All language depends on agreed definitions of its words. For public objects and actions this is easy; we can point to what a word refers to. But words for private sensations cause endless confusion. Defining them needs a subtler approach.

Daedalus has been inspired by a recent study in which volunteers claiming to be 'in love' were placed in a magnetic-resonance brain scanner, and shown photographs of their alleged beloved. Four specific brain regions immediately gained activity, and one lost it. Photographs of mere friends gave a different pattern.

The word 'love' must be responsible for more confusion and misery than any other in the language. How are we supposed to learn the difference between desiring, fancying, being infatuated with, falling in love with, being in love with, or loving, somebody? Do these states exhaust the emotional range? Are they the same for men and women? And what are the logical connections between them? (Daedalus reckons, for example, that falling in love leads to the state of infatuation, and that you can get to be in love with somebody without having fallen in love with him or her.) Romantic fiction merely confuses the issue. It generates innumerable emotional agonies in those who take it seriously.

So DREADCO's psychologists are now launching a programme of emotional exploration. Volunteers from starry-eyed teenagers to ruthless Casanovas to long-married pensioners are being studied by all brain-scan technologies. At first the programme will be merely empirical. It will seek to correlate the brain maps of volunteers in various emotional states with what they claim to be feeling. In due course the team will discover the most consistent use of the existing words. New words, or new definitions, may have to be invented to fit the observed facts. The baffling private world of love will slowly gain an objective public map.

The programme will then switch into its educational phase. People confused by their emotional state will take a DREADCO brain scan. They will learn the right expression for their state of mind, and be taught how to recognize other states. The DREADCO standard vocabulary and definitions will spread through society, ending the anguished doubts and misunderstandings propagated by the current versions. The question 'Do you love me?' will at last have a true, demonstrable answer.