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Fifteen people got into an MRI machine and were handed a photograph.
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All fifteen had been left. The average time since it happened was sixty three days, and every one of them reported spending more than eighty five percent of their waking hours thinking about the person who left.
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Then the machine started recording.
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You Are Not Still in Love Because He Was Right for You.
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The study came out of Rutgers in 2010, led by Helen Fisher, and it ran in the Journal of Neurophysiology. The protocol was plain. A photograph of the one who left, then a math task to clear the head, counting backward from a four digit number by sevens, then a photograph of somebody neutral.
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The counting is in there so the next picture starts from nothing.
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Ten women and five men, college age, all of them high on the scale researchers use to measure how intensely someone is in love. Not one of them had asked for it to end.
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Here is what came on when the photograph of the one who left went up on the screen:
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The ventral tegmental area. Motivation and reward, the same region that is active in people whose love is going well. |
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The nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. Craving and addiction, the dopamine system studied in cocaine users. |
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The insular cortex. The place where physical pain gets registered. |
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The anterior cingulate. The place where distress gets registered. |
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That first one is the finding. The region that fires when a love is going well fired again in people whose love had been taken away from them. Two months out, the brain was still filing him under reward.
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The scan also picked up the insula and the anterior cingulate at the same time, which is the pain side running in parallel with the wanting side. Both were on. Neither cancelled the other.
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The file had not been moved.
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It is not weakness. It is not a character problem. It is a motivation system doing the exact job it was built to do, which is to send you after the thing.
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That system measures one thing, which is how badly you want something. It has no opinion about whether the something is good. There is a reason cocaine research shows up in the same paper.
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This is why the feeling that arrives when his name comes up on a screen is not information about him. The same system fires for a man who is driving over and a man who is bored on a Thursday.
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So if he surfaces, the feeling does not get a vote. Something outside it does the deciding, starting with what he is willing to say out loud about the months he was gone.
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The machine cannot tell you when this stops, only that the thing running that hot is yours, and it was never his to take with him.
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Also True
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From the Ancients
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Greek did not make you say love with one word. It kept several, and one of them was mania, which it used for the kind that takes the whole house: the sleeplessness, the wanting that gets larger the less it is fed. It was not filed with the others. Twenty four hundred years before anyone built a scanner, it already had its own name.
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The Mirror
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What is the one thing in your house that you have not been able to put in a box yet?
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Today’s Devotion: Tonight, find one object in your house that is only there because of him and put it in a drawer that stays shut. Not the trash, not a decision, just the drawer, and then go to bed.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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