What Is The Neuroscience Behind Valentine’s Day
Nobody waits for Valentine’s Day as a chocolate seller or distributor does, and here’s why–every entrepreneur who sells chocolates makes the most profit on Valentine’s Day. The lovers are eager to profess their love to their beloved with heart-shaped chocolates. However, is it just expressing love, or is there a hidden motto behind it? Are chocolates a very strong influencing factor for accepting someone’s love? Is it possible that rather than love, our brain chemistry is pushing us to accept a lover that offers us chocolates?
Why do we relate chocolates and Valentine’s?
To answer this question, we need to run through our history in the course of Valentine’s Day. Earlier, it was Gelasius who declared that 14th February, i.e., Valentine’s Day, will be a festival that celebrated St. Valentine because he preached the principle of love towards humankind.
Later, Chaucer wrote a poem about love and connected it to Valentine’s Day and to love and romance. The famous lovers like Casanova and Montezuma made the connection between chocolates and Valentine’s Day by presenting chocolates to their loved ones. This, later on, became a tradition as we have come to know of it now.
The neuroscience aspect of chocolates and valentines
When we consume chocolate, our brain releases serotonin. Serotonin makes a person feel happy, rewarded, and pleasured. Our brain also releases a neurotransmitter called phenylethylamine, i.e., PEA. PEA is associated with the reward and pleasure centers’ of our brain.
When you receive a box of chocolates from your lover and have a bite, what makes you feel good about his love for you or the PEA that is released by consuming chocolate? We don’t know what it is that we do come back for. Chocolates? Love? Or both? This interconnection is smartly used by today’s age’s Romeo for his Juliet!
The experiment
There has been an interesting, albeit funny experiment done by a college student. She had a crush on a boy, and every time she would see him, she would offer him his favorite chocolate. The guy felt good because of the release of PEA and serotonin.
Every time he would see her, he felt happy and rewarded. After a while, the girl stopped bringing chocolate. We might expect the guy to stop liking her. But the guy was already reinforced to associate her with pleasure (it was the chocolates originally). He replaced his feelings for chocolates for his feelings for her, subconsciously. Later, he associated these feelings with love and discovered what a great personality she has and started dating her.
What an unconventional way to express your love and have him/her love you back! You can try this out too. This trick is better than a casual ‘hey’ and going out. We cannot accept that the only reason Casanova got his girls’ chocolates was to please them. Maybe, he discovered the scientific reason long before modern scientists! Casanova came to know the aphrodisiac quality of chocolates and used him to his benefit as now we do it as well.
