Love is a many-splendored...mental illness?
From the Anderson Cooper 360° Blog
Posted By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Correspondent: February 14, 2006, 4:34 PM
I want to say first and foremost that I am a romantic. I really am. I am a scientist as well, however. So, I decided to do a little research into the science of love. It is worth investigating, after all, especially on Valentine's Day. It is an emotion for sure, but what exactly makes it so powerful?
It turns out Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, decided to put it to the test. She found 17 people who were madly in love and scanned their brains while they were looking at a picture of their sweetheart. She wanted to find out what happens in the brain when someone experiences intense feelings of love.
What she found is that there is no separate "love" part of the brain. Instead, the reward/pleasure part of the brain lights up strongly, just like it does when someone eats chocolate or when an addict gets a fix.
If that doesn't take all the poetry out of love, consider this: Serotonin levels were 40 percent lower in lovebirds, just as they are in those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. So, according to Brown and her two fellow researchers, Art Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook University in New York and anthropologist Helen Fisher, love is a motivation bordering on mental illness.
And it gets worse. It is predictable that the dopamine-drenched craze that fuels intense love will wear out; sometimes over days, sometimes over years.
But remember, I am a romantic. So in this one case, I will dispense with science and just follow my heart. I will buy flowers for my wife and take her out to a nice dinner. Sometimes, it is better not to know all that is going on in our brains at any given time.