This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition

Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s whatThe Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine, thinking deeply about love and allowing the imaging technology to measure activity in their dopamine, serotonin and ocytocin/vasopressin pathways. If you think this sounds unromantic, you’ll want to reserve judgment. Though science may be the explicit focus here, the film has a touching human dimension to it.

The Love Competition was made as part of Wholphin, the short film quarterly published by McSweeney’s. You can subscribe to Wholphin to find more films.