Safeguarding Your Love Life – Part 6
The Brain On Love
To better understand what happens in the brain when we are in love, anthropologist Helen Fisher and fellow researchers gathered thirty-seven people who were madly in love and scanned their brains with a functional MRI brain scanner. The researchers were curious to find out what, if anything, the brain might divulge. Would they detect any unique activity connected with romantic love? Might the brain reveal the secrets to romance?
Of the thirty-seven subjects the researchers examined, seventeen were happily in love. Fifteen had just been dumped, and the remaining reported that they were still happily in love after 10-25 years of marriage. Upon examining the brains of those happily in love, the researchers noticed increased activity in a small factory near the base of the brain known as the ventral tegmental area (or, VTA.) Specifically, the researchers noticed activity in the A-10 cells – the cells that make dopamine and spray it to many brain regions. This dopamine spraying mechanism is part of the brain’s reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter– a natural stimulant
The rush of romantic love, however, is far more complex than a cocaine high, Fisher explains. A cocaine high wears off. One comes down from it. But romantic love is not so easily predicted or measured. It takes hold of a person. One loses their sense of self. You can’t stop thinking about the person you love. You become obsessed. You are, for all intents and purposes, possessed. And paradoxically, perhaps even cruelly, the obsession actually intensifies when you need it to stop the most – when you have been rejected.
The second area of the brain the researchers found activity in among those who had been dumped was in the region associated with calculating gains and losses– an area in the core of the nucleus accumbens. This is the area of the brain that becomes active when you are prepared to take enormous risks for huge gains. The third area the researchers observed activity in was in the region associated with deep attachment to another individual. Given all this, Fisher notes empathically in her TED video address1, “No wonder people suffer around the world, and we have so many crimes of passion. When you’ve been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you are feeling deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is working, and you’re feeling intense energy, focus, motivation, and the willingness to risk it all to win life’s greatest prize.”
____________________________________
1https://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html