ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three of the relatively new hypotheses relating to recent discoveries in neuroscience that shed a lot of light on the phenomenon of passionate love. These are: the idea of “emotional operating systems” within the brain; the specific biochemistry of mate selection; and, finally, what could be termed “the neuroscience of transcendence”. The great advances made in various neuroimaging techniques in particular have led to much development in the neurosciences. In the natural sciences, the discovery that two or more variables occur together does not prove that one is the cause of the other. Research in neuroscience might confirm what psychoanalysis hit upon phenomenologically. The natural sciences, ethology, biology, and the neurosciences, give a language to explore passionate love from the point of view of our physical and biological nature with a brain chemistry wired towards our survival both as individuals and as a species.
