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Love Story
Writing in The Japan Times, Rowan Hooper discusses an evolutionary take on love. A recent study makes the case that romantic love has evolved from maternal love:
What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the same regions of the brain. The implication is that maternal love is the evolutionary basis, the foundation, for romantic love.The researchers, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, of UCL's Laboratory for Neurobiology, also found that love leads to a suppression of neural activity associated with critical social assessment of other people and negative emotions: The brain is told to go easy on people. The findings suggest that once you fall in love, the need to critically assess the character and personality of that person is reduced. The work could provide a neurological explanation for why love makes us blind.
