Happy Dox

In recent years, technology has enabled scientists to begin mapping emotional experiences in the human brain, discovering not only the geographic location of feelings like love, joy, fear, and hate, but also the specific neurochemical pathways responsible for creating them. Thus, it has become possible, to some extent, to measure one individual’s emotional experience against another’s. With this in mind, a filmmaker enlists The Stanford Center for Cognitive Neurobiological Imaging to help hold the world’s fi rst ever Love Competition, in which seven contestants have five minutes in an MRI machine to love someone ‘as hard as they can’. And while the attempt to scientifi cally quantify such a deeply personal experience may seem far from romantic, the results are anything but…