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Good morning, It’s the most searched for phrase on Google. And was a hit record for dance act Haddaway in the early 90’s. And now, a team of scientists from China and the US have been attempting to find some answers to one of humanity’s most enduring questions: What is love? Using MRI scans to track the physical effects of love on the brain, researchers monitored three groups of students: those who were ‘in love’, those who had recently ended relationships, and those who had never been in love. The study claims to have successfully obtained evidence of alterations in brain function. With those ‘in love’ showing increased brain activity especially in the parts that deal with emotion regulation and social cognition. It could be claimed the data demonstrates the power of love to change us. But does an observable increase of serotonin, pheromones and dopamine tell us more about love than, say, the song Love Is The Drug? In fact, if you want to know what love is, you could ask a musician. Since the charts began 60% of the top ten hits have been about love and it’s been variously described as ‘all you need, blind, a crazy little thing, and deeper than a river and higher than a mountain. Love it seems needs more than one word to define it. The Greeks helpfully supplied a few: giving us philia to describe the intimacy between friends; agape for a selfless kind of love, and eros to describe romantic-sexual love. Whilst it’s probably the latter that keeps rock stars in royalty cheques and even scientists conducting brain scans, there are clearly other kinds of love worth singing about as well as analysing. Back in the 80’s the writer Scott Peck made a distinction between being ‘in love’ and ‘love,’ describing ‘in love’ as a feeling that is spontaneous, effortless and temporary whilst ‘love’ involved an action that was deliberate, demanding and lasting. It’s much more than a passing feeling. It involves commitment, a steadiness: ‘an ever fix-ed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ The philosophers, poets and prophets have all been nudging us closer to a fuller, more mature understanding of what Love might be. But even among the most eloquent, there is no single description that covers it; just as for science there is no irreducible formulae. Nothing we can locate, put under a microscope and say ‘Eureka, I’ve found love!’ Perhaps the scientists are measuring the wrong thing. Maybe the real evidence of love’s activity can’t be scanned. For it’s found in the millions of hidden actions of giving and receiving that take place between people every day. The commandment ‘Love God with all your heart mind and soul and your neighbour as yourself’ makes no sense without somebody to love and the somebody who loves. Love needs bodies to make it incarnate, and it has to be incarnate to be Love. First broadcast 17 March 2015