Couples will sometimes look to find ways of creating intimacy. A study conducted this year may point the way to a remarkable finding: all you have to do is stare into your partners eyes.

The research, published in Neuroimage, found that prolonged eye contact actually synchronizes brain activity between two people.

The scientists conducting the study had the intent of examining what happens in the brain during face-to-face eye contact, such as the attention given to a conversation participant in the work or school-related world.

They matched up 96 strangers and had them hold eye contact for extended periods of time while MRIs scanned the subjects’ brains for activity.

What they found was that blinking became synchronized and that a portion of the brain known as the right inferior front gyrus lit up with activity in both people. According to the authors, this finding suggested that mutually-held eye contact bound people into a “singular connected system.”

“Based on the enhancement of behavioral and neural synchronization during mutual gaze, we now know that shared attention is hard to establish without eye contact,” Norihiro Sadato, senior study author, told Psych Central.

This research has implications not only for our work lives, but also for our love lives. It’s often been said that people can fall in love when gazing into another’s eyes.

This was reinforced by a story found in the Modern Love column by Mandy Len Catron. The author replicated an experiment by psychologist Arthur Aron, which went something like this: Continue reading →

It’s true that loneliness affects some more than others. However, to traditional medicine, it is not always clear why some are more susceptible than others.

Whatever the case, it is clear that some people desire romantic relationships yet continue to stay single. It could be that some of them are empaths who have the tendency to feel overwhelmed and fatigued in their close relationships to others.

Empathetic people are a unique subset of humans. Those who can easily intuit and even take on the energetic themes of others can very easily become overloaded and exhausted when encountering the intimacy of a close relationship.

They can feel taken over when not given the personal time to decompress, which is why they may both want close relationships while at the same time fear for their own safety.

Obviously, traditional coupling will not work for many empaths who feel this way. In order to succeed in love, empathetic people must assert their need for personal space much more than is common.

While with a mate it is not as extreme as the necessary physical space in public situations or with strangers, there may be times when the partner is confused by the feeling that intimacy is desired but the need for space must be granted. Continue reading →

Extroverts and introverts don’t exactly see eye to eye all the time. There are major psychological differences between the two types of behavior and there are often some serious misinterpretations of the other. First, let’s talk about how the two are different at a biological level.

It all comes down to dopamine. Dopamine is the brain’s reward hormone and it responds more actively in an extrovert’s brain to things like sex, social status, and money than it does to an introvert’s brain.

At least according to Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist. This perfectly explains why extroverts love being around people and doing new things.

“[Extroverts] get more energized by those things in their environment,” Kaufman said. “Introverts, on the other hand, just don’t get as energized. Their dopamine system is not as active when they see these kinds of things in the environment.”

So does that mean introverts don’t enjoy socialization at all? Not necessarily. Introverts tend to need more time to rebuild their energy levels before being social again. They’re still social people. Continue reading →