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Are Our Love Songs Getting It Right?
Love is a mystery, love is a battlefield, love stinks, love hurts, love is all you need. To hear our artists go on about it, love is as impenetrable and mystical as it is powerful. But in a digital, big-data, genome-sequenced age, we know a lot more about the “magic” of attraction than ever before. So for this Valentine’s Day, we decided to unromantically break through some of the enigmas and investigate the science behind love. We spoke to experts including Dr. Leslie Vosshall, professor and olfactory scientist at Rockefeller University, and Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and chief scientific advisor at Match.com, and asked them to help explain. Is love like a drug? Dr. Helen Fisher and her team have done a number of fMRI studies, scanning the brains of over 100 people who have recently fallen in love, who have recently been dumped, and who have been in love for years. Love, as it turns out, is very much like a drug. When we’re in love, our biological reward system goes bonkers. The VTA, or ventral tegmental area, is activated; this is “the brain system for wanting, for energy, for focus, for motivation, and in this case the …
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