An Open Letter to the Hypothalamus

Dear dense cluster of nerves responsible for hundreds of bodily functions and transmitter of various chemicals to the pituitary gland,

Love songs never gave you credit and the unfortunate crowd never referred to you as broken.

You are responsible for that rapid heartbeat. That lightness in the head people refer to as “falling in love”. But you were never recognized. You remain hidden in the lower region of the brain – safe from all the maudlin sentiments you inflict to the human race.

It must be hard not to be remembered during Valentine’s Day. Greeting cards and mall decorations are all about the cute kid with an arrow and hearts that don’t look like the real thing at all. But you probably don’t even care about that day. After all if an almond size part of the brain represents Valentines, nobody will ever buy cards. It’s just not cute.

But you do know that there is a reason behind all these. Love is a sacred word for us humans. Acknowledging the fact that it is just you secreting all these hormones demeans this romantic notion of love into a primal urge. That it is nothing more than a chemical reaction recognized by the unsuspecting person’s cognition. Influenced by melodramas and teenage flicks. This, of course, is aside from the fact that saying I love you with all of my heart sounds way better than I love you with all of my Hypothalamus.

But at the same time, you are also proof that love is a cognitive process. It goes through that same region of the brain where information is processed, knowledge is applied, and preferences are changed. Ergo, love is not the primal urge that most romantics mistakenly name. It is the conclusion of that cognitive process. A decision that do not always have a name because the name doesn’t give justice to its meaning. Love, then, is an overrated signifier for an underrated signified. Just like the hearts in Valentine cards that do not look like the real thing at all. Or Hilary Duff sampling Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus.