July 2011 Archives

OK, so you're barreling along, dig? Making good time. Smooth. Everything is moving with you, getting out of your way when you need it to, giving a bit of glam and flash to your edges, a big assist from the Universe. With me? Right on.

Then: a big old pile of bricks on your head, man. Like an even hundredweight at least, maybe more. Splits your cranium wide open, and all that glam and flash flees into a storm drain. So you're lying there, surrounded by broken pieces of red masonry, and this bird--real fly--walks up and sits down on the curb next to you, looking at your big mess and your bricks and your split head.

And so you try to give her the old Hey Babe, you know, but you've got a piece of skull lodged in your speech center, so you give her the old Heyuh Flaboo Zuzzich? instead.

But this babe just smiles and says, "He was like that when I found him. Honest."

Universe ain't got no kindness at all, sometimes, no kindness at all.

PLAY ME

To wit:

1. Romantic attraction is associated with focused attention on a specific, preferred other. Elevated concentrations of central dopamine and norepinephrine are associated with heightened and focused attention. These parallels suggest that elevated levels of central dopamine and norepinephrine contribute to the lover's focused attention on the beloved.
   
   
2. The lover tends to regard the beloved as novel and unique. Elevated concentrations of central dopamine are associated with exposure to novelty.
   
   
3. The lover tends to remember tiny details of the beloved and their time spent together. Elevated levels of central norepinephrine are associated with increased memory for new stimuli.
   
   
4. The lover becomes highly motivated to seek affiliation with the beloved and exhibits diverse goal-oriented behaviors designed to achieve  contact. Elevated levels of central dopamine are associated with motivation and goal directed behaviors.
   
   
5. Characteristic of the lover is emotional dependence on the relationship with the beloved and longing, even craving, for emotional union with the beloved. Emotional dependency and craving are aspects of addiction associated with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways in the brain.
   
   
6. When people are "in love," they characteristically express heightened energy, sleeplessness and often loss of appetite, as well as labile emotional states, predominated by euphoria. Elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are associated with hyperactivity, sleeplessness, loss of appetite and feelings of euphoria.
   
   
7. Adversity intensifies feelings of attraction. Known as the "Romeo and Juliet Effect," this phenomenon is most likely also associated with elevated levels of dopamine. When a reward is delayed, dopamine-producing cells in the Ventral Tegmental Area of the midbrain increase their activity. (This neural mechanism probably evolved, in part, to drive birds and mammals to work even harder in times of adversity to acquire genetically desirable partners.)
   
   
8. The most prominent aspect of romantic attraction is obsessive thinking about the beloved. Obsessive thinking is commonly associated with low levels of central serotonin.

"The Neural Mechanisms of Mate Choice: A Hypothesis"
Helen Fisher, et al.
Neuroendocrinology Letters Special Issue
Suppl. 4, Vol. 23, December 2002
[Download .PDF]

Or, you might take those eight points and reduce them to this:

When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

Rumi

My preference for one over the other varies depending on my mood and whether I'm reveling, or seeking an explanation.

Although this is a bit cold:

Activation specific to the beloved occurred in the right ventral tegmental area and right caudate nucleus, dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation. These and other results suggest that dopaminergic reward pathways contribute to the "general arousal" component of romantic love; romantic love is primarily a motivation system, rather than an emotion; this drive is distinct from the sex drive; romantic love changes across time; and romantic love shares biobehavioral similarities with mammalian attraction.

"Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice"
Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy L. Brown
The Journal of Comparative Neurology 493:58-62 (2005)
[Download .PDF]

...it has a lot going for it in terms of raw explanatory power, and I've discovered over the past several days that I'm not actually prepared to say that's its "soullessness" is inferior to this:

Falling in love is a thing that strikes like lightning and is, therefore, extremely analogous to the mystical vision ... We do not really know how people obtain [these experiences], and there is not as yet a very clear rationale as to why it happens. If you should be so fortunate as to encounter either of these experiences, it seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it.

Alan Watts

There are evolutionary, social, and psychoanalytic theories intended to explain all of this love business, and every one of them has something to offer. I don't think that any one of them, taken alone, provides a complete portrait of this thing that happens to people every day, all over the world, at once so common and so extraordinary.

However.

Having recently gained a series of insights into the psychological mechanisms that drive my own somewhat rare but potent infatuations, I'm now less inclined to sigh over the insights of Rumi or Byron than I am to examine the processes that they're actually describing though the lenses of psychology and neurochemistry. The academic work of Frank Tallis, Dorothy Tennov, and Helen Fisher provides excellent general introductions to and specific experimental data about just what it is that goes on in the brain and the mind during what is supposedly the ascension of the heart.

I'm not repudiating anything that I wrote here ["The Dance of Veils"], because I continue to maintain that the conscious process of relating to one another in ways that pierce illusion is one of the most, if not the most, important facets of being a human being. But there's a certain imprecision of language at work here, muddying up the waters. English speakers have one paltry word to account for a vast range of emotional experiences. I can "love" my ex, with whom I shared eight years of my life and with whom I am still in frequent and meaningful contact, and I can also "love" someone whose intoxicating presence has recently gone off in my psyche like a bomb. The former is companionate love, something the two of us deliberately worked on after our breakup, and because of our intentional efforts, we have managed to achieve more intimacy as friends than we did as lovers. The latter is infatuation, and is actually what many, many people mean when they speak of "being in love." That's the intoxicating love of the Romantics, that's the drunken metaphorical love of the Sufis. And, to keep up with my ongoing metaphor, that's a love that seems to have far more to do with veils than the dancers who spin behind them.

The commonalities of "falling in love," the head-over-heels, mad love of verse and fiction, stretch across cultures and back through history. We all know people who, time and time again, manage to fall in love with the same type of person, or whose relationships are all characterized by particular patterns. And if we're willing, we may recognize those same patterns in ourselves. With enough self-examination, these patterns are explicable. The courses of such infatuations can be predicted. I won't go so far as to say we can control who we fall in love with, but I do believe that we can gather enough information about ourselves and how we relate to others to raise the odds in favor of building satisfying and healthy intimate love relationships, instead of giving ourselves over to being randomly struck by lightning.

Some people treasure and pursue the uncontrollable nature of full-on romantic love--and it is such a rush, isn't it?--claiming that anything other than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of time, a sentiment well-disseminated through popular culture. And although there are always exceptions in the form of lifelong, impassioned love affairs, there is ample psychological, sociological, and neurological evidence which suggests that this particular kind of love, this sought-after madness, often follows an explicit and predictable course, and that it eventually ends, or becomes something else. This process is driven by hormones and neurotransmitters that have been arranged into artful patterns by millions of years' worth of evolution, all to encourage humans to produce more of themselves and stay together just long enough to get their progeny on its feet and toddling out of the cave. Our evolutionary heritage, combined with the relationship maps we develop for ourselves in childhood, suggests that many of us are repeatedly struck by certain bolts of lightning because we've unconsciously done the relational equivalent of picking a particular golf course, setting up an aluminum ladder, and standing atop it during a thunderstorm waving a sword. 

In love, in the middle of the street, and out of his mind, an impassioned Ronny Cammareri shouted, "We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die!" Well, no, Ronny, we're not...at least, I'm not. You can do that if you want, but I'd like to try something a little different. For me, in my current understanding, the matter reduces to this: who's in charge, here? My right ventral tegmental area and my right caudate nucleus? My corticostriate system? Or me--whoever that is?

There actually are reasons for all of that supposedly reasonless, irrational, crazy love. If you have some idea if what those reasons are, you might have a better chance of not ruining yourself, not breaking your heart, and falling in love with the right people. But, having said that: the depth and strength of those reasons insure that that, in all likelihood, love can and will knock you on your ass anyway. And when it does, you'll probably be much more inclined to read Rumi than an fMRI display.

• Welcome to the snake farm, baby!
• Part Two: Friendship and Love
• Part Three: Fiction

Moving from the theoretical towards the practical is always interesting. First, you get to find out how terribly wrong you were about everything, and second, you get to refine the theory, so you can venture forth and be wrong some more.

And, of course, every so often, you're right, which is like having an orgasm in your constructs.

And that, in true solipsistic style, must mean that it's important for everyone and deserves a bit of your attention. Berit Ellingsen's "The Anatomy of Infatuation."

“Do you bite the glass when you drink?” Tom asked when they were back in the kitchen. The room still smelled of fried batter and syrup.

“No, why would I do that?” Brandon said.

“Great, then we can drink together,” Tom said.

Read the rest over at Zouch Magazine, and spend some time perusing the other stuff to be found there as well.

"What she and I have got is a failure to communicate." The martini glass didn't respond, so I peered into it and addressed the olive that rested in a tablespoon's worth of warm gin at its bottom. "You know what I'm saying, right?"

"I'm an olive," it said. "With a skewer through me."

"And?" I shifted my eyes, once in either direction, to see if anyone at the bar had noticed that I'd been talking to my drink. Either no one had, or they weren't being obvious about noticing.

"And? And no, I don't know what you're saying," the olive said. "Until six months ago I was growing on a fifteen-hundred-year-old tree on a nice hill just outside of Marina di Ostuni with a nice view of the Adriatic."

"How was that?"

"It was nice." Apparently olives weren't blessed with an abundance of adjectives.

"Not much opportunity to form opinions about human relationships, hanging off a tree." I contemplated eating the olive, but it didn't seem appropriate to eat something that was reminiscing.

"No, not really," said the olive. "Once a boy brought a girl up the hill and tried to seduce her beneath my tree. She bit his nose. That's all I know."

"I know a few things." The martini glass spoke up. "I've been here for three years, night in, night out, men, women, getting together, breaking apart..."

"Really."

"Oh yes," the glass said. "But I wanted to give my main olive here a chance to speak up first, seeing as how he's going to get eaten soon."

"This is true," I said.

"I don't blame you," the olive said. "Picked, brined, skewered, and eaten, that's my lot."

"So what's your take?" I asked the glass. "Keen and transparent observer of human nature that you are."

"My take?" If the martini glass could've picked up its own drink, leaned back in its chair, and taken a sip, it would have. It settled for conveying that action via a well-timed pause. "My take is that when it comes to love, people usually know what they don't want with far greater clarity than what they do want."

I thought about it for a small collection of moments to see if it made any sort of immediate sense, and although it didn't, the glass had gained my full attention. "Go on."

"This is because in amore, true knowledge of what you don't want is often acquired via experience, while true knowledge of what you do want is harder to come by, and based on hypotheticals."

"You're awfully abstract for a martini glass," I said. "Explain yourself." The olive was looking tastier, but--not wanting to deny it the chance to experience some kind of Oleaic epiphany before meeting its destiny--I decided to let it hear whatever it was the glass had to say.

"Say someone's been through a real meat-grinder of a relationship. Now, that's real knowledge there, experience, see? She knows in her bones that she doesn't ever want to go through that again. It's real, it's painful, it's immediate, right?"

"Granted."

"But what she does want--say, a successful pairing, or a marriage, even--she's never had that. It's uncharted territory. Like maybe she's got a map somebody drew for her on a cocktail napkin, but she's never really been there herself. So what she doesn't want, that's real clear, in the past. What she does want, that's in a hazy and unknowable future. Theoretical."

"All right, I'm with you so far." In the kitchen, visible through an opening in the wall at the far end of the bar, something sizzling and savory erupted into a squat ball of flames on the stove. The chef lifted the pan, flipping and searing its contents until the fire expended itself. I eyed the olive again.

"So, take your woman friend," the glass continued.

"I'd like to."

"Yes, that's been obvious," said the olive. "What with the brooding about her all night and all."

"You're looking pretty tasty right now," I told it.

The martini glass ignored the exchange. "She's already got a long list of 'don't wants,' doesn't she."

"Yeah. And I'm on it."

"Of course you are. And you'll stay there as long as you're a hypothetical."

"So what's your recommendation?"

"Get real!" the olive piped up.

"The olive has it," said the martini glass.

"Bite her on the nose!" the olive went on.

"Don't do that," said the martini glass. "The olive has limited experience."

"You say the olive's right, though?" I asked.

"In its own limited way, yes. As long as you're a hypothetical, you'll never possess the reality, the immediacy, the, dare I say it! Integrity of her past knowledge. Your challenge is to move away from the translucent realm of possibility and towards her sensual now."

I was impressed. "You say you've only been a martini glass here for three years?"

"Yes," said the glass. "But before that I was sand, which used to be stones, and those were once a mountain."

"I would like to be eaten now," the olive said. I cocked an eyebrow at it. "I'm pretty sure that's what I was supposed to hear, this go 'round. So I'm ready."

I picked the skewered fruit from the glass, slid it between my teeth, crunched the green and salty pulp against my tongue. I heard a small sigh of contentment at the back of my throat, just before I swallowed. "So...any ideas about how I'm supposed to make that move?"

"That, my smitten friend, is the province of poets, not glassware."

I thought about that for another small collection of moments, then caught the attention of the bartender with a raised finger. He lifted the glass from the bar, intending to drop it in the bin with the others for washing and bring me a new one, but I stopped him with a touch on his wrist. "Same drink, same glass, please." That glass and I had more to talk about. "And two olives."