This article reports on the results of a recent study conducted by researchers from Aalto University in Finland which aims to map how people experience 27 different types of love. The goal of the research was to answer the following questions:

Where are the different types of love felt in the body?
How are the feelings associated with different types of love related to emotional valence, bodily and mental experience, and controllability?
How similar are different types of love about each other, in body and mind?

The research discovered that different types of love manifest in different parts of the body, at different strengths. For example, passionate love, true love, and love for life were experienced most strongly in the body while some types of love like benevolent love, love for God, and love for wisdom were felt less strongly in the head, but could have chest and head area activations.

According to the researchers, the most surprising finding they got was that all types of love being studied were felt in the head.

Editor’s Note: How do we know what love is? How can we differentiate one kind of love from another?

Some people will interpret the activation of the brain in this study as proof that emotions are a function of our neurological processes. And yet even the best neuroscientists have not been able to find where love is in the brain. Love, like consciousness, cannot be traced back to just one region of the brain.

The materialists want you to think that love is a by-product of hormones, yet no one has found the perfect love by spritzing oneself with a hormone cocktail.

It is uncanny how those we might call “deep love” or “spiritual love”, those that give us a deep feeling of peace, joy, happiness, and connection to something much bigger than ourselves such as the love for God, for wisdom, and for one’s country, are all concentrated in the head.

Are they merely a cognitive experience, or are these types of love tapping into the same undiscovered “capacities” that are being “used” by “consciousness”?