Why Indeed Do Fools Fall In Love?

Why does falling in love feel so darned good? And more to the point, why does it seem to lead to an increase in creative productivity?

One possibility is that when we're in love we actually think differently.

This romantic hypothesis was recently tested by psychologists at the University of Amsterdam who found that love really does alter our thoughts, and that this profound emotion affects us in a way that is different than simply thinking about sex.

The experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish