professor of neurology at the Einstein College of Medicine I learned that we all feel similarly in love and are chained into these feelings, whether wanted or not, by our own brains. Being overwhelmed by love is such a common thing that there is even a scaling system that has been determined by several psychologists to determine just how in love you are. Being able to quantify love in such a way tells us that we all feel these extreme emotions in similar ways.

To help analyze why we need love Dr. Brown and her colleagues performed brain scans on a population of people who looked at pictures of their loved ones. With this data Dr. Brown found that the area of the brain that was lit up was the ventral tegmental region. This is the area in the brain that deals with our subconscious and tells us to do things when we need to; such as drink water when we are thirsty. This means that we cannot control love. Love merely occurs and does what it can to keep our minds from being productive. We have a yearning for love when we are lonely just as much as we have a yearning for food when we’re hungry. This yearning can be harmful not just to your productivity but when the love is lost there are also uncontrollable consequences. The adverse effects of love have also been analyzed such as the pain from losing one that you love. This heartache from love is so powerful that it is manifested into an agonizing physical pain. It was found that the pain you feel after a breakup is equivalent to what one feels when the have a tooth ache.