Earth - The sinister reason why people fall in love. Your heart beats a little faster, glands open to secret tiny dribbles of sweat, and your body starts producing hormones, which make you feel a bit giddy and warm inside.
Love is not time's fool These are some of the biological processes that occur as you are thrust into the early throes of love – or infatuation, it can be hard to tell which it is. Love is such a pervasive part of our humanity that art and culture is filled with references to love won and love lost. Libraries have shelves of books filled with romantic prose. "Love is not time's fool," wrote Shakespeare in sonnet 116: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
" It seems Shakespeare was more correct than he could have known. Is there a shortcut to bonding with a romantic partner on a deeper level. From Sam Gosling’s book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another.
Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take week, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two. The questions are part of an hour-long “sharing game” in which each member of a pair reads a question out loud and then they both answer it before moving on to the next question.
What are some of the questions? 1. 2. 3. Why We Kiss: The Science of Sex. Pecking, smooching, Frenching, and playing tonsil-hockey—there are as many names for kissing as there are ways to do it.
Whether we use it as an informal greeting or an intensely romantic gesture, kissing is one of those ingrained human behaviors that seems to defy explanation. Its many purposes—a blow and peck for good luck on dice, lips to ground after a rocky boat ride, kisses in the air to an acquaintance, and the long slow smooches of Hollywood—have different meanings yet are similar in nature. So why is it that we love to pucker up? A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss Philematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly sure why humans started locking lips in the first place.
The most likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along chewed food to their toothless babies. But something’s obviously happened to kissing since the time of the chewed-food pass. Men Sloppy, Women Choosy Behavioral research supports this biological reasoning. The Biology of Attraction. In an apocryphal story, a colleague once turned to the great British geneticist J.B.S.
Haldane, and said, "Tell me, Mr. Haldane, knowing what you do about nature , what can you tell me about God? " Haldane replied, "He has an inordinate fondness for beetles. " Indeed, the world contains over 300,000 species of beetles. I would add that "God" loves the human mating game, for no other aspect of our behavior is so complex, so subtle, or so pervasive. In describing these strategies, I make no effort to be "politically correct. " Darwin Was Wrong About Dating.
The Rules of Attraction in the Game of Love. To figure out how we pick mates, scientists have measured every shape and angle of the human face, studied the symmetry of dancers, crafted formulas from the measurements of Playboy models, and had both men and women rank attractiveness based on smelling armpit sweat.
After all this and more, the rules of attraction for the human species are still not clearly understood. How it all factors into true love is even more mysterious. But a short list of scientific rules for the game of love is emerging. Some are as clearly defined as the prominent, feminine eyes of a supermodel or the desirable hips of a well-built man. Other rules work at the subconscious level, motivating us to action for evolutionary reasons that are tucked inside clouds of infatuation.
In the end, lasting love depends at least as much on behavior as biology. Symmetry equals sex Starting at conception, the human body develops by neatly splitting cells. Those hips Body shape is of course important, too. Face it. The Science of Attaction. By Raj Persaud Psychologists have long demonstrated that we tend to perceive physically attractive people as not just easy on the eye but more intelligent and competent as well.
That this perception might not be strictly rational could be concluded from the finding that the beautiful are seen as better than the rest of us in such apparently unrelated tasks as piloting an aircraft. This tendency to see the attractive as bearing a host of other desirable qualities also explains why an attractive defendant is likely to be given a more lenient sentence or even be let off by a jury. The effect is profound - both genders see physically attractive men and women as more intelligent and good. Even very young children perceive better-looking teachers as more intelligent. The evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics and Jody Kovar of the University of Pennsylvania in the US have published research that argues that the beautiful really are more intelligent.