Neurobiology

Love and Meshing

Barbara Fredrickson

Via Maria Popova & BrainPickings

The neurobiology of how the warmest emotion blurs the boundaries by you and not-you.

[Barbara] Fredrickson zooms in on three key neurobiological players in the game of love — your brain, your levels of the hormone oxytocin, and your vagus nerve, which connects your brain to the rest of your body — and examines their interplay as the core mechanism of love, summing up:

Love is a momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care.