Researchers from New York and New Jersey have found out that signs and signals of love can be seen in the human brain. These neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of the fevered activity that the brain exhibits at a time when a person is in love.
Scientists have now recognized the fact that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal. They assert that its neural profile matches the drives like hunger, thirst or craving for narcotic drugs. And as you get deeper into the relationship, the neural activity associated with romantic love undergoes some changes in the deep areas of the brain that are associated with long-term attachment.
Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis, says, "When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there. And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."
This analysis seeks to explain why love produces a variety of emotions in people. In the present study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, analyzed 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who had reported that they were in the first stages of romance.
Researchers conducted the M.R.I scan while these students looked at the picture of their current romantic interest and then contrasted this with the M.R.I taken while they looked at the photo of any acquaintance. The technology in the functional M.R.I detects changes in the amount of blood that flows to the brain. This in turn reflects changes in neural activity.
Researchers then produced a computer-generated map, which showed hot spots deep in the brain. These areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area are located deep in the brain and are rich in cells that produce a brain chemical called dopamine. Dopamine increases in the brain when people desire any reward.
But critics say that brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds and that a phenomenon as diverse as love cannot be mapped on simple computer graphics, Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, says, "I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love. The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."
Details of this analysis are available in today's issue of The Journal of Neurophysiology.
