Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love Read Free

associated with distinct hormone activity that cause specific feelings and behavioral changes in lovers. When you think of love in terms of these three systems, it makes it easier to follow what stage a person is in and to better understand that person’s actions.
    The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand the basic brain functions that govern lust, romantic love, and long-term attachment. We have attempted to keep the explanations as brief and simple as possible. Where we talk about specific areas of the brain, it’s important to understand that the brain regions discussed are usually part of an overall brain network, and we thank Professor Graeme Jackson of the Brain Research Institute in Melbourne for his suggestions in this area. We have simplified things here to make them more accessible to our readers; at the same time, we are conscious of not oversimplifying these ideas and concepts. It is vital to have this knowledge of the research because it’s referred to throughout this book. We use medical terminology for the technically inclined, but you will only need to understand its significance in relation to your love life. We will be discussing principles that operate most of the time for most people, not how outliers or the exceptions behave.
    Love has been shown to be the result of a specific group of chemicals and brain circuits working in specific areas of thebrain. In simple scientific terms, love is triggered by a combination of brain chemicals, including dopamine, oxytocin, testosterone, estrogen, and norepinephrine; in much the same way, these chemicals drive other mammals to find suitable partners. Once our brain has identified a suitable partner based on certain criteria, which are discussed later, the brain goes into overdrive to produce the chemicals necessary to create the environment to attract that person.
    Throughout human history, marriages were an arranged event based on wealth, status, family rivalries, tribal groups, and politics. Today, this approach has generally disappeared from the Western world and most people now marry for love.
    When it comes to mate selection, humans focus their attention on just one person. This distinguishes them from most other animals. A courting male pigeon, for example, will puff up his feathers and approach as many potential partners as his energy will allow. Humans, however, usually have a short list of candidates but intensely target just one.

Love at First Sight
     
    The phenomenon of “love at first sight” has been scientifically proved and affects most animal species in much the same way.
    Ray was shopping in the supermarket when he glanced between the cornflake packets into the candy aisle. What he saw overwhelmed him, and he experienced a euphoric feeling, almost as if he was intoxicated. Standing there was a woman who simply captured his heart. She was not beautiful in the usual sense, but there was something unique about her and the way she moved. All he knew was that he felt magnetically drawn to her. Just looking at her filled him with excitement and gave him butterflies in his stomach
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    While he experienced these feelings of elation at discovering her, however, he had at the same time a sense of despair because he would never have her
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    If you’ve ever experienced love at first sight, your brain was producing huge amounts of the chemicals dopamine and nor-epinephrine, which make you feel almost as if you are on drugs. The same things happen to other animals. Take, for example, the female prairie vole, which is similar to a desert rat. If you expose a female prairie vole to even a tiny scent of male vole urine, she experiences exactly the same chemical reaction humans do: a surge of dopamine and norepinephrine. One study demonstrated that when female sheep that are in heat are shown images of male sheep, norepinephrine levels in their brains surge. Although this effect lasts for seconds or minutes for most animals, it can last for