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The Brain In Love
Note: If you’re too lazy to read the whole thing, the parts that are in bold are all you need.
So, right now, Lucy Brown and I, the neuroscientist on our project,are looking at the data of the people who were put into the [MRI] after they had just been dumped… So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. We found activity in the brain region, in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love. What a bad deal. You know, when you’ve been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life — but no, you just love them harder. As the poet Terence, the Roman poet once said, he said, “The less my hope, the hotter my love.” And indeed, we now know why. Two thousand years later, we can explain this in the brain. That brain system — the reward systemfor wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus — becomes more active when you can’t get what you want. In this case, life’s greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner.
We found activity in other brain regions also — in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses. You know, you’re lying there, you’re looking at the picture, and you’re in this machine, and you’re calculating, you know, what went wrong. How, you know, what have I lost? As a matter of fact, Lucy and I have a little joke about this. It comes from a David Mamet play, and there’s two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, ”Oh, you’re a bad pony, I’m not going to bet on you.” And indeed, it’s this part of the brain, the core of the nucleus accumbens, actually, that is becoming active as you’re measuring your gains and losses. It’s also the brain region that becomes active when you’re willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses.
Last but not least, we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. No wonder people suffer around the world, and we have so many crimes of passion. When you’ve been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you’re feeling deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is working, and you’re feeling intense energy, intense focus, intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all to win life’s greatest prize.
So, what have I learned from this experiment that I would like to tell the world? Foremost, I have come to think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive. Not the sex drive — the sex drive gets you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual. I think of all the poetry that I’ve read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato, over 2,000 years ago. He said, “The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.” I’ve also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going poorly.
And indeed, it has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it’s got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more, and more, and more; withdrawals; and last, relapse. I’ve got a girlfriend who’s just getting over a terrible love affair. It’s been about eight months, she’s beginning to feel better. And she was driving along in her car the other day, and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man. And she — not only did the instant craving come back, but she had to pull over from the side of the road and cry. So, one thing I would like the medical community, and the legal community, and even the college community, to see if they can understand, that indeed, romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.
-Helen Fisher
I find it fascinating and comforting that the way I feel right now can be perfectly explained by science.
The text above comes from a TED talk given by Anthropologist Helen Fisher. I like that her approach is both scientific and romantic. After all of her studies she still says that love is magic. I think that’s beautiful. The quote, “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all” is one that she does not use in her speech, but I find it very fitting at the moment.
Watch the talk below.
