Affair love is specific type of 'in love' one based on fantasy and fueled by dopamine that comes from doing what is forbidden, secretly, and with someone who is equally broken and lost. It's not real love, and is highly addictive. Your wife is deeply broken to be able to do this to you.
I do believe she loves you, in the sense she is bonded to you, as in oxytocin love. She was lacking the dopamine love or excitement that naturally dies down as couples live and stay together over time.
People how are not broken don't need to have the dopamine/adrenaline fueled affair experience to feel alive. They also know they need to nurture and keep alive the excitement in their marriage to keep it working. She took a short cut. She was lazy. She let her body over ride her mind and heart. She knew it was wrong but that make it even harder to avoid.
I don't recall where I came across this information, I think maybe exhibits in American Museum of Natural History or in Franklin Institute taking my kids, but there is quite a body of science regarding the human brain. I am not a scientist, but researchers are finding more and more about what parts of the brain causes functions, feelings, reasoning, memory, etc. Even love and monogamy. Some of it makes me get the feeling that humans have no will, just an illusion because we don't know enough about the science yet that causes what we do and when we do it.
I find it very difficult wondering how much of an extremely moral person (as far as we know) of 40-plus years, changing completely against their "character"; if there is some type of brain science involved, chemicals causing them to be "not at fault," or is so how much extent, vs. just selfishness.
People how are not broken don't need to have the dopamine/adrenaline fueled affair experience to feel alive.
i.e., Is the cheater just a victim of their "illness" or "malfunction" in their chemicals?
In the end, I believe the brain science, but I (and Walloped, and many others) apparently can "over-ride" these chemical drugs in our brains, but our cheating wives were not. I wish there was some type of "medical test" we could go to the doctor, and find out why they cheated, what chemicals spiked up, but science is not there yet. Until then, I've got to stick with the selfishness explanation and hold my wife completely responsible for her behavior. Though I think some of the research otherwise is compelling.
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/brain-the-inside-story
Love
What is love? Neuroscientists can't answer that question yet. But they have learned more about how the feelings that occur when people "bond" are produced in the brain. If you look at how humans bond with their mates and care for their young, you'll see some surprising similarities between us and other species. Can family bonds be strengthened and weakened by chemicals in your brain?
How it Works
Only about 5 percent of mammal species form exclusive, lifelong bonds with their mates. One is the prairie vole: Chemicals in a vole's brain make it link its mate with good feelings, and pairs tend to stay together for life. One of these chemicals is the neurotransmitter oxytocin. Prairie voles with more oxytocin receptors tend to stay with their mates. Voles with low levels mate with new partners.
Oxytocin plays a key role in the bonding process in voles--but what about in humans? In humans, as in prairie voles, oxytocin is released during birth, nursing, and mating--important bonding moments. Inhaling oxytocin in a nasal spray makes people feel more trusting in clinical studies. And in studies, men with naturally low oxytocin levels were less likely to get married.
So is oxytocin the secret of love? No. It is just one chemical messenger in the brain--a small part of a very complicated system. And it's not the only messenger involved in producing feelings of love and affection. Dopamine is a key messenger in the brain's "seeking system" that generates desire, and endorphin activates your pleasure centers when you find what you were looking for.
Reasoning
The powers of your brain are astonishing. You can live in the moment, reflect on the past, or imagine the future. You can allow your thoughts to wander in new directions--or train them to shut out the world and focus within. How does your brain help you reason, plan, make choices and set your mind on your goals?
How it Works
Much of the thinking you do day-to-day is a form of planning or problem-solving: deciding which steps to take to complete a job or get from here to there. When problem-solving, neurons near the front of your brain come alive. They take in a flurry of signals from the rest of the brain, help you weigh your options, and choose the best course--then transmit the plan to your brain's motor areas for action.
Make Up Your Mind
© Sunshinecity
Just when you're trying your best to be reasonable, however, your emotions can lead you astray. While executive neurons at the front of your brain allow for rational and logical decision-making, it's easy to be swayed by the emotional circuitry in your brain.
Have you ever bought something you can't afford and don't even need? Blame it on your overactive nucleus accumbens. Studies show that this bundle of neurons--sometimes called the brain's reward center--becomes active when you see a product that pleases you. If the price is exorbitant, your insula may express disapproval, and your reasonable prefrontal cortex may keep you in check. But if these brain areas are busy with other cares of the day, you'll reach for the reward.
Aging
By the time you reach your twenties, your brain is functioning at its peak. How does your brain change as you age?
How it Works
Scientists once assumed that after early childhood, the number of neurons in the brain was fixed, and no new ones could ever form. But recent research has shown that new neurons form throughout life in at least two areas: the hippocampus, which helps memories form, and the olfactory bulb, which processes smell.
Like the rest of your body, your brain has a natural tendency to slow down over time. After your twenties, little by little, the number of neural connections declines. Your working memory may become a bit less reliable, and you may not focus as well or react as quickly as you were able to in your youth.
With an illness, the brain can dwindle more rapidly. One of the most common brain disorders in people over 50 is Alzheimer's disease. While the causes of this illness are still unknown, it is clear that Alzheimer's destroys neurons and the connections between them. Under a microscope, Alzheimer's tissue shows fewer neurons and fewer synapses than normal. Damage starts in an area near the hippocampus, the brain's memory center. This is why one of the first signs of Alzheimer's is difficulty with memory.
In a normal aging brain, however, lessons learned through many years of experience are retained. Studies suggest your brain will stay healthy longer if you keep it engaged with mental and physical exercise; in fact, the more actively you use your brain, the more likely it is to stay sharp as long as you live.
SCIENCE + TECHNOLOGY
UCLA researchers map damaged connections in Phineas Gage's brain
Famous 1848 case of man who survived a terrible accident has modern parallel
May 16, 2012
Poor Phineas Gage. In 1848, the supervisor for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont was using a 13-pound, 3-foot-7-inch rod to pack blasting powder into a rock when he triggered an explosion that drove the rod through his left cheek and out of the top of his head. As reported at the time, the rod was later found, "smeared with blood and brains."
Miraculously, Gage lived, becoming the most famous case in the history of neuroscience — not only because he survived a horrific accident that led to the destruction of much of his left frontal lobe but also because of the injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior, which were said to be profound. Gage went from being an affable 25-year-old to one that was fitful, irreverent and profane. His friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage."
Over the years, various scientists have studied and argued about the exact location and degree of damage to Gage's cerebral cortex and the impact it had on his personality. Now, for the first time, researchers at UCLA, using brain-imaging data that was lost to science for a decade, have broadened the examination of Gage to look at the damage to the white matter "pathways" that connect various regions of the brain.
Reporting in the May 16 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, Jack Van Horn, a UCLA assistant professor of neurology, and colleagues note that while approximately 4 percent of the cerebral cortex was intersected by the rod's passage, more than 10 percent of Gage's total white matter was damaged. The passage of the tamping iron caused widespread damage to the white matter connections throughout Gage's brain, which likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced.
Because white matter and its myelin sheath — the fatty coating around the nerve fibers that form the basic wiring of the brain — connect the billions of neurons that allow us to reason and remember, the research not only adds to the lore of Phineas Gage but may eventually lead to a better understanding of multiple brain disorders that are caused in part by similar damage to these connections.
"What we found was a significant loss of white matter connecting the left frontal regions and the rest of the brain," said Van Horn, who is a member of UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI). "We suggest that the disruption of the brain's 'network' considerably compromised it. This may have had an even greater impact on Mr. Gage than the damage to the cortex alone in terms of his purported personality change."
LONI is part of an ambitious joint effort with Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Institutes of Health to document the trillions of microscopic links between every one of the brain's 100 billion neurons — the so-called "connectome." And because mapping the brain's physical wiring eventually will lead to answers about what causes mental conditions that may be linked to the breakdown of these connections, it was appropriate, as well as historically interesting, to take a new look at the damage to Gage's brain.
Since Gage's 189-year-old skull, which is on display in the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School, is now fragile and unlikely to again be subjected to medical imaging, the researchers had to track down the last known imaging data, from 2001, which had been lost due to various circumstances at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard, for some 10 years.
The authors were able to recover the computed tomographic data files and managed to reconstruct the scans, which revealed the highest-quality resolution available for modeling Gage's skull. Next, they utilized advanced computational methods to model and determine the exact trajectory of the tamping iron that shot through his skull. Finally, because the original brain tissue was, of course, long gone, the researchers used modern-day brain images of males that matched Gage's age and (right) handedness, then used software to position a composite of these 110 images into Gage's virtual skull, the assumption being that Gage's anatomy would have been similar.
Van Horn found that nearly 11 percent of Gage's white matter was damaged, along with 4 percent of the cortex.
"Our work illustrates that while cortical damage was restricted to the left frontal lobe, the passage of the tamping iron resulted in the widespread interruption of white matter connectivity throughout his brain, so it likely was a major contributor to the behavioral changes he experienced," Van Horn said. "Connections were lost between the left frontal, left temporal and right frontal cortices and the left limbic structures of the brain, which likely had considerable impact on his executive as well as his emotional functions."
And while Gage's personality changed, he eventually was able to travel and find employment as a stagecoach driver for several years in South America. Ultimately, he died in San Francisco, 12 years after the accident.
Van Horn noted a modern parallel.
"The extensive loss of white matter connectivity, affecting both hemispheres, plus the direct damage by the rod, which was limited to the left cerebral hemisphere, is not unlike modern patients who have suffered a traumatic brain injury," he said. "And it is analogous to certain forms of degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease or frontal temporal dementia, in which neural pathways in the frontal lobes are degraded, which is known to result in profound behavioral changes."
Van Horn noted that the quantification of the changes to Gage's brain's pathways might well provide important insights for clinical assessment and outcome-monitoring in modern-day brain trauma patients.
Other authors of the study were Andrei Irimia, Micah C. Chambers, Carinna M. Torgerson and Arthur W. Toga, all of UCLA, and Ron Kikinis of Harvard Medical School. The work was performed as part of the Human Connectome Project (www.humanconnectomeproject.org). The authors report no conflict of interest.
The UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, which seeks to improve understanding of the brain in health and disease, is a leader in the development of advanced computational algorithms and scientific approaches for the comprehensive and quantitative mapping of brain structure and function. The laboratory is part of the UCLA Department of Neurology, which encompasses more than a dozen research, clinical and teaching programs. The department ranks in the top two among its peers nationwide in National Institutes of Health funding.
