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Scanning Love (Part One)
By Anusheh Hussain - 5:59 PM Wednesday 19 April 2006
Found a really interesting study on how the brain loves to love. Am re-producing it verbatim.
"In a study published in 2002, anthropologist Helen Fisher PhD of Rutgers University and a multi-disciplinary team of experts recruited 40 young people madly in love - half with love returned, the other half with love rejected - and put them into an MRI with a photo of their sweetheart and one of an acquaintance. Each subject looked at the sweetheart photo for 30 seconds, then - after a diversion task - at the acquaintance photo for another 30 seconds. They switched back and forth for 12 minutes. The result was a revealing photo album of the brain in love.
Think like a brain scientist and you too would be excited by activity in the right ventral tegmental area. This is the part of the brain where dopamine cells project into other areas of the brain, including the posterior dorsal caudate and its tail, both which are central to the brain’s system for reward and motivation. The sweetheart photos, but not the acquaintance photos, were the cause. In addition, several parts of the prefrontal cortex that are highly wired in the dopamine pathways were mobilized, while the amygdala, associated with fear, was temporarily mothballed.
When Love Blossoms
Romantic love, Dr Fisher explained in a lecture at the 2004 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting, is not an emotion. Rather, it’s "a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain." It’s a need that compels the lover to seek a specific mating partner. Then the brain links this drive to all kinds of specific emotions depending on how the relationship is going. All the while, she went on to say, the prefrontal cortex is assembling data, putting information into patterns, making strategies, and monitoring the progress toward "life’s greatest prize."
Love also hurts. Dr Fisher cited one recent study where 40 percent of people who had been dumped by their partner in the previous eight weeks experienced clinical depression and 12 percent severe depression. It is estimated that 50 to 70 percent of female homicides are committed by lovers and spouses. Annually one million women and 400,000 men are stalked.
Dr Fisher divides love into three categories involving different brain systems: 1) Lust (the craving for sexual gratification), driven by androgens and estrogens; 2) Attraction (or romantic or passionate love, characterized by euphoria when things are going well, terrible mood swings when they’re not, focused attention, obsessive thinking, and intense craving for the individual), driven by high dopamine and norepinephrine levels and low serotonin; and 3) Attachment (the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner) driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.
"I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there to get looking for anything at all," she told her audience. Romantic love, she thinks, developed to focus one’s mating energy on just one individual while attachment works to tolerate this individual long enough to raise children as a team.
These systems are also connected. "Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with," she half-jokingly tells her students, "because indeed you may do just that." Testosterone can kickstart the two love neurotransmitters while an orgasm can elevate the attachment hormones. But the brain systems remained separate units, probably to allow each partner to cheat on the other. This would have enhanced Alley Oop’s chances of transmitting his genes. A philandering Clan of the Cave Bear babe, meanwhile, would have had an insurance policy had her main squeeze ended up as a baby mastodon’s throw toy.
Romantic love, Dr Fisher believes, is a stronger craving than sex. People who don’t get sex don’t kill themselves, she said. On the other hand, it is not adaptive to be romantically in love for 20 years. "First of all," she confided, "we would all die of sexual exhaustion." Not surprisingly, the subjects in her study who had been in love the longest (17 months) displayed markers in the brain indicating the beginnings of "the satiation response."
In a related undertaking, Dr Fisher found evidence that romantic love exists in 150 societies, even though it is discouraged in many of them. But with many women from these countries now entering the workforce and acquiring a sense of independence - together with medical science keeping us relatively younger longer - we can expect to see romantic love on the rise worldwide, she predicted..Bring it on.
When Love Fades
High levels of oxytocin and vasopressin may interfere with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways, Dr Fisher explained in the same talk, which may explain why attachment grows as mad passionate love fades. The antidote may be doing novel things together to goose the two love neurotransmitters.
Meanwhile, elevated testosterone can suppress oxytocin and vasopressin. There is good evidence, Dr Fisher said, that men with higher testosterone levels tend to marry less often, be more abusive in their marriage, and divorce more regularly. The reverse can also be true. If a man holds a baby, levels of testosterone go down, perhaps in part because of oxytocin and vasopressin going up.
In a 54-item questionnaire Dr Fisher prepared for 430 Americans and 420 Japanese, 95 percent responded yes to the question, "Have you ever been dumped by someone you really love?" An equal number also dumped someone who really loved them. Getting dumped makes you love the person harder, Dr Fisher noted, a term she calls "frustration attraction."
Psychologists also refer to "abandonment rage" and "frustration depression," which may paradoxically work to hasten the relationship’s end. Then comes resignation and despair, where the brain’s reward system begins to realize the you are never going to get what you want. Despair may seem counterproductive, but it is in essence "a failure of denial" that allows us to see the world for what it is and sets us on the road to finding a more suitable partner.
Gender Differences
Although the brain images of the men and women in Dr Fisher’s study were basically the same, she and her colleagues did find activity in men in a region of the parietal of the temporal lobe associated with the integration of visual stimuli. Ninety percent of pornography is for men while women spend their lives trying to look good for them, Dr Fisher explained. The Darwinian explanation is that the studs of Leakey Land picked their partners by sizing them up visually.
In women, there was more activity in regions associated with memory recall. From an evolutionary perspective, looks probably weren’t enough to determine if a prospective mate would be a good provider and protector. The belle of the Great Rift Valley needed to remember what that suave suitor with the sexy brow ridge grunted yesterday and promised two months ago." (to be continued)
Posted By Anusheh Hussain - 5:59 PM Wednesday 19 April 2006
Comments
Hi Ray
I guess it's something like that perennial question "I think therefore I am.....or I am therefore I think" Personally I'm all for the mystery of life, believing like you that science needs to acknowledge that which is mysterious or 'spiritual' in nature, for it to be holistic and carry depth. Having said that I appreciate the bits of mystery that it does manage to unravel;-)
Posted by
Dear Anusheh
A small question. Can you make a little clear 'frustration attraction'? Does it mean if I really love somebody and I have been dumped by him, I will feel more attracted to him? But then how the 'failure of denial' will help me to find a more suitable partner?
Love
Buas
Posted by
Dear Buas
Yes, sort of. What the Dr is trying to say is that human beings by nature are desire focussed. When that desire is not met - in this case attraction to another - then they want it even more. A little like when you a child wants an ice cream and doesnt get it the desire for the ice cream gets stronger than it was in the first place. The Dr. goes on to say that when we dont get what we want then that desire eventually becomes tiresome and we begin to look around to find someone more suitable...i.e. more likely to be attracted to us as well.
Hope that makes it clearer:-)
love
Posted by
Perhaps, the older generation was much luckier when it comes to romance and passion. Not in terms of finding love but in terms of experiencing it. Of course books/visuals /music, they all can lie, especially if it is about love. At least it wasn’t so complicated:) These days I see a lot of friends (in their 20s/30s) remain single not that they can’t find love, but they refuse to fall in love with some one who is not so ‘established’....
Talking of attraction, I had this friend who used to always get attracted to those she knew she would never get and it drove her crazy. Last year I was told it was some sort of illness..
Talking of romance, as a little girl, I used be very fond of an aunt. This aunt of mine used to listen to old romantic Malayalam songs almost every evening. Whenever I was with her my job was to sit next to the tape recorder and rewind her favorite songs and play it again and again. I used to be so proud of that job and became an expert in winding and rewinding tapes at that young age... But now when I hear those songs I can’t stop crying. She married someone else....
Posted by
While all this talk about love, attraction, frustration etc is going on I thought of sharing this joke about what happens when love is lost. Enjoy :)
An Ex-Wife's Revenge
She spent the first day packing her belongings into boxes, crates and suitcases.
On the second day, she had the movers come and collect her things.
On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their beautiful dining room table by candlelight, put on some soft background music
and feasted on a pound of shrimp, a jar of caviar and a bottle of Chardonnay.
When she had finished, she went into each and every room and deposited a few half-eaten shrimp dipped in caviar, into the hollow of the
curtain rods.
She then cleaned up the kitchen and left.
When the husband returned with his new girlfriend, all was bliss for the first few days. Then slowly, the house began to smell. They tried everything; cleaning, mopping and airing the place out.
Vents were checked for dead rodents and carpets were steamed. Air Fresheners were hung everywhere. Exterminators were brought in to set
off gas canisters,during which they had to move out for a few days, and in the end even paid to replace the expensive wool carpeting.
Nothing worked. People stopped coming over to visit. Repairmen refused to work in the house. The maid quit.
Finally, they could not take the stench any longer and decided to move.
A month later, even though they had cut their price in half, they could not find a buyer for their stinky house. Word got out and eventually even the local realtors refused to return their calls.
Finally, they had to borrow a huge sum of money from the bank to purchase a new place.
The ex-wife called the man and asked how things were going. He told her the saga of the rotting house. She listened politely and said that
she missed her old home terribly, and would be willing to reduce her divorce settlement in exchange for getting the house back.
Knowing his ex-wife had no idea how bad t he smell was, he agreed on a price that was about 1/10th of what the house had been worth, but only
if she were to sign the papers that very day.
She agreed and within the hour his lawyers delivered the paperwork.
A week later the man and his girlfriend stood smiling as they watched the moving company pack everything to take to their new home....
.......including the curtain rods.
Posted by
Dear Ramlath
In my mind I see loving to be the least complicated emotion. The problem is that as we as individuals have become more complicated so has our loving.
Loving always meant dropping the ego. Perhaps its just more difficult today for people to do that.
Posted by
Dear Anusheh
Yes.. It is clear now.
Say Hello to Jasjit (ji).
Thanks and lots of love
to both of you.
Buas
Posted by
Hi Buas
How is it going? Good to see you here and enriching the debate. :)
love to you both
Posted by
Dear Ramlath,
Memories taking us back to the moments that gave us love and happiness can bring both smile to our face as well as tears in our eyes.
I had a crush on this guy when I was in college. He was also a very dear friend of mine. But things didn't work out. During those days songs of DDLJ were top of the list. Now when I hear those songs my mind goes back to those days of my crush. Yes pain I do feel but along with also the feeling that i have come a long way from then to now. This thought immediately makes me perk up and dismiss my unsuccessful love story with a big sigh and think of what I have now and will have in the future.
Hey we win some and loose some. Lets take the love that we lost to sum up the courage in us to win the next which is to come.
Posted by
Ramlath
Unrequited love is truly a tough one. And it is fascinating how 'memory' continues to track those same emotions, as if keeping them safely in store and just a fragrance, a phrase or a melody is enough to trigger the whole scenario and its emotional tides.
Posted by
Chaitali
Your story reminds of that hilarious film 'First Wives Club' where Donald Trump's ex-wife Ivana makes a guest appearance just to share her memorable mantra, "Don't get mad, get even."
Posted by
Jasjit you mean the joke that I posted. For I minute I thought what was so hilarious about my unrequitted love!
Ramlath I think I made a typo error. I meant we win some and LOSE some.
Posted by
When I said my favourite aunt married someone else, I meant she couldn't marry her lover-:) I cry when I listen to those songs because, I wish I could re-creat those days for her .....
Posted by
Aw Ramlath
Had us a little confused there you did lol! But hey its not as if crushes on aunts and uncles are rare or easily forgotten. :)
Posted by
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SUMANTA SENGUPTAcommented ( 3:58 PM Wednesday 23 July 2008) on
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"In addition, several parts of the prefrontal cortex that are highly wired in the dopamine pathways were mobilized, while the amygdala, associated with fear, was temporarily mothballed."
Love can indeed make you fearless whether for yourself or for another. This finding just validated the entire research for me. I'm stuck though with a scary question...is the brain generating love or is love generating a certain brain response? What I love about science is that it explains everything so clearly but what I dislike about it is that it leaves no room for the mystery of life.