--- In evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com, "Steve Moxon"
<stevemoxon3@...> wrote:

This is the leader from tomorrow's Sunday Times (UK). Poor news day,
huh?

Steve Moxon (Author of The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how
the sexes relate at work, at play and in society. Extracts/info at
www.imprint-academic.com/moxon)

From The Sunday Times
January 4, 2009

The science behind love
Love has no secrets from neurologists and what they have found
contradicts the cynics: there is such a thing as everlasting love
Love, said Shakespeare, is "an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests
and is never shaken". On the contrary, wrote Swinburne, "Laurel is green
for a season, and love is sweet for a day; / But love grows bitter with
treason, and laurel outlives not May". And so on . . . with infinite
variations. Love is (or should be) the core of human experience,
triggering every emotion from euphoria to despair as we write about it,
sing about it, hope for it, worry about it and cry about its
irrationality and transience. But the examination of love is no longer
confined to the imagination. Where poets once conjured metaphors,
scientists now probe the mental circuits that deliver its wild emotions.
Love has no secrets from neurologists armed with an MRI brain scanner.
What they have found contradicts the cynics: there is such a thing as
everlasting love.

Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have shown that the
traditionally sorry path of sexual love - a downward spiral from lust to
indifference over the space of a decade - is not an iron rule. Scanning
the brains of people who have been together for 20 years, the scientists
found that about one in 10 couples still display elements of
"limerence", the psychologists' term for the obsessive behaviour of new
lovers. They enjoy "intensive companionship and sexual liveliness" but
without the anxieties and tensions of early love. They are generous,
calm and deeply attached. The scientists call them swans (swans mate for
life). This is good news for the 10%, if not for the remaining 90%
gripped by marital fatigue. But Arthur Aron, leader of the researchers,
says the majority can learn from the minority. One clue he has found is
that the swans share experiences and avoid stress. This may be a symptom
rather than a cause, but Aron, 64, and his wife are copying the swans
anyway in the hope of enjoying a little limerence themselves.

If we cannot all be swans, the other good news is that Aron's team has
established a biological basis for romance. Science has long dismissed
the idea of love as "culturally determined", existing only in societies
that believe in it. But Aron and co have found identical brain patterns
in lovers from New York to Beijing. Unromantically, they say love is
born in the brain's reward-seeking circuitry, not the heart, but we are
no worse off for that. Love matters. It is not confined to Christmas
repeats of Love Actually and other daft (but really not so wide of the
mark) Richard Curtis films. The absence of love from generation to
generation led to the death of Baby P and other outbreaks of depravity
that scarred 2008. As we face the tempests of 2009, love must remain the
"ever-fixed mark" that is never shaken.

--- End forwarded message ---