If you like, you can pretend this is not absolutely awesome . . . but you really would only be pretending as it’s actually pretty much beyond awesome. Seriously, this is most well and truly on the awesome side of life.

Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what The Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine, thinking deeply about love and allowing the imaging technology to measure activity in their dopamine, serotonin and ocytocin/vasopressin pathways. If you think this sounds unromantic, you’ll want to reserve judgment. Though science may be the explicit focus here, the film has a touching human dimension to it.

Here’s the film, seriously, watch it all . . . this is amazing and heart-warming stuff:

See, I told you it would be worth it.

One particularly cool thing . . . this is the First Annual Love Competition . . . in my mind’s eye I can see future competitors gearing up and doing love-ups and intense practicing loving so they can fire off those love regions harder, faster, higher, and more intensely. That’s it, the next Olympic sport . . . competitive loving . . . actually, that’s not a half bad idea. Certainly, it would foster some really neat positive benefits in society that organized competitive beating the shit out of each other doesn’t foster.

- Brian

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