Imagine your body and brain constantly building a model of the world and your place in it. Besides coordinates, another important thing to know (and a bit harder to find, determine, or feel) is the sense of direction. The model I’m about to lay out relies on fundamental “reference frames”—Where am I in life and where do I want to go?—and suggests something beautiful and novel about the mechanism of falling in love beyond the standard biomedical paradigm. As you might have guessed, it includes gravity.
Apart from the hormonal cocktail, I believe falling in love changes our deep-seated attentional reference frames. I’ll explain throughout the essay how this relates to gravity. For now, in the language of the music theory of consciousness—the system is undergoing some serious oscillatory recalibration. As a metaphor, it’s like you’re a captain of a ship and suddenly you realise there is this awesome new wind that will help you reach your destination faster. This hypothesis really becomes more intriguing once we take our usual starting point, consciousness physicalism, where the laws of physics actually describe qualia, and consider a functional analogy between attention and gravity that I discussed back in 2023. (You can also check out Andrés’ work on modelling attention as EM field lines.)
We can say that gravity “binds stuff into things”, whereas (focused) attention “collapses vibes into coherent phenomenological objects.” Both “forces” involve a form of tension that gives rise to structure. Interestingly, gravitational collapse played a fundamental role in the formation of the universe’s earliest structures, including nebulae and proto-stars, and this process represents one of the most important mechanisms in cosmic evolution. Fundamentals played a key role here.
If gravitational collapse occurs when gravity overcomes other forces that typically maintain equilibrium in a region of space containing matter, how about saying: Attentional collapse occurs when a surprise, such as unexpected beauty, overcomes all the other phenomenological content that used to maintain attentional balance in your model of the universe? The new gestalt becomes a central source of symmetrification and positive valence. Why heartbreaks or hard break-ups feel like your whole world falls apart? On some level, it’s because it literally does—but it’s in oscillations and in your attentional reference frames.
Gravitational vs. attentional collapse
In the context of the early universe, gravitational collapse was essential for transforming the initially near-uniform distribution of matter into the structured cosmos we observe today. Since this is always an interesting topic, let’s have a look at how that went. First, we have the formation of nebulae. Nebulae represent one of the first large-scale structures formed through gravitational collapse:
- Giant molecular clouds: As gravity pulled hydrogen and helium gas together in the early universe, enormous clouds formed spanning hundreds of light-years. (Other elements such as carbon come later with nuclear fusion in star formation)
- Density variations: Within these clouds, some regions became denser than others due to turbulence, radiation pressure, and random motion of gas particles.
- Fragmentation: The clouds began fragmenting as multiple centers of gravitational collapse formed within the larger cloud, creating complex nebular structures.
- Self-gravitation threshold: When regions within the nebula reached sufficient density, they became self-gravitating—meaning their internal gravity became the dominant force determining their evolution.
Then, we have proto-stars—the precursors to fully-fledged stars—that form as a direct result of gravitational collapse within nebulae. With some help of Johnson’s vasocomputation, I will draw parallels to attentional collapse:
- Core formation: As gravity (focused attention) continually pulls matter (blood; Mike’s insight) toward the center of a collapsing region (vasomuscular latch-bridge), a dense core (a frozen pattern, memory) forms.
- Angular momentum conservation: The collapsing cloud begins to rotate faster as it contracts (like a spinning ice skater pulling in their arms), forming a flattened protostellar disk.
- Temperature increase: As the core contracts, gravitational potential energy converts to thermal energy, increasing the temperature.
- Opacity effects: When the core becomes dense enough, it becomes opaque to its own radiation, trapping heat and accelerating temperature rise.
- Hydrostatic equilibrium: Eventually, the proto-star reaches a temporary equilibrium where the outward pressure from heat balances the inward pull of gravity.
At this stage, the object is considered a proto-star. It will continue to accrete matter from its surrounding disk until it either gains enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion (becoming a true star) or fails to reach the necessary threshold (becoming a brown dwarf). I’m wondering how many interesting analogies might be extracted once we consider the processes of conception and birth.
In any case, what makes gravitational collapse so important is that it represents the universe’s fundamental mechanism for creating complexity from simplicity. Without attention, we wouldn’t be able to make memories. The universe began in a state of near-perfect thermal equilibrium, but through gravitational collapse, it developed the hierarchical structures—galaxies, stars, planets—that eventually made life possible. What I am suggesting is that this process has to be a function of consciousness—”coherence operator”, as Joscha Bach named it—or rather attention that imposes spatio-temporal harmonic order onto chaos. It is observation.
Ultimately, just like gravity made early formations in the universe possible, attention does exactly the same when it comes to building our internal model of the universe. So besides the Darwinian interpretation of falling in love in order to mate, on a deeper level of consciousness physicalism, just like self-gravitating nebulae or proto-stars, we fall in love to find ourselves and to calibrate our sense of direction in life.
“Maybe love will set you free” is a true saying, and what it means is that if you’re lucky enough, you might experience the glory of total annihilation of the self, an ego death brought about by the simple imperative of surrendering to that unseen field line carrying you towards a harbour you had never even known it existed.
Theoretical breakdown and the hypothesis
The brain constantly uses signals, particularly from your inner ear (the vestibular system), to create an internal model of gravity. This gravity model is a fundamental reference frame – it helps you know where you are in space and influences how you interact with and attend to the world. Now, think about attention. Johnson’s vasocomputation suggests our blood vessels (specifically smooth muscles) might help the brain decide and “clamp” down on what’s important, essentially “freezing” certain thoughts or predictions. I am comparing intense focus to an “attentional collapse,” where possibilities narrow and attention settles on one thing or goal. This mechanism could make “the beloved” a latched hyperprior or an unshakeable expectation. In a powerful analogy, the beloved serves as a “gravitational mass” or a “gravitational pull”. Just as a massive object’s gravity dictates the movement of things around it (like planets orbiting a star), the beloved becomes so salient that they become a central “attractor”, pulling our attention and our body’s resources towards them. It’s as if they become the key reference frame in your internal “universe.”
Building on the gravitational analogy, this theory suggests that if “falling in love” is a shift in one’s internal reference frames, it might actually involve the systems that sense gravity and orientation – such as the vestibular system. The vestibular system is strongly connected to parts of the brain that handle emotions and attention. The novelty of this idea is that an intense emotional state—like a beautiful, symmetrifying surprise of someone’s smile—could feel like: 1) loss of ground, weakness in knees, or cognitive disorientation, and 2) gradual “grounding”, settlement of a new orientation precisely because love may recruit these vestibular-emotional pathways.
Think about the phrase “swept off your feet” or how you might have felt dizzy when unexpectedly seeing someone you are attracted to. Even John Mayer felt it was true! Ah, yes. The poets knew it. Lovers. Now, despite the intuitive truthfulness of this model, for the time being, it remains speculative and we’re yet to see what the research will show. Perhaps it is no wonder why time dilation is another common occurrence in romantic reports, such as a slo-mo of a cinematic kiss with someone who has already been oscillating within (cf. Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence).
Wishing you all sublime gravitational collapses and memorable time dilations,
Beata
Thoughts On Evolutions 
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