Feb 14, 2020 (elemental.medium.com)
Science reveals that love is not just a human emotion, but a biological need in the brain (and yes, it can make you feel high)
Love is a feeling often associated with extreme hyperbole: It makes you blind, drives you mad, some even say it feels like being on drugs. It’s not surprising that one of the most intense human emotions is given such dramatic associations. What is surprising is that some of them may not be so exaggerated after all.
Over the past 15 years, scientists and anthropologists have made significant advances in understanding the ways feelings of romantic love affect the brain. What they’ve found so far manages to put scientific merit behind the centuries of folklore.
One of the most notable breakthroughs was found during a 2005 study conducted by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, PhD, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. In this study, Fisher produced the first functional MRI images of the brains of people in love.
“Hunger and thirst keep you alive today; romantic love begins the mating process and eventually sends your DNA into tomorrow.”
When Fisher put people in the study in a brain scanner, she found that they all experienced activity in a particular brain region called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a part of the brain that produces the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. The VTA is also a crucial component of the brain’s reward system, a collection of brain regions and pathways that are activated when exposed to rewarding stimuli.
“What’s interesting to me is that the VTA lies right next to the part of the brain that orchestrates thirst and hunger, both of which keep you alive,” says Fisher. This close proximity led her to classify romantic love as a basic human need rather than an emotion.
“There are a lot of emotions attached to romantic love, but the focus, motivation, craving, and energy that come from the VTA and this dopamine system is a survival mechanism,” she says. “Hunger and thirst keep you alive today; romantic love begins the mating process and eventually sends your DNA into tomorrow.”
Fisher theorizes that humans have evolved three distinctly different brain systems that contribute to mating and reproduction: lust (sex drive), romantic love, and attachment. According to Fisher, these three systems can operate independently or together.
For example, when you develop a companionate type of love with someone like a family member or a close friend, it’s possible for the attachment brain system to activate without also spurring feelings of lust or romantic love.
It’s when the three systems operate in tandem that you experience the all-consuming type of love. Romantic attraction sparks activity in the VTA, increasing dopamine production. Dopamine promotes high levels of testosterone, fueling the sex drive. And during sex, the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin are released, triggering feelings of attachment.
While love sends parts of the brain into overdrive, it can also slow down activity in other areas. “When you’re happily in love, brain regions in the front of the head, in the prefrontal cortex, begin to deactivate,” says Fisher. This is the part of the brain best known for providing executive functions like decision making, impulse control, and acting with long-term goals in mind.
Fisher also points out that people are biologically wired to remember negative experiences over positive ones. However, when you’re falling in love, activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — the brain region linked with negativity bias — also reduces. “You’re able to overlook what you don’t like about this potential partner and focus on what you do,” she says.
Scientists have also found that love’s effect on the brain can really make a person feel high. Cocaine, marijuana, heroin, MDMA, and alcohol all work in a similar way to romantic love, by boosting feel-good dopamine levels and activating the brain’s reward system.
The manic, obsessive feelings of love are most common in early stages. As infatuation evolves into long-term love, the brain is eventually able to gain back some control. How exactly it does this is an area that has yet to be thoroughly studied, says Bianca Acevedo, PhD, a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But experts speculate it could be connected to hedonic adaptation, a human tendency to return to a relatively stable state despite major positive or negative life changes.
Although the “butterflies” eventually go away, long-term love does not fade into nothing. In fact, far from it. In a 2011 study, Acevedo and Arthur Aron, PhD, a research professor at Stony Brook University, compared the brain activity of people who had recently fallen in love to the brain activity of people who reported being happily in love for an average of 21 years.
When the latter group was shown images of their partner, scientists saw the same activation in the dopamine-rich areas of the brain as the couples who reported being newly in love. This suggests that the feel-good effects of love can be sustained even after the brain adapts to a new love phase.
The verdict is still out on exactly what keeps some couples happy for so long, but Acevedo believes one key component is regular sex. “From looking at the activation related to sexual satisfaction and frequency, we’re pretty certain that satisfying sex plays a significant role in the maintenance of romantic love,” she says.
In the end, it all links back to Fisher’s three systems. Once you reboot the sex drive, feelings of romantic love and attachment are also likely to kick into action. With these three systems back in play, even couples who’ve been together for decades can begin to feel newly in love all over again.