Love is a disease

What love does to the brain.

This article once again proved my worldview, that person is unfortunately in the hands of unconditioned reflexes :)

Normal people new love often seems to be mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession. She cuts off people from their friends and relatives and inspire an unusual pattern of behavior – compulsive phone calls, serenades, yelling on the roofs – all this can be mistaken for psychosis.

But now scientists neuroscientists for the first time received the scanned image of such a damaged brain, even before the novel will be included in their puppy love stage and on the horizon will be a joint vacation plans or long-term commitments.

Carried out by scientists from new York and new Jersey the imagery analysis, published today in the Journal of neurophysiology (Journal of Neurophysiology), proves that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual desire.

It, scientists say, according to your neural appearance much closer to such feelings as hunger, thirst or the need for drugs, than to emotional States such as excitement or passion. With the deepening of relations, according to brain scans, neural activity associated with romantic love, is slowly changing.

This research helps explain why love is such a wide range of emotions – from euphoria to anger or anxiety – and why it becomes even more powerful when it is linked to deprivation.

In another, not yet finished the experiment, the researchers analyzed images of the brain of people rejected by their loved ones.

When you are at the mercy of romantic love, it becomes all-consuming. You can't control yourself. Every day you go to the gym at 6 am – and why? Because there – she – says Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the study. – And when a man is rejected, he may start to think about the persecution of her lover, the murder, of suicide. This need for romantic love can be stronger than we can imagine.

The technology of brain scanning does not allow you to read minds, warn scientists, and is multi-faceted and socially constructed phenomenon, like love, cannot be known with the help of simple techniques like computer graphics.

Nevertheless Dr. Hans Breiter, Director of Community for the study of motivational and emotional neuroscience from the hospital, Massachusetts said: I are suspicious of 95% of the literature based on magnetic resonance imaging, and I would put this study excellent. It really is a powerful breakthrough in terms of understanding the mechanisms of attraction love.

He adds: These discoveries are wonderfully fit into the large and growing body of literature describing the total system of reward and exclusion, functioning in the brain. They put the intellectual component of love on a par with homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, the need for drugs.

In this study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy brown of the Medical College named after albert Einstein and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist from new York state University headed the research team investigating about two and a half thousand images of the brain obtained during the examination of 17 students of the College who fell in love a few weeks or a few months ago. Students looked at pictures of their sweethearts, while the apparatus for magnetic resonance imaging took pictures of their brain. The researchers then compared these images with others taken when students looked at photos of acquaintances.

Functional imaging allows to determine the increase in blood flow to different parts of the brain that reflects changes in brain activity.

In this study designed using the computer the map is particularly active sites were visible hot spots in the depths of the brain beyond the level of conscious perception in the area, called caudate nucleus" and in's ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other during the exchange.

These areas are densely filled with cells, producing or absorbing a chemical agent of the brain called dopamine, which is actively spreading, when people have some desire or expect a reward.

In studies of pathological gamblers, cocaine, and even people playing for money in a computer game, it has been shown that the development of dopamine are particularly active, when these people win, say neuroscientists

But love is an example of the most irrational behavior in humans: this is not a question of meeting a simple need or receive the award. In addition, the researchers found that one of the areas in the pictures – in the region of the caudate nucleus is particularly active in people who showed the highest results on the questionnaire measure the level of passionate love.

This passion is responsible for the area, as the researchers found, is associated with craving, desire and inexplicable attraction that people feel to one specific person out of many equally attractive partners. She has a place in the area of the brain of mammals that is responsible for most of the basic functions such as eating, drinking, movement of the eyeballs. It all happens on a subconscious level, and I think nobody expected this part of the brain such specialization," – says Dr. brown.

The thrill of new love eventually, of course, passes, and shots imaging of the brain record evidence of these changes.

Early studies love using tomography, the results of which were published in 2000, researchers from University College London studied the brain activity of young people who are in relationships for about two years. Brain scans taken when the subject looked at the picture of your beloved or lover, show increased activity in the same areas of the brain that and in a new study, but to a much lesser extent in areas associated with passionate love.

Last summer, researchers from Emory University in Atlanta reported that the introduction of the mouse, the vole is just one gene turns a lecherous males in monogamous-couch, activating the same brain area in which a new study found increased activity evolving over time.

One of the reasons why love keeps the heart-stopping, this inescapable fear that this feeling can be quite mutual that the dream could suddenly end.

In a subsequent series of experiments, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. brown have studied the brains of 17 young men and women who were recently dumped by their lovers. As in the above-described experiment, the scientists compared two sets of images: one taken when the subject was looking at a photo of a friend and others when he looked at a picture of his former partner.

Although the researchers are still sorting pictures, but at this stage they noticed increased activity in the area of the brain responsible for passionate love. Obviously confirms what has long been described in the psychological literature and poetry, and the fact that people have long noticed: when you throw, the love increases. I call this phenomenon the deprivation-attraction," – says Dr. Fisher in an email.

One of the volunteers who participated in the study were Suzanne Katz, a 22-year-old student from new York, three years ago survived a breakup with a boyfriend. She explains that she has carried out many activities to distract from feelings after a breakup, but remember that there were moments when she felt almost a physical shortage of something, as if she was breaking drug.

It was not so much about him, but with the fact that I used to have something inside, hope, the realization that you have someone there that you can feel it, and suddenly everything is gone she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of experiments, researchers found that, among other things, a new love psychological means assign a loved one, a partial assimilation of other people's views, passions and ways to Express it, nature, as well as the transfer of something of his.

"The expansion of the personality occurs very rapidly, it is one of the most memorable experiences of all that exists, and except for the fact that our survival is threatened, it is one of the most stimulating sensations, says Dr. Aron.

When in love a person loses all of it, parts of his brain responsible for emotion, cognition, and response to promotion, vigorously react to it. But sooner or later the increased activity in these areas is gradually waning. And gyrus of the brain associated with passionate love, remain intact and ready to be reborn to a new life and new love.