Love, Actually: Terrific Things to Know About Our Brains When We Are In Love

Love is an affair of the heart, yet it is the brain that’s deeply affected when you’re in love with someone. Even though your romantic attraction and feelings come from what your heart tells you, the significance of the brain can never be understated.

The brain is one of the most powerful and complex organs in your body, other than the heart. It helps you balance, regulates your biological processes, controls your thought and cognitive abilities, and does many more functions you can’t live without.

While the heart sends blood throughout your body and the brain largely focuses on your nervous system, it can’t be helped to pin the two together, especially when it comes to love.

Oftentimes, you’re caught in a position wherein you have to favor one over the other. Indeed, love makes you go crazy.

For decades, scientists and researchers have tried to understand the mechanics of love. Through their studies and experiments, they tried finding out what love does to the brain – why we choose to love someone and stay in love with them, and what makes us fall out of love.

Despite the existence and continuous urge of various disciplines to explain what makes love, love, a lot of these questions remain unanswered.

But today, allow us to take you on an in-depth analysis of the terrific things that involve your heart, brain, and most especially, your feelings.

How is the brain affected by love?

According to Jacek Debiec, MD, Ph.D., and Residency in Psychiatry, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, there are three major neuromodulators of romantic love, which are dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin.

Dopamine is the principal pleasure neurotransmitter that plays a vital role in developing romantic feelings and sexual arousal. High levels of it, and other related hormones, are released during the attraction, thus responsible for making you feel euphoric and impulsive, and may even cause loss of appetite and insomnia.

On the other hand, oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, increases in the initial stages of romantic love, all while activating your feelings of trust and attraction. Working together with oxytocin, vasopressin is also a hormone associated with romantic love.

Vasopressin is in charge of physical and emotional stabilization, and both support your behavior when you want to guard a partner. In fact, the levels of vasopressin in your body increase after orgasm, whereas oxytocin increases in women.

Most importantly, high levels of oxytocin and vasopressin are the reasons why you feel sudden closeness with someone after intercourse.

Where does love sit in the brain?

The million-dollar question.

In 2000, Professor Semir Zeki worked with Andreas Bartels, Ph.D. from University College London, and conducted a study with 17 healthy male and female volunteers who were reported to be madly in love with someone.

They showed the participants photos of their partners while performing brain scans on them. Based on the findings, it was discovered that the medial insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and some segments of the dorsal striatum lit up as the participants saw the faces of their partners.

At the same time, some parts of the brain shut off, such as the bilateral parietal cortex, the temporal cortices, and parts of the right prefrontal cortex. Because love is a broad and complex emotion, there are several different parts of the brain involved during attraction.

Further, Sandra Langeslag. Ph.D. stated that people are more active and interested when interacting with and responding to people they like, compared to those they are not in love with.

Where does the thin line between love and hate lie?

It’s in the brain.

A study at University College London identified similar circuit structures of love and hate. The latter is the exact opposite of love, which expresses feelings of evil passion and detestation.

However, both feelings are believed to intertwine at some point. Love and hate are equally irrational and can cause someone like you to do either good or bad deeds. So how come these two opposite feelings lead to the same behavioral patterns?

As you can see, feeling each emotion involves the insula and putamen, which are related to aggression and distress.

How can love hurt physically?

It’s all thanks to your brain.

Listen to Nazareth’s Love Hurts all day long, especially when you and your partner are in a rough patch. It may not have greatly occurred to you, but the lyrics to this song are true to the very bone.

Have you ever wondered why some loving couples die within a few months of each other?

The reality behind this emphasizes intense emotional pain that later progresses to a form of physical pain. Mainly, neuroimaging studies proved that some parts of the brain responsible for processing physical pain are tied to social anguish. The relationship between the two is so strong that painkillers can aid with emotional wounds and pain.

Also, it’s important to take note that being in pain makes you more susceptible to having broken heart syndrome. Just when it feels like you can’t take it any longer, you’d feel symptoms similar to having a heart attack, all while suffering from chest pains and shortness of breath.

Love: One of the Mysteries of Life

The intricacy of love makes it hard to determine whether you can control it or not. Though most of you can easily choose a woman to date, understanding and knowing if your feelings for her can be influenced is close to impossible.

However, there’s meager control on your end. If you want to decrease your feelings for someone, simply think of the things you hate about them. It can either be their negative qualities, their twisted way of thinking, or predict an unfortunate situation with them in the future.

Regardless of the discoveries and widely available studies that explained the neuroscience of love, a lot of things remain unknown. Needless to say, love is one of the greatest mysteries of life that we will consistently attempt to comprehend.