Filed under: General Interest
The author is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. He is also an Associate Professor of Physics at the National Institute of Physics in UP Diliman. He recently married his girlfriend of six years.
Physicists know resonance by heart, and can even name (and solve) at least two representative systems that exhibit such behavior.
In mechanics, there's the case of the driven damped harmonic oscillator (HO); in electromagnetism we have the series resistor-inductor-capacitor (RLC) circuit driven by a sinusoidal voltage source. The interplay between the forcing and retardation mechanisms in such systems gives rise to an interesting property: the system response (in the form of the amplitude of the oscillation of the HO or the current through the RLC) is maximal only at a very precise value of the driving frequency, and sharply declines away from it. This value, aptly called the natural frequency, is inherently related to the parameters within the system (the square root of the ratio of the relative strength of the restoring force over the measure of the system inertia). A resonance phenomenon, in a way, paints a picture of a system responding only to external influence whose characteristics are very much similar to its own; and, boy, does it respond, with amplitudes spiking to very high levels!
Going back to the last sentence and replacing “system” with “person” and “amplitudes” with “happiness” paints a picture that is far more familiar, not only to physicists, but to everyone in general. In that case, we can replace “Resonance phenomenon” with the ever-so-prevalent but not-so-well-defined (and also ever-so-cliched) “Love”.
Indeed, the phenomenon of love – physiological, psychological, social, or whatever it is – is very much like a resonance process, wherein we have this certain sets of qualities we look for in a mate and find it only in a certain person and not in anybody else and being with this person makes us really happy. There have been many attempts to look at love from different perspectives, but it still remains as one of the most enigmatic things in the world, as there have been as many definitions of it as there are books and papers written about it. But the resonance analogy – at least, for us scientists – is quite an interesting way to describe it.
It’s no wonder then that this sort of description would come up in an attempt to scientifically determine the origins and mechanisms of love. In the book titled Love 2.0: Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a Professor of Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tries to veer away from our preconceived notions about love to come up with a basic definition ‘as our body experiences it.’ In an article published in CNN, she describes love as follows:
We tend to think of emotions as private events, confined to one person's mind and skin. Upgrading our view of love defies this logic. Evidence suggests that when you really “click” with someone else, a discernible yet momentary synchrony emerges between the two of you, as your gestures and biochemistries, even your respective neural firings, come to mirror one another in a pattern I call positivity resonance. Love is a biological wave of good feeling and mutual care that rolls through two or more brains and bodies at once.
Yes, love, according to her, is positivity resonance (she is so enamored with the term, which I think she coined, she used it repeatedly in the article and even for the url of the book).
I have not yet read the book so I have yet to see whether resonance, in its strict physics definition, is indeed observed in their experiments (as the wordings suggest, this might be more of a synchronization than a resonance). But even so, if we are not being strict about it, the analogy is uncanny: the similarity in the “wave” of feelings and the resulting spike in biochemical activity. There are, however, some interesting theses that defy how we have conceptualized love in our minds. Again, from the same CNN article, she mentions:
Love is not romance. It's not sexual desire. It's not even that special bond you feel with family or significant others.
And perhaps most challenging of all, love is neither lasting nor unconditional. The radical shift we need to make is this: Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of connection shared with another.
Whereas the frequency-selectivity property of resonance phenomena is associated with the idea of that one single person – the soul mate, if you will – in the analogy made earlier, the author completely rejects this idea. By her argument that you can find such micro-moments of positivity resonance in anyone, “whether your soul mate or a stranger,” the soul-mate-is-to-love-as-the-natural-frequency-is-to-resonance equivalence no longer holds. It’s like saying that the series RLC can be driven to resonance regardless of the AC voltage source used.
While people may take it as a license for, well, loving not just one person (am I hearing “Torn Between Two Lovers” or “Sana Dalawa ang Puso Ko” in the background?), I take the stand of the author on the issue:
Writing this book has profoundly changed my personal view of love. I used to uphold love as that constant, steady force that all but defines my marriage. While that constant, steady force still exists, I now see our bond as a product of the many micro-moments of positivity resonance that my husband and I have shared over the years. This shakes me out of any complacency that tempts me to take our love for granted. Love is something we should re-cultivate every single day.
The statement is very well said; I couldn’t make it better. Instead, I’ll just add another physics analogy: this time with the related field of signal processing. Yes, we all aim to give (and receive) that steady, constant curve of love in our relationships (I had to qualify it as “constant” because I know somebody who defines “steady” as a sinusoid, ehem, Karl). If love is just a micro-moment – a spike of perfect synchrony and resonance – then it is comparable to an impulse, a Dirac-delta signal. Signal processing tells us that an easy way to produce the constant curve is to continuously fire impulse responses.
It is therefore my resolve to regularly (and continuously, and persistently) show love to all those whom I cherish. Whether it’s the romantic love for my wife, the filial love for my family, or the friendly love to my friends, knowledge of the fleeting nature of this “positivity resonance” phenomenon inspires me to do everything within my power to keep doing things that will keep our “waves” in synch. I will do it everyday, it will be my normal mode (pun intended). ●
The CNN article: 10 things you might not know about love.
The book: Love 2.0: Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
