Posts I like
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The Happy End title refers directly to there being no fatalities, but he also sees it as “happy end” for the planes themselves. They’ve found a...
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We turned the Times blue!
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a forest of ancient graves - Lindholm Høje (c.5th-11th Cent. CE)
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Blurry Marissa Mayr.
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Aqua by Atelier Teee
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The great workplace dilemmas of our time…
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In Focus: 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest
The 25th annual National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest is under way, and ...
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22 posts tagged love
“Love is something that you feel and very seldom see, but when you feel and see both at the same time, it’s everlasting.” -Anthony Barboza
Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor.
Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dangerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals.
Passion also heightens several cognitive functions, as the brain regions and chemicals surge. “It’s all about how that network interacts,” says Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, who led the study. The cognitive functions, in turn, “are triggers that fully activate the love network.” Tell that to your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.
Graphics by: James W. Lewis, West Virginia University (brain), and Jen Christiansen.
(via Scinerds)
What love does to the brain. I’d like to see what the other organs (heart, skin, etc.) are going through at the same time.
Before the social web, surviving a breakup meant tossing out mementos and looking over your shoulder at parties. Now it means perusing invite lists, haunting status updates, watching tiny circles of green turn orange, then red, before fading to offline grey. It is easier than ever to self-punish through voyeurism, of course, but now tactics for avoidance are so similar to strategies for stalking, so equal in the all-seeing indifference of the web, that even average heartbreak can take on sinister dimensions.
An essential ingredient of l’amour à la française is the insistence on sexual pleasure. Yalom cites a recent statistic culled from a study in which a French and an American group were asked whether “true love can exist without a radiant sex life.” Of the American group, 83 percent agreed with this statement; only 34 percent of the French agreed, Yalom writes: “A 49 percent difference in opinion on the need for sex in love is a startling statistic! This French emphasis on carnal satisfaction strikes tighter-laced Americans as deliciously naughty.”
“It leads me to conclude that the Internet, as well-designed as it may be to find love and sex and even pet supplies, may also be very well designed to serve up rejection.”
Read this great essay.
“And now Indie Rocker Nationality-Ambiguous Dude had been seated beside me, where he’d remain for the next 3,000 miles. “There is a God,” I thought. “And clearly, He’s fucking with me.”
“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.”
