Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University conducted a study about the neurochemical reactions involved in falling in love. She found that different types of love are addressed by different parts of the brain.
Ortigue also said (or at least the article about her study said) that falling in love takes one fifth of a second. That part of the article didn't make a lot of sense to me, but perhaps Neatoramanauts more literate in biochemistry can explain.
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For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image.
Ortigue also said (or at least the article about her study said) that falling in love takes one fifth of a second. That part of the article didn't make a lot of sense to me, but perhaps Neatoramanauts more literate in biochemistry can explain.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo by Flickr user Garry Knight used under Creative Commons license
That depends on whether you define love as a relationship or an emotion.
The high-speed falling in love they refer to is most-likely a woman being quickly ATTRACTED to someone when she sees them,
and then just rewriting history after the relationship worked out.
Personally, I never perceived that relationship as being regarded as reciprocal, anyway, i.e. a mother's love for her child is unconditional, not necessarily her child's love for her. (And where is fathers' unconditional love in all this, eh?)