Around the world, people sing for love, dance for love, compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. As pointed out by anthropologist Helen Fisher, "anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it." It has been said that romantic love is the most addictive and powerful of human emotions.
On the other hand, love like every other addictive substance has its downsides. Heartbreaks are hard to handle, similar to withdrawal from the use of an addictive substance. We keep analyzing every little bit of what had gone wrong, often refusing to accept the reality. In the end, we lose our hope in finding love ever again. Here are 5 brilliant TED talks, that explores everything from the brain chemistry of romantic love to how to cultivate desire in long-term relationships, that will help you believe in love again.
1.The brain in love by Helen Fisher
Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies the evolution of human emotions, making her an expert on romantic love, explored people's brain activity during love and breakup. She and her colleagues studied 37 people who are madly in love by MRI scanning their brains.
They discovered that the brain's reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus, becomes more active when you can't get what you want explaining the desire for forbidden love. While she also points out that during the break up the core of the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that becomes active when you're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses, becomes more active. Fisher's TED talk from 2008 has been watched by over 4.5 million people and gives the best insight into how our brain functions in romantic love.
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