Is Love an Illusion?

Spanish essayist Miguel de Unamuno said, “Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.” Is this view cynical or biologically based? This series on the neuroscience of illusions highlights that illusions are, by definition, mismatches between physical reality and perception. Love, like all emotions, has no external physical reality: it may be driven by neural events, but it is nevertheless a purely subjective experience. So, too, is the wounded heart we have drawn in this slide. Where the arrow enters and exits the heart there is no heart whatsoever, except for how the arrow itself defines the edges of the imagined heart.

This effect is called an "illusory contour.” We perceive the shape of the heart only because our brains impose a shape on to a very sparse field of data. Neuroscientist Rudiger von der Heydt, of Johns Hopkins University, has shown that illusory contours are processed in neurons within visual brain area called V2. The illusory heart even looks slightly whiter than the background, although it is actually the same shade. Much of our day-to-day experience is made up of analogous feats of filling in the blanks, as we take what we know about the world and use it to imagine what we don’t.