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Feb 10, 2023 · Even your love for a passion such as running, biking, knitting, or enjoying nature evokes activation of the brain’s angular gyrus, a region involved in a number of processes related to language, number processing, spatial cognition, memory retrieval, and attention, according to a study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, led by Cacioppo.
Feb 14, 2024 · Love may not be a choice. It may just be your brain on autopilot intoxicated by the love potion. That’s according to Tom Sherman, a neuroendocrinologist and professor in Georgetown’s School of Medicine who studies the endocrine system and how hormones shape human physiology and behavior. “Falling in love is a fascinating phenomenon ...
Sep 30, 2024 · Love in the Brain: Stages and Effects. Love, like a fine wine, changes and evolves over time. Neuroscientists have identified three distinct stages of romantic love, each characterized by unique brain activity and chemical processes. Stage 1: Lust. Ah, lust – the spark that often ignites the flame of love.
- Overview
- Where in the brain is love?
- How does love affect our minds?
- Does love change everything?
- Do love and desire overlap?
- Can we control love?
- The trouble with love science
Anecdotally, love is a matter of the heart. However, the main organ affected by love is actually the brain. Where is love “located” in the brain, and what does it do to our minds and bodies, according to science? We investigate.
Butterflies in your stomach. That giddy feeling you get when the person you like is nearby. Excitement to be around them again. All of these feelings will be familiar to people who have fallen in love.
However, love itself remains largely a mystery. Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we stay in love, and what makes us fall out of love?
Some of these questions remain unanswered, and researchers from a range of disciplines are still grappling with what makes love … well, love.
Still, scientists have been working for decades to understand the mechanics of love, including how it expresses in the brain and how it “makes us tick.”
So, while we may not yet know everything about this deeply human experience, we do have some good pointers — about its neurobiological underpinnings, at least.
This is the main question that scientists have striven to answer.
In 2000, Prof. Semir Zeki from University College London (UCL), in the United Kingdom, and Dr. Andreas Bartels formerly of UCL, now at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, set out to find out. They conducted a study with 17 healthy volunteers — both males and females, aged 21–37 — who reported being “truly, deeply, and madly in love” with someone.
In their study — the findings of which they explained in the journal NeuroReport — Prof. Zeki and Dr. Bartels conducted brain scans of the volunteers while they viewed images of their significant others.
The scans revealed that when the participants gazed at the face of the person they were in love with, some specific brain areas “lit up.” Those were the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and segments of the dorsal striatum.
However, there were also some brain regions that appeared to deactivate. These included parts of the right prefrontal cortex, the bilateral parietal cortex, and the temporal cortices.
Further research revealed an even more complex picture of romantic love in the brain.
There are some hypotheses, however, that correlate the activation and deactivation of certain brain areas with specific behaviors and attitudes associated with romantic love.
Prof. Zeki, for instance, explained, in the 2007 commentary, that romantic love activates “brain regions that contain high concentrations of a neuromodulator that is associated with reward, desire, addiction, and euphoric states, namely dopamine.”
This is why, he suggested, people in love get a constant “high” — because dopamine makes us want to bond with others and strengthen existing bonds.
However, he added that when dopamine levels go up, levels of another brain chemical, called serotonin, decrease. This chemical messenger “is linked to appetite and mood,” said Prof. Zeki.
This change may explain why people in love tend to fixate on the object of their affection, perhaps leading them to think of very little else.
People in the early stages of romantic love may experience “a depletion of serotonin […] to levels that are common in [people] with obsessive-compulsive disorders,” noted Prof. Zeki.
Two related studies conducted by Dr. Phillip Sean Kavanagh, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Canberra, in Australia, and Adam Bode, a doctoral researcher in the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology, also looked at why the people we fall in love with tend to become the center of our world.
Their findings — reported in Behavioral Sciences in November 2023 — suggest that, when we are in love, our brains really see the person we have fallen for as the most important person in the world.
The researchers analyzed self-reported data from 1,556 young adults who identified as being in love to see how they reacted to, and behaved in relation to the objects of their affection.
They then validated the statistical significance of their findings in a subset of 812 partnered young adults who had been experiencing romantic love for up to 2 years.
The conclusion? Love makes us perceive things differently, and it also alters the way that we behave in the world. Like Prof. Zeki, Dr. Kavanagh believes that these changes are explained by the interaction of neurochemicals associated with the experience of love.
“We know the role that oxytocin plays in romantic love, because we get waves of it circulating throughout our nervous system and blood stream when we interact with loved ones,” said Dr. Kavanagh in a press release.
When we think about romantic love, many of us also think about sexual desire. For numerous couples, love and sex go together. But do love and sex also “switch on” the same areas of the brain?
According to psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo — currently of the University of Chicago in Illinois — there is some overlap between romantic love and sexual desire.
In a paper she co-authored in 2012, she and her colleagues pointed out that when someone sees a picture of someone they find sexually arousing, some of the same brain areas activated by romantic affection also become active.
These areas, which include the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, are also those involved in human reward circuitry. This reinforces behaviors that allow the species to survive, such as eating and drinking.
However, other researchers point out that love and desire, though they do overlap in the brain, do not do so all the way.
Also in 2012, researchers from Concordia University in Quebec, Canada, conducted a review of the studies that had aimed to “map” the location of romantic love versus sexual drive in the brain.
Because love is such a complex, and often surprising, experience, there is some question as to whether or not people are able to control it.
In 2016, Dr. Langeslag and colleagues turned their attention to precisely this topic. Working with a group of 32 participants, all aged 18–30 and all in love, the researchers aimed to assess whether or not these individuals were able to exert any control over their feelings.
Dr. Langeslag told us that “some people think that love is a natural process that shouldn’t be controlled, or that love regulation is very difficult or even impossible.”
“[H]owever,” she added, “people are actually able increase or decrease their love feelings for someone.” How? The answer, she explained, is actually fairly simple:
“If you want to decrease your feelings of love for someone, you should think about his or her negative qualities (e.g. he never puts his socks in the hamper) and the negative qualities of your relationship (e.g. we often fight). You could also imagine negative future scenarios (e.g. he’ll cheat on me).”
“Negative thoughts like these will decrease infatuation (i.e., passionate love) and attachment (i.e., companionate love),” Dr. Langeslag explained.
Despite all the available research about love and how it expresses in the human brain, much remains unknown. This is because studying love can be a difficult task.
One reason for this is that there appears to be more than just one type of romantic love — or, to be precise, more than one type of emotion and experience associated with romantic love.
“In my research, I assume that there are at least three different types of love: sexual desire, infatuation (or passionate love), and attachment (or companionate love),” Dr. Langeslag explained to MNT.
Then, there is a question about the extent to which humans and other animals share the same experiences of love or attraction.
“Animals mate, so they must have some form of sexual desire. Some animals also form pair bonds, so they must experience some form of attachment,” Dr. Langeslag told us.
“By studying those animals in those situations, we have learned quite a bit about the neural basis of sexual desire and attachment. However, I don’t know if animals experience infatuation, or how we would be able to tell when they do,” she 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.
Sep 28, 2023 · Love's Lasting Legacy: Long-term Effects on the Brain and Relationships. The neurological changes in the brain when we fall in love aren't just a temporary effect. Experiencing love, particularly romantic love, can have powerful long-term effects on the brain. Stronger bonding: The chemical changes we experience when we fall in love promote ...
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Oct 28, 2024 · You love from the depths of your ventral tegmental area, your hypothalamus, your nucleus accumbens, and other vital areas of the brain. In the last two decades, scientists have joined the throngs of poets, philosophers, artists, and others striving to comprehend the ways of love. Scientific techniques for exploring how the brain experiences ...
