Falling in Love? Blame the Anterior Insula (of Your Brain)
Who thinks about their brains when falling in love? But a new study has found the actual part of the brain that makes decisions about whether we want to spend the rest of our lives with someone. According to newswise.com, t he finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, provides the first causal clinical evidence that an area of the brain called the anterior insula “plays an instrumental role in love,” said UChicago neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, lead author of the study. " In this study, the patient made decisions normally about lust but showed slower reaction times when making decisions about love, in contrast to neurologically typical participants matched on age, gender and ethnicity," the Web site reports. “This distinction has been interpreted to mean that desire is a relatively concrete representation of sensory experiences, while love is a more abstract representation of those experiences,” said Cacioppo, a research associate...