Love? It's all in your head
Kate Santich
Sentinel Staff Writer
February 14, 2006
Your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, you've lost your appetite and you couldn't sleep if you tried. You can think of only one thing. You're either:
A) addicted to cocaine or B) in love.
Actually, as far as your brain is concerned, it can be tough to tell.
Scientists who have spent time peering into the human noggin report that, in the early stages of romance, what goes on in our brains is startlingly similar to the effect of certain addictive drugs or even obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Thus the expression "madly in love" is closer to the truth than you might have realized.
"It is very much like a drug high," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has spent years studying the evolution and brain chemistry of lust, romance and attraction. "When you're madly in love, you think this person is more special than anyone else on Earth. You focus all your attention on them. You have personality changes. You're willing to take great risks to win the person's affection. And you have a tolerance level -- you see the person a couple of times a week at first, and that's OK for a while, and then you've got to see them every night."
There are also withdrawal symptoms of love -- the crying, the pining, the lethargy -- and there is the danger of relapse. Just when you think you're over your ex, you'll hear a favorite song you shared, and boom, you're swept up in the emotions again.
Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, conducted a study of people who had been intensely in love for up to 17 months. She and her colleagues questioned the subjects at length and then conducted functional magnetic-resonance imaging -- scans of their brains at work -- to map what happens when we mortals are struck by Cupid's arrow.
During the experiment, participants were shown a picture of their beloved and asked to recall a cherished memory. As a control, they were also shown photos of other friends and family and asked the same question.
As it turned out, romantic love acted like no single emotion -- not like fear or anger or joy. Instead, it activated the same regions associated with addiction. One is the ventral tegmental area, a group of neurons that, as Fisher explains, acts like "a tiny little factory near the base of the brain that actually makes dopamine" -- a chemical associated with pleasure and also released by eating and sex. A second affected region is the caudate nucleus, which consists of two shrimp-sized parts laden with dopamine receptors.
Together these regions are considered part of the brain's "reward system," which motivates you to focus intensely on something you want.
"The reward system is sort of the motor of the mind," Fisher says, "which made me realize that romantic love is not an emotion, but a drive -- and it's stronger than the sex drive. If you ask somebody to go to bed with you and they say no, you don't go killing yourself. But when you've been rejected in love, a certain number of people all over the world do kill themselves or somebody else."
Obviously, the drive for love can be stronger than the will to live.
But just as love itself is complicated, so too is its bodily manifestation. Italian researcher Donatella Marazziti, for instance, has linked high passion with low levels of serotonin in the blood -- much the same as in those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This, the theory goes, might help explain the singular-mindedness typical of the smitten.
Perhaps more curious, Marazziti and her co-workers also found that testosterone -- the hormone of masculinity, strength and libido -- actually increased in love-struck women but dropped in love-struck men.
But as any woman who has ever received a vacuum cleaner for an anniversary present can tell you, the phase of passionate, obsessive, romantic love is relatively short-lived. The average duration is about a year or two, after which dopamine levels drop. Of course, it would be quite stressful, not to mention impractical, to stay in that state of frenzied arousal forever.
Instead, when couples build a long and happy life together, their bodies begin to kick up production of another hormone -- oxytocin, the hormone of bonding -- which was first known to help induce labor and lactation. More recently, oxytocin was found to moonlight as a "cuddle hormone," and researchers discovered its production is particularly high during female orgasm.
At the University of Zurich in Switzerland, scientists found that administering oxytocin via nasal spray made subjects more trusting toward other humans.
In the big picture -- over the evolution of millions of years -- the combination of love's brain chemicals seems neatly designed to ensure survival of the species, Fisher says.
"I think the sex drive evolved just to get you out there looking for, really, a whole range of individuals," the anthropologist says. "And I think romantic love evolved to get you to focus your energy on just one at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy and conceiving a child. But once you've done that, it's not terribly adaptive to stay in that heightened, intense romance with your partner. You'd be better off to move on to that third stage of attachment so you can raise a child calmly together."
Source
Sentinel Staff Writer
February 14, 2006
Your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, you've lost your appetite and you couldn't sleep if you tried. You can think of only one thing. You're either:
A) addicted to cocaine or B) in love.
Actually, as far as your brain is concerned, it can be tough to tell.
Scientists who have spent time peering into the human noggin report that, in the early stages of romance, what goes on in our brains is startlingly similar to the effect of certain addictive drugs or even obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Thus the expression "madly in love" is closer to the truth than you might have realized.
"It is very much like a drug high," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has spent years studying the evolution and brain chemistry of lust, romance and attraction. "When you're madly in love, you think this person is more special than anyone else on Earth. You focus all your attention on them. You have personality changes. You're willing to take great risks to win the person's affection. And you have a tolerance level -- you see the person a couple of times a week at first, and that's OK for a while, and then you've got to see them every night."
There are also withdrawal symptoms of love -- the crying, the pining, the lethargy -- and there is the danger of relapse. Just when you think you're over your ex, you'll hear a favorite song you shared, and boom, you're swept up in the emotions again.
Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, conducted a study of people who had been intensely in love for up to 17 months. She and her colleagues questioned the subjects at length and then conducted functional magnetic-resonance imaging -- scans of their brains at work -- to map what happens when we mortals are struck by Cupid's arrow.
During the experiment, participants were shown a picture of their beloved and asked to recall a cherished memory. As a control, they were also shown photos of other friends and family and asked the same question.
As it turned out, romantic love acted like no single emotion -- not like fear or anger or joy. Instead, it activated the same regions associated with addiction. One is the ventral tegmental area, a group of neurons that, as Fisher explains, acts like "a tiny little factory near the base of the brain that actually makes dopamine" -- a chemical associated with pleasure and also released by eating and sex. A second affected region is the caudate nucleus, which consists of two shrimp-sized parts laden with dopamine receptors.
Together these regions are considered part of the brain's "reward system," which motivates you to focus intensely on something you want.
"The reward system is sort of the motor of the mind," Fisher says, "which made me realize that romantic love is not an emotion, but a drive -- and it's stronger than the sex drive. If you ask somebody to go to bed with you and they say no, you don't go killing yourself. But when you've been rejected in love, a certain number of people all over the world do kill themselves or somebody else."
Obviously, the drive for love can be stronger than the will to live.
But just as love itself is complicated, so too is its bodily manifestation. Italian researcher Donatella Marazziti, for instance, has linked high passion with low levels of serotonin in the blood -- much the same as in those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This, the theory goes, might help explain the singular-mindedness typical of the smitten.
Perhaps more curious, Marazziti and her co-workers also found that testosterone -- the hormone of masculinity, strength and libido -- actually increased in love-struck women but dropped in love-struck men.
But as any woman who has ever received a vacuum cleaner for an anniversary present can tell you, the phase of passionate, obsessive, romantic love is relatively short-lived. The average duration is about a year or two, after which dopamine levels drop. Of course, it would be quite stressful, not to mention impractical, to stay in that state of frenzied arousal forever.
Instead, when couples build a long and happy life together, their bodies begin to kick up production of another hormone -- oxytocin, the hormone of bonding -- which was first known to help induce labor and lactation. More recently, oxytocin was found to moonlight as a "cuddle hormone," and researchers discovered its production is particularly high during female orgasm.
At the University of Zurich in Switzerland, scientists found that administering oxytocin via nasal spray made subjects more trusting toward other humans.
In the big picture -- over the evolution of millions of years -- the combination of love's brain chemicals seems neatly designed to ensure survival of the species, Fisher says.
"I think the sex drive evolved just to get you out there looking for, really, a whole range of individuals," the anthropologist says. "And I think romantic love evolved to get you to focus your energy on just one at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy and conceiving a child. But once you've done that, it's not terribly adaptive to stay in that heightened, intense romance with your partner. You'd be better off to move on to that third stage of attachment so you can raise a child calmly together."
Source