You might as well face it ... / 你或许也会面对它……

Sex stimulates the release of vasopressin and oxytocin in people, as well as voles, though the role of these hormones in the human brain is not yet well understood. But while it is unlikely that people have a mental, smell-based map of their partners in the way that voles do, there are strong hints that the hormone pair have something to reveal about the nature of human love: among those of Man's fellow primates that have been studied, monogamous marmosets have higher levels of vasopressin bound in the reward centres of their brains than do non-monogamous rhesus macaques.

虽然抗利尿激素和催产素在人脑内的角色仍未被透彻了解，但与田鼠一样，人体在受到性刺激时也会释放这些荷尔蒙。尽管与田鼠不一样，人类不太可能有一张基于嗅觉的神经系统伴侣图谱，但若干线索已有力说明，这两种荷尔蒙能揭示一些人类恋爱的本质∶在已被研究过的人类灵长目同伴之中，一夫一妻制小长尾猴的大脑奖赏中枢系统中，抗利尿激素水平较非一夫一妻制的恒河短尾猿高。

Other approaches are also shedding light on the question. In 2000, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love. They took students who said they were madly in love, put them into a brain scanner, and looked at their patterns of brain activity.

其他方法也正在为人们寻找这些问题的谜底。2000 年，来自伦敦市大学学院的Andreas Bartels和Semir Zeki定位出了能被浪漫爱情激活的大脑区域。两位学者选择自称正在热恋的学生作为测试目标，利用脑扫描仪对他们的大脑活动模式进行观测。

The results were surprising. For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes. Like the prairie voles.

令人惊讶的是：首先，人脑参与到恋爱的活动区域，较之其他感情（如普通友谊），相对要比较小些。“引人注意的是，结果显示，”两位学者推断说，“美丽的面容是通过控制一个有限区域的大脑皮层来实现‘一顾倾人城，再顾倾人国’的。”  第二个惊奇之处是，大脑内因恋爱而活跃的区域不同于因其他情绪而活跃的区域，例如，恐惧和愤怒。 被恋爱“咬住”的那部份大脑还包括负责内脏感觉和因可卡因等毒品生成快感的区域。因此，因此，深坠爱河的恋人们的大脑，并非类同于经历强烈情绪波动的人，倒更接近那些鼻吸可卡因的瘾君子。换句话说，爱情使用的是在成瘾过程中被激活的神经机制。“严格地讲, 我们成瘾于爱情，”Young博士评述道，“就如同草原田鼠”。 ()