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Love is a Drug - Dopamine

Submitted by Meg Wilson on February 13, 2007 - 08:59.

Dopamine is a little neurotransmitter better known by its street name, romantic love. And norepinephrine is better known by its street name; infatuation.

This is what Neely Tucker tells us in a very entertaining article about love and romance and infatuation.

"These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love...and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on...

Why do we suspect this isn't going to end well?

Because these things are hard-wired not to last...The passion you fulfill is the passion you kill. The most wonderful, soaring feeling known to all mankind . . . amounts to no more than a narcotic high, a temporal state of mania.

"Being in love, having a crush on someone is wonderful . . . but our bodies can't be in that state all the time," says Pamela C. Regan, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles..."Your body would fizzle out. As a species, we'd die."

"The search for eternal passion is very misguided...It's the search for the perfect high that keeps people discarding relationships right and left. You don't feel the same way you did; people want to break up, instead of seeing it as normal."

Here's the big 1980 Grace Jones hit; Love is the Drug.


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