Why do we love?
- Locked due to inactivity on Aug 4, '16 4:30pm
Thread Topic: Why do we love?
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Honestly.
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In the 1947 song "Nature Boy," songwriter Eden Abhez posits, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return" [source: Sing365]. Four years earlier, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his book, "A Theory of Human Motivation," which included his famous hierarchy of needs. In the middle of this hierarchy, above physical needs like safety but below esoteric needs like self-esteem, lies our need for love and belonging -- the need to love and be loved in return.
While Abhez and Maslow may have disagreed exactly on how important love is to the human experience, both knew that love is one of the most crucial aspects of being human. Where Abhez was content to simply note its importance, Maslow included love as something humans are motivated to have or achieve. Love is a motivating goal for humans, and our behavior can be explained by our attempts to achieve this goal.
Research supported Maslow's hierarchy for decades. In 2005, a groundbreaking study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was published. The study, conducted jointly by researchers at three universities, found visual evidence that supports Maslow's view of love as motivation.
The human motivation system is linked to the reward system in the brain. Once we achieve a goal, the brain releases dopamine into a region of the reward system called the nucleus acumens. We experience this as a profound sense of pleasure and excitement -- the types of sensations one associates with the experience of romantic love.
In the 2005 study, researchers found that when 17 young participants were shown a photo of the person they loved, regions of the brain responsible for motivating and rewarding began to function. In other words, the study found that romantic love motivates people, and the motivation toward this goal -- loving and being loved -- is fueled by the brain's reward system [source: APS].
The imaging also showed that while the emotional centers of the brain were active, no distinct pattern of emotions was followed. This finding counters the longstanding view that love is based in emotion; instead, it seems that love springs from our goal-seeking behavior and that the emotions we attach to it come second to our motivation.
But the question remains: Why do we love?
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Because we can.
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goodgirlgonebad NewbieIDK, never thought about it.
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sex mostly
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It's all mental stimulants. They trigger a part of your brain which we call "love" and bam boom add some list in there and you've got yourself a happy marriage.
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*lust
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As far as I know, its a biochemical mechanism we most likely evolved to facilitate the structure of the family unit often associated with homosapiens. That is to say that people who exhibited biochemical re actions that caused the sort of loving attachments we have today in all their forms tended to survive and reproduce more often then those who did not.
In fact this trend was so overwhelming that the vast majority of modern homosapiens inherited the genetic disposition to achieve biochemical attachments.
as time went on, and homosapiens became socially conscious of this phenomenon, it became the subject of much thought, both in the realms of logic and poetry. Over time, a preexisting biological adaptation inherited social expectations that over thousands of years to 2014 based on economic and metaconigtion of our emotions.
All in all its safe to say we love, first because it is advantageous in the wild, and secondly as a means of communication with our social habitat. -
*over thousands of years evolved*
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*over thousands of years evolved*
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Remember, to love comes not from your mind but from the bottom of your heart...
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It really is all chemical stuff in your brain and is a byproduct of our original goal in life, to reproduce.
(Side note, echosmith is a great band!)
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