Sooner or later, love usually ends up hurting. But in its early, blissful throes, it actually lessens pain — at least of the physical kind. That's the finding, reported Wednesday, of a study by pain scientists and a psychologist who studies love.
The study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, sprang from a meeting of minds between Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, a longtime researcher of the science of love, and Dr. Sean Mackey, a pain scientist at Stanford University. The two shared a hotel room while attending a neuroscience conference a few years back. Their epiphany came one evening over drinks.
"I'd had a couple glasses of Zinfandel and was chatting about pain and the brain systems involved … and he was chatting about love and the brain systems involved," Mackey said. "And we realized, you know, they could be influencing each other."
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