brain on love

there are a few scientific studies that have linked the brain with love and attachment & so it seems that the heart is not the only organ involved in your relationships.  I’ve been helping a friend Giorgio Ungani to organize TEDx Dubai and have now developed an overactive interest in the mind & brain as a side effect.  So I thought I’d list some of the studies results in this post.  If you are interested in helping out please follow on Twitter @tedxdubai or post a short video on 12secondstv or else contact Giorgio with your ideas.

“The brain is the only part of the human machine that doesn’t wear out. Probably it’s because the brain is the only part that is not overworked.” Unknown

In a BBC News article How the brain registers love

The researchers at University College London took two brain scans of 17 male and female volunteers. The first was taken while the subject was looking at a picture of their partner with whom they claimed to be “head over heels in love”.  The second scan was taken as the volunteer looked at a picture of a friend who was the same sex as their loved one. Dr Andreas Bartels said that looking at pictures of the partner produced activity in two distinct areas of the brain that looking at the friend did not.  These were in the medial insula, a part of the brain associated with “gut feelings”, and part of the anterior cingulate, associated with feelings of euphoria. Dr Bartels said: “It’s not surprising that we got a response in this particular part of the brain.”   The team used a lie detector test as a way of checking the emotions of the participants – lie detectors are triggered by skin changes caused by strong emotions.

“Your Design mind (right brain) attends to the melody of life, whereas your Sign mind (left brain) attends to the notes that compose the melodies. And here is the key to natural writing: the melodies must come first.” Gabriele Lusser Rico

“The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of. “Charles H. Perkhurst

In the New York Times I found an older article called Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain By Benedict Carey:

In the 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, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.  In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.  These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.  This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, “is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don’t think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized,” Dr. Brown said.

“Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.” Edward De Bono

More recently in the LA Times Dear, I love you with all my brain: Dopamine brings people together and oxytocin keeps them attached, studies show. Is love just chemistry? by Judy Foreman:

In the initial love study at Stony Brook, 10 women and seven men in intense, “early-stage” love were put into a functional MRI brain scanner, which can detect activity in specific parts of the brain. They were then shown pictures of their loved one or a neutral person.  In these lovebirds, one dopamine-rich region in particular — the ventral tegmental area — consistently lighted up upon viewing the loved one, but not the neutral person, according to the research, published in 2005. The intensity of the brain’s response to falling in love, says co-author Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, suggests that it “is not just an emotion but a drive, a real goal like food or water.”

In new data presented at scientific meetings in 2008 and 2009, Bianca Acevedo, now a post-doctoral fellow in social neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara but formerly at Stony Brook, focused on 10 women and seven men still in love after 21 years of marriage. Like the young lovers, when these volunteers were put in scanners and shown pictures of their partners, their dopamine-rich areas lighted up.  “But in contrast to those newly in love,” Acevedo says, other brain regions did too, including areas rich in oxytocin, vasopressin (a similar chemical) and serotonin, a brain chemical associated with well-being and calmness.

The link between long-term attachment and oxytocin has long fascinated researchers, among them, Sue Carter, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Carter’s work has centered on prairie voles, known for their enduring bonds. Compared with other rodents, prairie voles — part of the only 3% of mammals that form monogamous bonds — have more active oxytocin. Moreover, brain cells with receptors that specifically latch onto oxytocin lie in the very brain regions believed to be important in forming attachments, Carter says.

Other researchers have shown that when mice (not known for their monogamous ways), are injected with a gene containing instructions for making the receptor of oxytocin, the mice cozy up to their mates like voles.  Lack of oxytocin is important too. For instance, if female animals are stressed by being isolated, their oxytocin drops. In humans, Emory University research shows that women who were seriously abused as children have low oxytocin levels as adults.

“A girl with brains ought to do something with them besides think.” Anita Loos

From MSNBC in an article titled How your brain handles love and pain: Scanners reveal mechanisms behind empathy and placebo effect by Daniel Kane some fotos of the brain areas:

Functional brain imaging shows that some of the same regions of the brain are activated by personal pain, at left, and by empathy over the pain of a loved one, at right. But other areas are not activated by empathy.

I would like to leave you with a very funny video Tale of Two Brains by Mark Gungor.  Enjoy…

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