Results

Passionate. Floating. Heart neurons (wha?!).

Here’s a great insider view of how the brain operates in that state known as “Love”. Helen Fisher (no relation to Marsh Fisher, my mentor and the founder of IdeaFisher) helps us understand maybe a smidgen more about how the brain works when the biochemistry has that love connection.

Helen happens to be the founder of Chemistry.com, the spinoff of Match.com. I won’t get into my experiences with the latter, but they were varied… and an excellent learning experience.

In Helen’s own words:

I once had the same girl leave me twice (10 years apart, no less!… ). Thanks to two truly great employers / business partners, I was able to get through it without losing everything (Rick & Rex, thanks for being there when the chips were down). But man, I was in bad shape for a while. Funny how a few misplaced biochemicals can put you at a complete loss.

What happens when you “fall in love”?

How and why do we become so debilitated when we are on the wrong side of a broken heart? Helen has SOME answers (thanks to more than 3,000,000 people completing her survey). But the dynamic from this that really caught my ear is:

“So why is it when someone of similar socioeconomic class walks into a party of peers who are all equally as good looking as they, that individual is magnetized toward a single person?”

What little piece of the brain+physiology+hormones equation makes us head over heels for one person, and someone equally as charming, intelligent, attractive and creative does very little for us?

You figure that one out, and you’ll be counting gold bars on your new yacht - overlooking the Mediterranean. Or Brunei (the Sultan was my second customer ever. If I had only known what circles I was walking in at the time…;-).

To loving ideas,
Mark Alan Effinger