What is an individual self? We’ve never met one, and neither have you. We could not be the people we are without our relationships. The evidence, it turns out, is in the bright colors on the heat maps when (and only when) we interact with others. There is much evidence against starkly individualist points of view in every discipline, and Ackerman’s article lays out the neurobiological case. This powerful point stands against the mechanistic moral individualism taught by devout Egoists like Thomas Hobbes or Ayn Rand - a bleak everyone-for-himself ethical point of view that is often presumed to be valid within debates, even though it’s never been proven or shown to be logical. Our loved ones provide the basic infrastructure of our minds. Our social selves, it turns out, are the deepest selves we have. These changes impact every aspect of our conscious and subconscious lives, making each of us deeply dependent, to our very core, to our very sense of self-identity, on our connections with others. The fact that love has a strong physical presence in our brains appears to be beyond scientific doubt.įurthermore, Ackerman explains, the brain regularly changes as a result of the physical affects of loving or being loved. This physical presence can be seen clearly on standard brain scans, and the neural signals correlate with verbal surveys of elderly spouses who still gaze with wonder upon their spouses.

But a Facebook recommendation sent me back for a second look, and this time I read further and was excited to find an important, convincing piece about the psychology of love that happens to touch directly on some very difficult and esoteric points about the nature of self that I’ve been struggling to express on this blog.ĭiane Ackerman, whose A Natural History of the Senses I enjoyed years ago, wrote this piece to communicate a fact that isn’t widely understood: the emotion we call love has a clear physical and neurobiological presence. On first glance I passed over Your Brain On Love, a Diane Ackerman article on the New York Times psychology blog with a Valentine-ish title that indicated the kind of soft piece I usually skip.

A history of love by diane ackerman