Our conception of romantic love could not be more trite, nor could it be more overflowing with pleonasms and tautologies, and endless inaccuracies, hunches and intuitions that contradict six decades of scientific literature.

However, there are intuitions or simple physical manifestations that have been corroborated. Like the neurophysiological changes that take place in a brain in love.

Neuroimaging

Stephanie Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who has studied the neuroscience of romantic love for the last decade, explains that the process involves several complex changes, particularly in the brain's reward system.

More specifically, in a review from 2012 From the scientific literature on love, Lisa Diamond and Janna Dickenson, psychologists at the University of Utah, found that romantic love is most consistently associated with activity in two brain regions: the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the caudate nucleus.

These areas play an essential role in our reward pathway and regulate the neurotransmitter dopamine. In other words, during the early stages of love we miss your loved one because he or she makes you feel so good.

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Why can't you buy my love for money?

In fact, simply thinking about your partner not only makes you feel good, but also can buffer pain, stress and other negative feelings. A study, for example, has shown that women in love do better on cognitive tasks after being subliminally told their lover's name.

These neural patterns of romantic love appear to be universal across genders, cultures, and sexual orientations. Romantic and platonic love, for example, may be associated with unique neural signatures. And studies show that the neural processes in charge of sexual attraction and desire can occur alongside and sometimes overlap with those that regulate romantic love, but they are largely different from them.

Be that as it may, it seems that finding someone special in our lives is a safe and stable source of happiness, although we are not very good at choosing a partner, on many occasions. Maybe we need help. Big Data + machine learning algorithms in order to find your perfect match. The one that suits you. And, furthermore, the offer will not be as limited as now (basically the people who live in your neighborhood or just beyond), but total (humanity). You can learn more about it in the following video:

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The news

Thinking about your partner can dull pain, stress and other negative feelings.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

In China they have hardly used credit cards: they have gone from cash to mobile phone payment via QR codes.

Perhaps this is one of the most recent cases of leapfrogging, which describes when a society progresses technologically but not linearly, but abruptly, skipping natural stages. In Africa there is another surprising case with ebooks.

African ebooks

Although it may sound counterintuitive, rapid progress does not take place in the most developed regions, but in the least developed ones. This happens because in more developed countries and regions, citizens are tied to a certain way of thinking or doing things, so it is more difficult for them to let go of the past.

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This is how China is making credit cards obsolete

But as explained Michael Hannan in This studio Regarding structural inertia, in less developed countries and regions, people adapt better to new radical changes, which offers a better observation point on the future.

A surprising and paradigmatic case, it's the ebook. In the most modern societies, its implementation is slow because users still find incentives for physical books. But what happens in a place where there are hardly any physical books? The same as in a China without credit cards.

For this reason, Africa could become, according to Mauro F. Guillen in his book 2030, the world's first ebook reader, in the same way that it is already at the forefront of mobile payments. Snappflify, for example, is a South African company that has become the largest educational content platform on the continent and already serves almost 200,000 students.

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For its part, worldreader, a San Francisco NGO, offers free access to a library of ebooks to schools in any developing country.

In rural areas, without coverage, it offers an integrated solution that includes solar panels, USB hubs, LED lights, e-book readers and access to the digital library.

Thanks to the magic of Leapfrogging, then, contentants like the African could receive aan unprecedented cultural and intellectual shock, suddenly, and in a few years; the equivalent of the shocks of thousands of years that the West received with the 38 most disruptive books for culture and science:

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The news

Leapfrogging: when a society makes a technological leap by skipping stages

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.