Made of Hearts 2020 Forever Stamps — Love Message Design, Pane of 20

Issue facts

Value: 66¢ 1-ounce First-Class rate (Forever)
Issue Date: January 23, 2020
First Day City: Memphis, TN
Printed by: Ashton Potter (USA) Ltd.
Printing Method: Offset, Microprint
Format: Pane of 20

What love does to a brain

Four letters, and people have been trying to pin it down for as long as there have been people — writing it, painting it, carving it, and lately measuring it. Part of the puzzle is that one word has to cover loving your mother, loving chocolate, and loving your spouse.

The American anthropologist Helen Fisher has spent a career on the question. Her team's imaging work found that being in love activates the ventral tegmental area — the region tied to wanting, motivation, focus and craving.

It is the same region that lights up when someone takes an addictive drug. Fisher's own assessment is that love is the harder of the two, because there is no coming down from it. Her group also found the cerebral cortex, which handles judgment and reasoning, going quiet in people who are in love. "Love is blind" turns out to be close to literal.

Why any two particular people are drawn together remains unsettled, and probably always will. Knowing the mechanism has never once diminished the experience.

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