Reprinted with permission,
Courtesy, Asbury Park Press, a Gannett Co. newspaper.
BY
MICHAEL RILEY
ASBURY PARK PRESS STAFF WRITER
|
- She
remembers the exact day it happened.
It was July 3, 2001, when Phyllis Noviello of Long Branch fell
madly in love with Angelo Ferraro.
They had met at work more than a year earlier and had gone out
together a couple of times. She liked him, but like is a long
way from love.
The fateful day was pretty much like any other. The two were
at work caring for residents of an adult day-care center in Long
Branch.
"I watched him care for a woman who had thrown up at lunch.
He cleaned her up and was so gentle. It happened right then," she
says. "His tenderness toward her ignited passion in me. I fell
in love with Angelo right there. He was the first man I ever
met who didn't need me. . . . He wanted me." She says that
with a passionate edge in her voice.
In the days, weeks and months that followed, Ferraro was never
far from her thoughts. She says she couldn't stop thinking about
him. Her palms got sweaty in his presence, butterflies flapped
wings in her stomach and she was euphoric all the time.
That overwhelming intensity lasted for a year and she's thankful
for that. She says she loves Ferraro more than ever, but adds
that no one could live with that kind of powerful yearning for
years and years.
If falling in love tends to make a person a little obsessive,
a bit crazy, there's good reason for that, says Dr. Francis L.
Cancellieri, chairman of the Monmouth Medical Center (Long Branch)
staff in the department of psychiatry.
He says that love is, in some sense, a matter of brain chemistry,
a cocktail of hormones and chemicals moving about in the gray
matter and the composition of that cocktail changes as people
move through the various stages of love.
Dopamine is what is called a neurotransmitter, one of a series
of chemicals in the brain that are used to help amplify electrical
signals between a neuron and another cell.
Dopamine, Cancellieri says, is commonly associated with the
pleasure system of the brain, providing feelings of enjoyment
and reinforcement.
It is these increased levels of dopamine among people in love
that also are partly responsible for the repeated pleasure circuits
that spin around in the heads of those in love.
It's part of what makes the love-besotted brain look similar
to the brain of someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, he
says.
But love is indeed a many-splendored thing at least as far as
the biochemistry of true love.
In addition to dopamine, Cancellieri says, other substances
such as glutamine and serotonin also are involved in making people
all doe-eyed and happy when it comes to falling in love.
Then, he adds, there is something called the GABAA receptor
system. A receptor is a part of the brain that certain chemicals
plug into, like an electrical socket.
Love tickles these particular receptors, thereby making a person
less inhibited.
Adrenalin also plays a part, giving sweethearts the increased
heartbeat, sweaty palms and butterflies in the stomach associated
with being head over heels in love.
A protein called Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) is found in higher
amounts among people who are in love. NGF may well be involved
in intelligence, Cancellieri says.
"Being in love may make you smarter," he says, with a laugh.
Dr. Daniel R. Kelleher, board certified in both psychiatry and
neurology at Riverview Medical Center, Red Bank, uses the poets'
phrase "divine madness" to describe the crazy-making process
of falling in love.
Love comes in three stages, Kelleher says: the release stage;
the merging stage (what Kelleher calls the "test-drive phase"),
which is marked by a desire for intimacy, ("and not just physical
intimacy," he says); and the "making-it-real" stage, bringing
love and long-term commitment into the real world.
Kelleher says that the chemical cocktail in the brain changes
as a person moves through the phases of love.
It's a matter of necessity, he says.
"We couldn't function if that first stage lasted forever," he
says. "I like to think of it like this. The brain in love is
like watching the world from high up. You travel and see the
lights of cities coming on in different places and at different
times."
You might think that all this talk of biology and brain chemistry
reduces love to nothing more than groups of atoms moving about
in the brain.
"Love has to be so much more than brain chemicals," Phyllis
Noviello says. "It can't be broken down into molecules. Science
will never be able to produce love and bottle it. I don't believe
in love potions."
Neither does Cancellieri.
"Biology is not destiny," he says. "Love, like so much of human
behavior, can't be reduced to a single cause. We use a "bio-psycho-social'
model. The biological, the psychological and the social all work
together."
Kelleher agrees.
"Love is more than brain chemistry," he says. "It has to be.
One thing we don't know is what sets off the whole chemical cascade
in the brain in the first place."
That, he says, is part of the mystery of love.
But it's no mystery for Angelo Ferraro.
"I felt good every time I saw her," he says of his wife. "I'd
just never met the right woman before."
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