Rewires the brain
Poets were once the recognised authorities on matters of the heart, but nowadays scientists have plenty to tell us about the topic – and they’re learning more all the time by deploying technology to study people swept up in various forms and stages of love.
It turns out that the brain’s grey matter – not the heart – is where all the action is. As we develop feelings toward someone, researchers have discovered, our brains fire off rounds of chemicals that make us feel all that passion, angst and desire. These hormones and neurotransmitters shape our behaviours and choices, driving important life decisions.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher, a trailblazer in the science-of-love field, published the results of a study in which she and her research team scanned the brains of 17 people aged 18 to 26 viewing pictures of those with whom they were in love. The team compared these images with scans done while participants looked at photos of mere acquaintances. When they viewed pictures of their lovers, the subjects registered peaks of activity in the ventral tegmental, a tiny and evolutionarily ancient area that’s central to the brain’s reward system. Because it’s rich in the neurotransmitter dopamine, this area makes us crave pleasurable things like food and sex, even drugs.
For this reason, the feelings that arise after rejection are similar to what people feel when they’re trying to break a drug addiction. When researchers scanned the brains of people who’d just endured a breakup, they found that the ventral tegmental area was still active and awaiting a fix. Fisher has called love “one of the most addictive substances on Earth.”
The type of love associated with long-term relationships – what researchers have come to think of as compassionate love – can be just as powerful as freshly blooming romantic love. In a 2011 study, Fisher and her colleagues looked at brain scans of couples who had been married for an average of 21 years and found similar activation in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with intense romantic love.
The most significant conclusion? There’s a reason we pine for love: we need it in order to thrive. If we’re deprived of meaningful relationships, our health will decline. Fisher and her colleagues conclude that love is less of an emotion and more of a drive that’s deeply embedded in our beings.
The secret to maintaining a strong relationship is to continually rebuild and enhance love. There are many ways to keep the spark alive via touch and other forms of contact. Try also to open up more to your partner – revealing deep, personal thoughts and feelings is an act of intimacy, and couples who disclose more emotional information maintain higher levels of intimacy.
Neuroscience explains how love affects our behaviour and – surprise! – the emotion doesn’t reside in our heart
after all, but the reward centre of our mind.