Secondhand Emotions

Her name is Genevieve, and she is a gorgeous French senior with whom Donovan is absolutely smitten, from her fabulous hair to the lovely lilt of her voice. She is his first love, and from her he learns about dating and courtship and sex.

It is the sort of relationship one can experience only at that stage in life, and it can't last.

When Donovan meets Brittany, and discovers he can read her mind, too, it seems like hope that the magic of love isn't confined to that first time. Maybe that's why it's so devastating when it ends, sending Donovan into a depression that persists into his senior year - when he meets Diana, a neuroscientist studying the origins of pleasure in the brain.

After a rocky start, they'll experiment to explore questions science doesn't often ask: can you see empathy on an EEG or detect intimacy with an MRI?

And what about love and other secondhand emotions?