Rhetorical Analysis Of Helen Fisher's Speech On Love

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Helen Fisher is an anthropologist studying emotions. Fisher attended a Ted Talk room to make a speech about love, as she is the best known expert on love in the romantic sense. In her speech, she addresses the chemistry of love and the way it affects the brain. She uses real world examples of people that have been in love, and also uses examples of scientific studies of people that claim to be in love. She is a very eloquent speaker.
This speech analyzes love in many different contexts. While she is analyzing these things, she demonstrates pathos quite immensely. We all know love, and that in itself is a very emotional thing to experience or think about. To demonstrate pathos, Fisher says things such as “. . . romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth” (5). Also, “Almost nobody gets out of love alive” (2). Or “. . . the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine. But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high -- at least you come down from cocaine” (4). The emotional appeal of her speech is demonstrated through quotes such as these to pull you into the …show more content…

To preface the entire speech, she states that her colleagues and herself, Art Aron and Lucy Brown, performed a scientific study on people in love. This already gives the listener a sense of credibility towards Fisher, because she is a professional studier of things of this nature. With this, she explains exactly how the study went. “I and my colleagues Art Aron and Lucy Brown and others, have put thirty-seven people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. Seventeen who were happily in love, fifteen who had just been dumped, and were just starting our third experiment: studying people who report that they're still in love after ten to twenty-five years of marriage” (1). The explanations of this study really enhances how the listener will have a sense of respect for

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