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Some aspects of this "revolutionary" thesis are already familiar. Freud also located love and its discontents in the body: All those female patients with their odd physical quirks, due always, it turned out, to some kink or twist in love's free expression. But for Freud, the involvement of the body was the symptom, not the cure. That was achieved by nudging the neurosis out of the corporeal and into the abstract, where it could be looked at in the light. Lewis et al., meanwhile, move in the opposite direction: They want to return love to the body, show that it's made from flesh, blood and bone.

A General Theory of Love: Love & the New Science of the Emotional Mind By Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon and Fari Amini Random House, 247 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Central to their argument is the theory of the "triune brain," which holds that our minds are made up of three parts, each an artifact of a particular era in our evolutionary history. There's the reptilian brain, which keeps our hearts beating and our lungs filling with air. There's the limbic brain, peculiar to mammals, which regulates our relationships with other warm-blooded creatures. And there's the neocortex, in humans the largest of the trio, which allows us to speak, reason and make up theories like this one.

It's the middle, limbic, layer that runs our love lives, the authors assert, and it gets the whole body into the act: heartbeat, temperature, blood pressure, the flow of neurotransmitters, all are righted and steadied by the presence of someone we're close to. And love alters not only these fleeting rhythms, but also the very structure of the brain. Every time we think, say or do something, we beat a path through neural thickets that makes it a little easier to go that way again. In love, especially, we tend to follow the tracks we've made before, and we look for others who inhabit familiar territory. To try to love someone whose mental highways and byways don't intersect with our own -- who sulks when we would argue, who shouts when we would cry -- is to enter an emotional wilderness.

Love makes its mark on us early. In greenest childhood, the brain is busy pruning the lush overgrowth of synapses with which we're born. Though this process is familiar to every ambitious parent (lay down some French verb tenses before it's too late!), it's less often applied to the emotional brain. But the same thing happens here: If a baby doesn't encounter kindness and compassion in her first years of life, she'll be no more conversant in its ways than any other latecomer struggling to master a foreign tongue.

Memory, too, becomes a physical part of us. There's the explicit kind, which records in vivid but fast-fading detail the casual criticism your lover lobbed at you last night. And there's implicit memory, which extracts from those details a general principle -- people who love often hurt you -- and squirrels it away for future reference. In childhood, especially, our implicit memories are engaged in identifying "rules" about how relationships work, and these unconscious rules are the ones we live by as adults.

Next page | De-programming limbic attraction to losers