- September 4, 2019June 30, 2020
What is love, according to neuroscientists?
It’s one of the most studied, but least understood, of all the human behaviours.
A major study over 20 years ago studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love in 147 of them. The conclusion of the researchers: “there’s good reason to suspect that romantic affection is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”
The world-renowned anthropologist and expert on romantic affection Helen Fisher has concluded that love is much more than an emotion. It operates at a level so deeply rooted in our biology that we struggle to control it.
I began to realise that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it’s a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of part of the mind when you’re reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It’s a drive.
This biological drive takes over, and we experience love and affection.
“But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. It would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you.”
3 signs it’s love, according to neuroscience
What is love?, neuroscientists have started to identify the most common experiences of love and affection.
Below, we share the 10 most common experiences in terms of people’s behaviours and what happens in the brain.
1) Love makes you feel addicted
When you feel like you’re in love, you can’t get enough of it.
Neuroscientists have established we respond to love in the same way we respond to drugs: once we’ve experienced it, we want more.
This is because love creates addiction. Thinking about the person you have affection for triggers activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain, which releases a flood of the neurotransmitters dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin (dopamine is the so-called “pleasure chemical”) into the brain’s reward (or pleasure) centers—the caudate nucleus and nucleus accumbens.
We seek love and adoration, acceptance and community at every turn in our lives.
The mix of affection, attraction, and arousal triggers fireworks in the brain.
A study found that once our brains have gotten a taste of something, it’s very hard for us to ignore it. Our brain will continue wanting to activate those feel-good chemicals, which is why love is sometimes described as an addiction.
This is also why break-ups can be so messy to deal with.
2) Love will make you experience recklessness
If you’ve ever been in love, then you know the term “crazy in love” is a real thing.
Research confirms that we’re more willing to take risks when we experience desire and affection.
The prefrontal cortex—the brain’s mechanism for logic and reasoning—drops a gear when we’re in love. At the same time, the amygdala—the warning us against threats—also works less.
The result of these effects is that we end up looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. This makes us make less-than-ideal choices when our brains are preoccupied with the person of our desire.
When we are infatuated, we have no need to be defensive, and we tend to see things from a positive point of view which stops us from questioning our actions, thoughts, and feelings, and it can leave us wondering what the heck just happened.
3) Eye contact is the gateway to the heart
Have you ever gazed into your lover’s eyes and lost yourself for a moment?
Your brain is working really hard to process the information it receives from your eyes, and when you get “lost” in the eyes of another, your brain doesn’t know what to do with that information.
Eye contact between people forms a connection, it’s a biological reality, according to researchers.
The connection that is made can solidify feelings of love, affection and make it all the more real.
More on this topic…
Love and the brain
Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds know a lot about love. These Harvard Medical School (HMS) professors and couples therapists study how love evolves and, too often, how it collapses. They have also been happily married for nearly four decades.
Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviours. More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love—the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric—in 147 of them. This ubiquity, said Schwartz, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., indicates that “there’s good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”
Rewarding ourselves
In 2005, Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study that included the first functional MRI (fMRI) images of the brains of individuals in the throes of romantic love. Her team analysed 2,500 brain scans of college students who viewed pictures of someone special to them and compared the scans to ones taken when the students looked at pictures of acquaintances. Photos of people they romantically loved caused the participants’ brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter. Two of the brain regions that showed activity in the fMRI scans were the caudate nucleus, a region associated with reward detection and expectation and the integration of sensory experiences into social behaviour, and the ventral tegmental area, which is associated with pleasure, focused attention, and the motivation to pursue and acquire rewards.
The ventral tegmental area is part of what is known as the brain’s reward circuit, which, coincidentally, was discovered by Olds’s father, James, when she was 7 years old. This circuit is considered to be a primitive neural network, meaning it is evolutionarily old; it links with the nucleus accumbens. Some of the other structures that contribute to the reward circuit—the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex—are exceptionally sensitive to (and reinforcing of) behaviour that induces pleasure, such as sex, food consumption, and drug use.
“We know that primitive areas of the brain are involved in romantic love,” said Olds, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, “and that these areas light up on brain scans when talking about a loved one. These areas can stay lit up for a long time for some couples.”
When we are falling in love, chemicals associated with the reward circuit flood our brain, producing a variety of physical and emotional responses—racing hearts, sweaty palms, flushed cheeks, feelings of passion and anxiety. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase of romantic love, marshalling our bodies to cope with the “crisis” at hand. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what Schwartz described as the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love”—the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with infatuation.
Being love-struck also releases high levels of dopamine, a chemical that “gets the reward system going,” said Olds. Dopamine activates the reward circuit, helping to make love a pleasurable experience similar to the euphoria associated with use of cocaine or alcohol. Scientific evidence for this similarity can be found in many studies, including one conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in 2012 in Science. That study reported that male fruit flies that were sexually rejected drank four times as much alcohol as fruit flies that mated with female fruit flies. “Same reward center,” said Schwartz, “different way to get there.”
Other chemicals at work during romantic love are oxytocin and vasopressin, hormones that have roles in pregnancy, nursing, and mother-infant attachment. Released during sex and heightened by skin-to-skin contact, oxytocin deepens feelings of attachment and makes couples feel closer to one another after having sex. Oxytocin, known also as the love hormone, provokes feelings of contentment, calmness, and security, which are often associated with mate bonding. Vasopressin is linked to behaviour that produces long-term, monogamous relationships. The differences in behaviour associated with the actions of the two hormones may explain why passionate love fades as attachment grows.
In addition to the positive feelings romance brings, love also deactivates the neural pathway responsible for negative emotions, such as fear and social judgment. These positive and negative feelings involve two neurological pathways. The one linked with positive emotions connects the prefrontal cortex to the nucleus accumbens, while the other, which is linked with negative emotions, connects the nucleus accumbens to the amygdala. When we are engaged in romantic love, the neural machinery responsible for making critical assessments of other people, including assessments of those with whom we are romantically involved, shuts down. “That’s the neural basis for the ancient wisdom ‘love is blind’,” said Schwartz.
If love lasts, this rollercoaster of emotions, and, sometimes, angst, calms within one or two years, said Schwartz. “The passion is still there, but the stress of it is gone,” he added. Cortisol and serotonin levels return to normal. Love, which began as a stressor (to our brains and bodies, at least), becomes a buffer against stress. Brain areas associated with reward and pleasure are still activated as loving relationships proceed, but the constant craving and desire that are inherent in romantic love often lessen.
Many theories of love, said Schwartz and Olds, propose that there is an inevitable change over time from passionate love to what is typically called compassionate love—love that is deep but not as euphoric as that experienced during the early stages of romance. That does not, however, mean that the spark of romance is quenched for long-married couples.
A 2011 study conducted at Stony Brook University in New York state found that it is possible to be madly in love with someone after decades of marriage. The research team, which included Fisher, performed MRI scans on couples who had been married an average of 21 years. They found the same intensity of activity in dopamine-rich areas of the brains as found in the brains of couples who were newly in love. The study suggested that the excitement of romance can remain while the apprehension is lost.
“A state-of-the-art investigation of love has confirmed for the very first time that people are not lying when they say that after 10 to 30 years of marriage they are still madly in love with their partners,” said Schwartz. In the Stony Brook study, he added, the MRI scans showed that the pattern of activity in the participants’ dopamine reward systems was the same as that detected in the brains of participants in early-stage romantic love.
For those whose long-term marriage has transitioned from passionate, romantic love to a more compassionate, routine type of love, Olds indicated it is possible to rekindle the flame that characterised the relationship’s early days. “We call it the rustiness phenomenon,” she said. “Couples get out of the habit of sex, of being incredibly in love, and often for good reasons: work, children, a sick parent. But that type of love can be reignited.” Sexual activity, for example, can increase oxytocin levels and activate the brain’s reward circuit, making couples desire each other more.
That alone, she said, may be enough to bring some couples back to those earlier, exhilarating days, when all they could think about was their newfound love.
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