Page 15 - Advanced Romance

12 Advanced Romance*
And, as with other religions, we romantics resist the intrusion of a science that may prove that we’re deluded—that our devotional God is false. Again, I believe romantic love is much stronger than this and can easily withstand almost any degree of investigation. And that if we do investigate love as objectively as possible, and apply the gleanings to our own love lives, we will probably have more happiness in our romance.
But for those who aren’t sure love can survive intense scrutiny, Fisher’s findings are the apostate devil. They are the findings of a mad, love-starved scientist, who’s so bitter she wants to spoil love for everyone else. Yet, let no less of an august source as that of National Geographic insert its imprimatur on Fisher’s work in
a cover story, So What Really is This Thing Called Love, written by Lauren Slater:
One of Fisher’s central pursuits in the
past decade has been looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine. Fisher recruited subjects who had been “madly in love” for an average of seven months. Once inside the MRI machine, subjects were shown two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one...
When each subject looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure—the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus—lit up. What excited Fisher most was not so much finding