One of life’s toughest questions to answer is “What is love?”
Childhood games such as “He loves me, he loves me not” set the
parameters for us to become infatuated with the validation of love, but
even after saying “I love you” to a person, we may still not understand
the profound meaning of the sentiment. According to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,
activity in regions of the brain associated with reward, motivation,
emotion, and social functioning are highest when we are in love.
The most powerful human emotion that can be experienced is actually
seldom understood. The unnerving urge to grasp it led the term “What is
love” to be the most searched phrase
on Google in 2012. Psychologists have defined it as a state that is
different from familial or friendship love with the desire to enter or
maintain a close relationship with a specific other person, but what
happens biologically?
Love is known to have a variety of effects on the body that lead to
feelings of euphoria, craving, obsession, and even personality changes.
During instant attraction,
the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex — the area that judges
attractiveness in milliseconds — is immediately activated, setting off a
chain of reactions in the brain. However, how exactly does the brain
activity of those in love compare to others?
Professor Xiaochu Zhang, leader of the study at the University of
Science and Technology of China, and researchers from Southwest
University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and from
the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, N.Y., sought to see how
exactly romantic love affects the functional architecture of the brain. A
total of 100 men and women, divided into three groups — those who were
intensely in love, recently ended a romantic relationship, or single and
never had a romance — underwent a brain scan. There were no significant
differences found in age, education, or income.
The brain activity of all the participants was investigated using
resting state fMRI while they weren’t thinking about anything. This was
done to help scientists get the overall picture of their functional
architecture. The brain map found a variety of results among the three
groups.
The findings revealed, compared to other groups, those within the
in-love group had more increased activity across several brain regions
involved in reward, motivation, emotion, an social functioning.
Moreover, the researchers found the longer they had been in love, the
greater the brain activity seen. Those in the ended-love group were more
likely to show a lower amount of activity detected in these areas of
the brain.
“This study provides first empirical evidence of love-related
alterations in brain functional architecture. Furthermore, the results
shed light on the underlying neural mechanisms of romantic love, and
demonstrate the possibility of applying a resting-state fMRI approach
for investigating romantic love,” wrote the researchers. This suggests
love may influence dispersive brain networks during general state as
well as the social cognition brain networks.
Falling in love is such an easy thing to do, but such a hard thing to understand — even for neurologists.
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