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First flush of love not emotional


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This is an oldie, but goodie.

When you first fall in love, you are not experiencing an emotion, but a motivation or drive, new brain scanning studies have shown.

The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.

The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Fisher and colleagues recruited seven male and 10 female volunteers who claimed to be madly in love. They asked them to look at pictures of either their loved one or another familiar person while inside a functional MRI scanner.

Eating chocolate

Early on in a relationship, the images showed that the brain seems to be very focused on planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward, says Fisher, mediated by regions called the right caudate nucleus and right ventral tegmentum. The same regions become active when a person enjoys the pleasure of eating chocolate, she adds.

There are also patterns that resemble aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder. "Activity in one particular area of the anterior cingulate cortex is in common," says Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who was part of the research team. "The activity is correlated with the length of a relationship, lasting just into the emotional stage."

There are some differences between love-struck men and women, says Fisher. Women in love show more emotional activity earlier on in a relationship. They also seem to quiz their memory regions as they look at pictures of their partner, perhaps paying more attention to their past experience with them.

For men, perhaps unsurprisingly, love looks a little more like lust, with extra activity in visual areas that mediate sexual arousal.

The team has since moved on to examining the final phase of romance. "We are now looking at people who have just been rejected," says Fisher. The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience's meeting in New Orleans on Tuesday.
sheamus

23 responses // First flush of love not emotional

  • I love the feeling of being in love!!! Where you feel light, you feel beautiful...where ever it comes from i wish the experience lasted longer!
    Azucena
  • Love is simply a neurochemical process, that's all. The same chemical effect can be achieved through cocaine, and possibly electroneural simulation in the future.
    Dmitri_Molotov
    1 response to this
  • I'm not in love i'm just high.
    regularrf
    3 responses to this
  • Haha. agreed.
    rekloess
  • Doesn't mass quantity of chocolate pretty much cause the same symptoms?
    eldamon
  • ya but the feeling of loving someone and having them love you back!I love chocolate and never will i do cocaine but love is different for me!!! like I said Im light, floating in a weird type of way!!! i just love it!
    Azucena
  • Very snazzy! Studies like this are always interesting to me.
    netsurfer
  • hopefully the love people share is cheaper than cocaine! Love is such a questionable thing, though...it's not as unconditional as the romantics claim it is. Look at the statistics of who people marry, and it makes it seem so methodical and unromantic. Perhaps it's just another carrot or pleasure unit in utilitarianism.
    achromatic
  • We can try to explain love scientifically as much as we like, but it is still unexplained. I disagree that love is like eating chocolate or taking drugs - it is far more deep and highly more complex than something as simple as ingestion.
    TyMarshal
  • There needs to be a new term...something that expresses what they are actually feeling. In Greek they have several words for different degrees of love. English, with all its words, only has one for love and it isn't used truthfully by the masses.
    J_Jammer
  • "The team has since moved on to examining the final phase of romance. 'We are now looking at people who have just been rejected,' says Fisher."

    Now THAT'S a study I'd like to see. I've read plenty about love as a sociological transaction and the chemical reasons for romance eventually ending, but I'd love to know what happens in the brain to cause near-hate feelings and vindictiveness against the person one was so recently infatuated with.
    jennatar
    1 response to this
  • You have the ability to not have the feeling of hate and vindictiveness against that person. In studying Buddhist philosophy I learned that most of the emotional reactions that we claim are caused by the actions of other are actually our own fault for letting ourselves think and feel that way. Now understanding that and not letting it happen are two different things. It is still very hard not to let yourself think or feel that way and it takes a lot of retraining ourselves and self discipline. One thing that helped me was to remember that we are all imperfect creatures.
    cedrickosborn
  • I've known people who claim to be in love but actually they're displaying signs of obsessive compulsive disorder!

    If the first flushes of love are similar to chocolate I wonder how the end of a relationship that they're now studying will compare? Brussel sprouts perhaps? Or boiled tofu?
    LindseyIndigo
  • to the person saying it can't be explained...

    Well we are after all just a walking bag of chemicals, some bags are nicer than others but, you get what I'm saying.

    There is no magic, it just Feels that way..

    I'm not sure i'd actually like to be the researcher, I imagine it would be like making movies, taking away from some of the "magic" of them...
    Owwmykneecap
  • Chemistry is magical.
    Vierotchka
    1 response to this
  • this is like a battle between ~knowledge is power~ and ~ignorance is bliss~

    Love could really just be a chemical reaction whose only evolutionary purpose is for procreation and gene protection purposes, but who wants to think that? It's so much nice to think it's more than that.
    achromatic
  • I actually prefer to think of it in terms of chemical reactions. Love as a feeling has a definition which might differ amongst people, but understanding love as a neurochemical process helps us to think about our feelings contextually, as they fit within the broad range of human emotions.
    sheamus

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