The Biochemistry of Love’s Ecstasy and Agony

This Huffington Post article by  Glenn Braunstein (click above link), says so much, in so few words! I’m just going to focus on one aspect of it that I found particularly interesting. The old song that featured the lyrics, (I’m dating myself, now), “Love Makes the World Go Round”, really got it right. Love is a powerful consuming experience that is a complex interweaving of inner and outer experience. Love is a “drug” (as they say in another song), literally and figuratively. What really got me thinking is this statement:

“Research into “the brain chemistry of love” indicates that when a person sees a potential mate, it takes as little as a fifth of a second for the brain to launch a complex “love-related” chain reaction involving multiple areas of the cortical and more primitive subcortical portions of the brain”

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A fifth of a second to start falling in love?!?!??!!  Wow!  What happens in that fifth of a second to trigger the cascade of love potions in your brain?  What could this possibly mean?