Over at Boing Boing, Lisa Katayama reports on the latest neuroscience on romantic breakups. I’m not going to comment on the report itself, but rather her take on it:
I think most of us have experienced this feeling at one point in our lives, but it’s interesting to know it can be backed up by science.
How interesting that anyone should think that it is important for one’s feelings to be “validated” in this peculiar way. In the wake of a failed romance, lacking this latest information, would I otherwise be in some kind of doubt that I was miserable? Does a scan of my brain tell me what I am really feeling?
Futurisms
July 27, 2010
Meanwhile, we are working on vaccines against addiction:
http://www.newsweek.com/2008/01/02/the-anti-drug-drugs.html
Eros must be silenced, one way or another.
"[L]acking this latest information, would I otherwise be in some kind of doubt that I was miserable? Does a scan of my brain tell me what I am really feeling?"
Well, yes. Introspection is useful, but it does not grant us infallible, perfectly detailed self-knowledge. We should expect that systematic empirical investigation of brain and behavior will tell us things about ourselves that we didn't already know, or, yes, provide further confirmation of things we already thought we knew.