Re: [UUPoly-L] UUPoly-L Digest, Vol 27, Issue 27

[ericatn <ericatn@pngusa.net>]

Nancy here has been a several year community explorer with me, via 
attending several of the GateWay to Community events here in N.E. 
Texas.  She just recently sent along this piece from the New York 
Times.  I think it is an very interesting 'springboard' for thoughts 
about what really creates successful relationships (of any type?) long 
term.  Since "community" is nothing if it is not about relationships, is 
"community" the answer?  Of what type and to what degree?  Or is 
something needed that might incorporate community and at the same time 
go beyond it?  Is "poly" the answer to 'more joy' in life via this the 
info in this article?

Thanks for sending this along Nancy.  Again, since you sent this along, 
I would love to hear your own thoughts about how you, as a mature woman 
with a lot of life experience, might apply this new 'info' ideally in an 
integrated fashion in your life which you believe would support you in 
the best way.

Cheers,  Eric
The Mariposa Group <http://www.mariposagroup.org>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Goleman (Emotional_ Intelligence) _is one of my favorite 
thinkers, so I was tickled to find this essay in the December 13 NYT.  
You may want to forward it to others when you get back in January.  It 
adds to the conversations about money and sex - emotions and biology.

nancy 


    - - - - -


   Love on the Brain
   <http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/love-on-the-brain/>

By Daniel Goleman <http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/author/dgoleman/>

A radio interviewer in Dublin recently asked me why, in my view, people 
in Ireland were no happier now that their booming economy had brought 
them a sudden tide of prosperity. In answering, I cited well-known data 
showing that once people leave poverty and are able to satisfy their 
basic needs, there is little to no correlation between earnings and 
happiness. Or as the Beatles put it, "*Money can't buy me love*."

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-winning psychologist at Princeton, has 
explained the paradox of the unhappy rich in terms of "the hedonic 
treadmill": as we earn more income, our material expectations ratchet 
inexorably upward, so there's never enough money. The chase for ever 
more expensive pleasures never ends. As a result, the rich end up 
needing more to be as satisfied as the poor are with less money and 
lower expectations.

In 2004, Kahneman reported data from a survey of 2000 women showing that 
good personal relationships - far more than money - determine how 
satisfied people are with their lives.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, which studies how people's 
brains operate during interactions with others, is beginning to explain 
Kahneman's conclusions. Satisfying relationships, it seems, have 
powerful effects on brain function, particularly the neural centers for 
pleasure.

Consider, for instance, research that has been done on attraction. 
Neuroscientists scanned the brains of men while they looked at photos of 
various women. Only when a man looked at a woman who was attractive to 
him /and/ appeared to be looking him straight in the eye (as if she were 
interested in him, too) did his brain secrete a dose of *dopamine, a 
*brain chemical that delivers pleasure. If the man was not drawn to the 
woman, or when her eyes looked elsewhere, there were no molecules of joy.

At University College London, researchers recruited men and women who 
were "truly, deeply and madly" in love to have their brains imaged while 
they looked at photos of their romantic partners. As the subjects gazed 
at the pictures, their brains lit up neural areas that also activate 
during another kind of euphoria: narcotic addiction. Apparently, the 
intense happiness of romance owes much of its ecstasy to the same brain 
receptors that respond to opiates. Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at 
Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, proposes that a couple falling 
in love go through the *neural equivalent of forming an addiction* - to 
each other.

That is not the only kind of neurochemical thrill love can provide. 
Another is the pleasant buzz we get from *oxytocin. *This potent 
chemical floods a mother's brain after childbirth and while she nurses 
her baby. But oxytocin is more than a molecule of motherly love: it 
surges, too, *in both men and women after orgas*m.

Freud found parallels between a mother with her baby and the physical 
intimacy of lovers. Both kinds of pairs immerse themselves in 
skin-on-skin nuzzling and kissing, with a resultant euphoria. Perhaps 
oxytocin is the neurochemical key to the pleasures of a good cuddle. 
Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg, a Swedish neuroendocrinologist, postulates that we 
get a goodly dose of oxytocin any time we engage affectionately with 
someone we like. In effect, people having a good time together stir the 
release of oxytocin in each other's brains.

The neurochemical pleasures of feeling connected to our loved ones, 
Panksepp has found, also operate in other mammals: lab rats, like 
humans, prefer to be with others with whom they have savored the brain's 
natural doses of oxytocin and opioids. This neurotransmitter-induced 
serenity may be part of what cements our friendships and family ties. 
Repeated good times with loved ones create a kind of Pavlovian 
conditioning, until simply thinking about them triggers a bit of the 
oxytocin we would feel in their presence. Small wonder that office 
workers paper their cubicles with photos of family and friends.

Back in the 19th century, Walt Whitman summed it up in his ode to human 
connection, "I Sing the Body Electric":

   .To be with those I like is enough,
   To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
   To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is
   enough.
   I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in the sea.
   All things please the soul, but these things please the soul well.