<< The hypothesis of the human brain operation in vicinity of a critical point has been a matter of a hot debate in the recent years. >>
<< In this work, (AA) suggest that love might be an example of a second-order phase transition occurring in the brain. (They) show that this hypothesis explains a lot of well-known properties of love. Analyzing several most famous literature examples and a private diary, (they) show that the intensity of feelings exhibits a universal scaling behavior, distinguishing two cases: love at first sight and love developing from liking or friendship (friends first), both being studied in psychology. >>
The theory of second-order phase transitions developed by L.D. Landau (1980) << has inspired a lot of activity in physics, because it turned out that such transitions are characterized by a universal scaling behavior. Independently of the nature of the system, their parameters exhibit power law dependencies on the dimensionless parameter (temperature). >>
<< The key hypothesis of the present work is that love is a second-order phase transition occurring in the human brain under the influence of hormones, such as dopamine and serotonin (..). The brain switches from the normal operation in the critical regime to the supercritical regime because of the increase of the excitation (more dopamine) and reduction of the inhibition (less serotonin) (..). The order parameter of the transition is the intensity of feelings: before the transition, the subject has no particular feelings, while after the transition the feelings are non-zero. The most direct consequence is that the order parameter should exhibit a universal power law behavior: the feelings should grow as a square root of time α ∼√ >>
<< Since it is impossible to analyze the human feelings directly during such uncontrollable phenomenon as ”love at first sight”, (AA) have decided to perform a quantitative study of the intensity of feelings depicted in the literature. (..) (They) have chosen three well-known books for this analysis: ”Romeo and Juliet” (W. Shakespeare), ”The Lily of the Valley” (H. de Balzac, (..)), and ”Martin Eden” (J. London). >>
<< the case of a non-zero external ”bias”, which is a situation that occurs more often than love at first sight. Indeed, one usually knows several persons better than all the others, and thus some positive feelings towards some of them can be present before the transition occurs. (..) To study this transition quantitatively, (AA) have chosen another well-known book, ”Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte. This books is also quite autobiographic, and famous for the psychological details, that got its author the title of ”first historian of the private consciousness”. The delay between the initial acquaintance and love is now of several weeks (about 45 days).
Dmitry Solnyshkov, Guillaume Malpuech. Love might be a second-order phase transition. arXiv: 2203.13246v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech]. Mar 24, 2022.
Also
keyword 'transition' in FonT:
keyword 'transizione' | 'transition' in Notes (quasi-stochastic poetry):
keywords: gst, life, love, transitions, critical point, phasetransition, second-order phase transition, brain, mind, behavior.
