A Card Catalog

Weep no more, little love-notes, your shoebox homes are safe from Dewey's decimals.

I have found a prettier way to index.

You have also looked at the cognitive process of love. What did you find?
Again we were interested in how the unconscious influences behavior. We presented each participant with the name of his or her beloved on a monitor, subliminally [faster than the threshold of awareness], and contrasted that with the name of a friend and the name of a stranger.
Then we asked the participants to do a demanding cognitive task that required focused attention. Love is supposed to activate the dopamine system, which is involved in reward and pleasure but also plays a role in cognition and movement. Our hypothesis was that if love activates the dopamine system, it should boost functions related to that system, like cognition and motor functions. So we should see a faster reaction time.
We found a huge and significant effect when we presented the name of the beloved: The participants were much faster at the cognitive tasks that we were asking them to do, but only when we asked them to do challenging tasks. When we asked them to do less demanding tasks, we didn’t see the same effect. We believe that passionate love activates a specific brain network that helps people make faster cognitive connections and mental associations. It isn’t just speeding up their motor skills.


7 items from a list for love
you see both darkness and light, but project more of the latter
not overly devoted to your moods
voice to wrap myself in (strong voice)
make your own fun
dynamic, not in suspended animation waiting for a muse to activate you
freckled body or otherwise compelling skin (sight, touch, smell)
alert, turned on, tuned in

7 items from a list for love

  1. you see both darkness and light, but project more of the latter
  2. not overly devoted to your moods
  3. voice to wrap myself in (strong voice)
  4. make your own fun
  5. dynamic, not in suspended animation waiting for a muse to activate you
  6. freckled body or otherwise compelling skin (sight, touch, smell)
  7. alert, turned on, tuned in

a list for love

At the end of 2010 I went on a string of first/second/third dates.  While getting dressed for these encounters, I slipped into an altered state that the Pintupi might call being “in the Dreaming.” My visions of that evening’s love interest were so specific they seemed preverbal, preconscious, arising from within or beyond. On slips of paper, I started to record what I was seeing, as the Pintupi do. From within the Dreaming, their Seers annotate the spirit realm thru dashes and dots radiating over entire canvases—these paintings become symbolic maps that guide them in waking life, when extrasensory vision is dormant. Instead of channelling my date-night juju into dot-paintings, I made a list for love. Later, I realized the list I wrote “in the Dreaming” was not hocus pocus or ESP, rather an exercise in introspection. My visions encoded values and desires about love, duh, cause I projected onto near-strangers qualities I’d most want in a mate! Clarifying what I want has been oh-so-helpful already, and so I tack up one item at a time like a booster-shot to keep myself focused; the path to my heart, clear. 

item the first: you see both darkness and light, but project more of the latter.