“Same reward center,” said Schwartz, “different way to get there.” That study reported that male fruit flies that were sexually rejected drank four times as much alcohol as fruit flies that mated with female fruit flies. Scientific evidence for this similarity can be found in many studies, including one conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in 2012 in Science. Dopamine activates the reward circuit, helping to make love a pleasurable experience similar to the euphoria associated with use of cocaine or alcohol. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what Schwartz described as the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love”-the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation.īeing love-struck also releases high levels of dopamine, a chemical that “gets the reward system going,” said Olds. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase of romantic love, marshaling our bodies to cope with the “crisis” at hand. When we are falling in love, chemicals associated with the reward circuit flood our brain, producing a variety of physical and emotional responses-racing hearts, sweaty palms, flushed cheeks, feelings of passion and anxiety. These areas can stay lit up for a long time for some couples.” “We know that primitive areas of the brain are involved in romantic love,” said Olds, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, “and that these areas light up on brain scans when talking about a loved one. Some of the other structures that contribute to the reward circuit-the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex-are exceptionally sensitive to (and reinforcing of) behavior that induces pleasure, such as sex, food consumption, and drug use. This circuit is considered to be a primitive neural network, meaning it is evolutionarily old it links with the nucleus accumbens. The ventral tegmental area is part of what is known as the brain’s reward circuit, which, coincidentally, was discovered by Olds’s father, James, when she was 7 years old. Two of the brain regions that showed activity in the fMRI scans were the caudate nucleus, a region associated with reward detection and expectation and the integration of sensory experiences into social behavior, and the ventral tegmental area, which is associated with pleasure, focused attention, and the motivation to pursue and acquire rewards. Photos of people they romantically loved caused the participants’ brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter. Her team analyzed 2,500 brain scans of college students who viewed pictures of someone special to them and compared the scans to ones taken when the students looked at pictures of acquaintances. In 2005, Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study that included the first functional MRI (fMRI) images of the brains of individuals in the throes of romantic love. This ubiquity, said Schwartz, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., indicates that “there’s good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.” Rewarding ourselves with love More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love-the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric-in 147 of them. Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviors. They have also been happily married for nearly four decades.
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