And nature created man... Why? So that he could destroy his creator? So that he can destroy himself? Or is it so that he can fall in love?
What is love? I am asking again a question that has been asked many times in different languages and cultures since the beginning of human history. Does love belong to a living creature? To one gender? Or to a soul?
The history of the science of philosophy's perspective on love dates back to ancient times, but neuroscience's perspective on love is still very new. Is love a law of nature, a power we can control, or a weakness? Whatever the reason, the result has not changed for years and people have always experienced love.
While a human being is still an embryo, that is, an egg fertilized with sperm in the womb, it has not yet attained a gender. In the presence of the X chromosome from the male, the gender will develop as 'female', and in the presence of the Y chromosome from the male, the gender will develop as 'male'. So what are the differences between these chromosomes? The systems called 'Antimullerian' hormone and 'Wolffian' formation in the Y chromosome - don't worry about the names - develop the gender in the male direction by suppressing the hormones that enable female gender development in the X chromosome. As you can see, male cruelty and oppression begins in the womb. But if I were to offer you a different perspective, 'Nature tends to create women'...
Now that humans have been formed, we can press the start button of love. The baby is born and falls in love with its mother as soon as it is born. She grows up a little and falls in love with her father. Some time passes and he falls in love with his schoolmate. As he grows older, he thinks that he has found the love of his life, and at this point he believes that his love life has ended. Even though its content and type may change, why would we have a reason to end love, this situation that happens to us at every stage of life? Is love a situation that can end when we say 'it's over'? If it's a situation that can end, then why can't we control it? The answers to these questions show that love is always in our back pocket throughout our lives. In this case, finding the love of one's life may be just a big lie, or perhaps an illusion.
Now, let's take a look at love and what it puts us through from a biological and neurobiological perspective.
Isn't there love at first sight? Is it a love that develops over time as you get to know him? In fact, when we look at it from a neurobiological perspective, the situation seems to be in favor of love at first sight. The situation that has been described for years as "the moment I saw him, my heart started beating fast, my breath stopped, my hands got sweaty, there was tingling in my brain, butterflies started flying in my stomach, I felt like I couldn't sit still" is actually the activation of the sympathetic system. What is this sympathetic system? There are two types of mechanisms in the human nervous system that occur automatically beyond our control. These are mechanisms called sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The parasympathetic system is the system that starts working when we are at rest and when we eat, bringing us calmness and peace. The sympathetic system is our system that is activated in situations of danger, excitement and any situation that may cause tension in us. For example; When we encounter a bear in the forest, our body goes into a state of extreme stress and our nervous system begins to prepare our body to escape from there. In this case, the sympathetic system takes action and starts to accelerate the heart in order to pump more blood to the muscles that we will use to escape. In order to increase the amount of blood going to the muscles, it reduces the blood flow to the brain and digestive system and directs this flow to the muscles. In order to run faster and longer, it reduces the lung volume so that you can breathe faster. As a result of all these preparations, we will have all the necessary features to escape from the bear. This situation is like a kind of transformation and change process. We change, just like in the movie 'Transformers'.
Now let's look at the symptoms experienced in the case of love. We saw the person we fell in love with. Our sympathetic system has become active. Their heartbeat accelerated. The blood flow to the brain decreased and our brain started to tingle. As the blood flow to our digestive system decreased, butterflies began to fly in our stomach, like tingling in the brain. As the lung volume decreased, we started breathing faster and felt like we were short of breath. As a result of the blood flow being directed largely to the arm and leg muscles, we began to experience the feeling of not being able to sit still. It's very similar to falling in love, isn't it? When we look at it from this perspective, encountering a bear and encountering the person we love is There is a very similar situation between reaching out. Then we may have fallen in love with this bear, too. Maybe this may be the reason why we call the person we used to love bear when we get angry after the love ends.
Some emotions are very similar to each other. The emotions we feel in a love situation can sometimes be very similar to fear or even hatred. The reason for this is a structure in the brain that we call 'Amygdala', which especially creates the feeling of fear and allows us to understand the mood of the other person from their facial expressions. A good empathy ability may be related to the development of the amygdala structure. Then, the intensity of the emotions we experience when we fall in love may again be related to the development of the amygdala structure. This may explain why not everyone has the same degree of love.
So, is love only related to the sympathetic nervous system? No. Scientific research conducted in recent years has proven that the sense of smell, that is, what we call the pheromone effect in animals, is also valid in humans. We humans can actually smell the other person at an unconscious level. By matching our own system with this scent, we can decide whether we like that person or not. In fact, what we call skin harmony is a process managed by this pheromone system. Human experiments have shown that when people smell the clothes that smell of the people they are in love with - clothes they don't know who they belong to - signs of love appear. Isn't it an interesting research?
Another system works through the area in the brain called 'fusiform gyrus', which enables people to recognize faces. This region stores all the faces we have encountered in our lives so far. It compares these faces that are also stored in every person we encounter. As a result of the comparison, this brain region sometimes unconsciously likens someone we meet for the first time in our lives to someone we used to love - we may still love them - at an unconscious level, so we can immediately feel warm towards this person. The exact opposite is true. In other words, when we encounter a person who resembles someone we do not like, we may not warm up to that person even though we do not know them at all. We may even express that we do not like that person for a reason we do not know.
Of course, there are other situations that are included in all these systems. For example; We can be influenced by other people's thoughts, moreover, we can watch what we know become reality by believing wildly in our own knowledge. In the world of neuropsychology, we call this situation 'self-fulfilling prophecy'. In short, the more we believe in a situation, an emotion, a feeling, the more likely we are to realize that situation for ourselves. As our elders said, 'if you say something forty times, it will happen'...
We can explain the state of love with the effect of these neurobiological systems that I briefly mentioned. Well, is there no non-mechanical system, can we not talk about the concept of soul? I can hear you asking. What if the concept we call soul is an advanced mechanical system? Or what if it is a collection of millions of software programs consisting of 1s and 0s? If it were possible to write a program into an artificial intelligence, that is, a machine, in which all the inputs of all the possibilities in life, the emotional possibilities that may occur as a result of these possibilities, and the behavioral alternatives that will arise from the results of these possibilities, how would this machine be different from a human? This may be where technology and the future will take us. A future that goes far beyond the science fiction movies we watch may be waiting for us. I don't know if I, who wrote this article, or you, who are reading it, will have enough time to see these things, but let the article stop here, when these things happen in the future, you won't say I didn't say anything. Maybe when this article is found centuries later, they will even treat me like Nostradamus. I hadn't decided on the name of my article yet, but after writing the last sentence, I decided what it would be; ‘Prophecy of Love’…
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