Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “you” and “I” are one, and is prepared to believe it as if it were a fact. — Sigmund Freud
Romantic love and adolescence are the only two socially acceptable forms of psychosis. — Lester Grinspoon Harvard psychiatrist
I pay tribute to love today, St. Valentine’s Day. LOVE, that one small word, stands for a hodgepodge of feelings and drives: lust, romance, passion, attachment, commitment, and contentment.
How we fall in love, though, may be the hardest human behavior to explain. Human beings make a terrible fuss about a lot of things, but none probably more than love. “People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms — for love,” says Helen Fisher, a scientist from Rutgers University and author of the best-selling book, Why We Love, who is considered the Queen Mum of love and romance research.
Notwithstanding the heart’s popular role in romance, it is not surprising to realize that falling and being in love is actually due to a great upheaval in your brain — not your heart. Research into the wonders of love and passion has found that a concert of chemicals acts on about a dozen parts of the brain (not to mention countless other body parts) to create that intense rush experienced as love.
In fact, those neurotransmitters flood the system so fast that it appears “your brain knows before you do that you are in love,” says Stephanie Ortigue, the Syracuse University professor who led the study on how fast the brains of people passionately in love lighted up when presented with the names or pictures of their significant others. The results, published in the October 2010 issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, showed it takes all of a fifth of a second for that truly mad, deep feeling, to register. That’s faster than your average resting heartbeat. Maybe there’s really a scientific explanation, after all, for that fast feeling of love at the first sight of a perfect mate!
Early Research On Love
Science is just beginning to parse the inner workings of the brain in love, examining the blissful or ruinous fall from a medley of perspectives: neural systems, chemical messengers, and the biology of reward.
It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.
The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for reproduction, by associating something that just happened with pleasure, and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.
Yet, the chemistry between two people isn’t just a matter of molecules careening around the brain, dictating feelings like some game of neuro-billiards. Attraction also involves personal history. “Our parents have an effect on us,” says Helen Fisher. “So does the school system, television, timing, mystery.” Every book ever read, every movie ever wept through, starts charting a course toward the chosen one.
Steps To Love And Romance
First comes initial attraction, the spark. If someone’s going to pick one person out of the billions of opposite sex-humans out there, it’s this step that starts things rolling.
Next comes the wild, dizzying infatuation of romance — a unique magic between two people who can’t stop thinking about each other. The brain uses its chemical arsenal to focus our attention on one person, forsaking others. “Everyone knows what that feels like. This is one of the great mysteries. It’s the love potion No. 9, the click factor, interpersonal chemistry,” says Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony Labs.
The passion lasts for at least a few months, two to four years tops, says relationship researcher Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. As it fades, something more stable takes over: the steady pair-bonding of what’s called companionate love. It’s a heartier variety, characterized by tenderness, affection, and stability over the long haul. Far less is known about the brains of people celebrating their silver wedding anniversaries or more, but researchers are beginning to recruit couples to find out.
Forces Of Attraction
The forces of attraction are in many ways mysterious, but scientists know certain things. Studies have shown that women prefer men with symmetrical faces and that men like a certain waist-to-hip ratio in their mates. One study even found that women, when they sniffed men’s T-shirts, were attracted to certain kinds of body odors. That initial spark can flash and fade. Or it can become a flame and then a fire, a rush of exhilaration, yearning, hunger, and a sense of complete union that scientists know as passionate love.
Key to this state of seeing a person as a soulmate instead of a one-night stand is the limbic system, nestled deep within the brain between the neocortex (the region responsible for reason and intellect) and the “reptilian brain” (responsible for primitive instincts). Altered levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin — neurotransmitters also associated with arousal — wield their influence.
But passionate love is something far stronger than that first sizzle of chemistry. “It’s a drive to win life’s greatest prize, the right mating partner,” Fisher says. It is also, she adds, an addiction. People in the early throes of passionate love, she says, can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they’re willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one. Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness, and habit all play their role in the trickery.
Love Is Blind
In a research published in 2006, Fisher studied 17 people who were in a love relationship for seven months. Using fMRI, she looked at what areas of the brain got active when the subjects saw a photograph of their beloved ones. “We found some remarkable things,” she says. “We saw activity in the ventral tegmental area and other regions of the brain’s reward system associated with motivation, elation, and focused attention.“ It’s the same part of the brain that presumably is active when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or when gamblers think they’re going to win the lottery. No wonder it’s as hard to say no to the feeling of romantic arousal as it would be to say no to a windfall in the millions. The brain has seen what it wants, and it’s going to get it.
“At that point, you really wouldn’t notice if the ideal mate you selected had three heads,” says Fisher. “Or you’d notice, but you’d choose to overlook it.” Adds Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, “When you’re in a relationship, you’re aware of the other person’s flaws, but your brain is telling you it’s OK to ignore them.” In other words, science is now revealing that centuries of poets have had it right all along: Love is blind!
Coincidence Or Soulmate?
The front brain certainly gets involved as well as it ponders all of life’s experiences and past mistakes, researchers say — but not just the front brain. The nucleus accumbens, virtual swamp of dopamine that it is, is also a holder of memories. Its quest for reward is influenced by childhood experiences, friends, previous failed engagements, or the jerk who cheated on you. The sum of those experiences makes some people attracted to a prince or a frog, a princess or a slob. And, as it happens, practical matters, such as whether a couple both like piña colada and getting caught in the rain, do matter in igniting passionate love.
In a study published in the July 2007 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Gonzaga found that those who reported similar interests and feelings were more satisfied. “Those who reported chemistry said they felt at ease, relaxed, connected. They know they had some things in common,” he says. But he adds, “Chemistry is more than just being hot or handsome.”
Everlasting Love
As people in love grow older, the more memories they harbor of joy and trust, rejection, and disappointment. And as people learn from experience, the front brain, with its logic and reason, probably gets a greater say. “When you are young, passion and hope are so strong that it’s almost impossible to stop loving someone,” says Elaine Hatfield, psychology professor at the University of Hawaii and relationship researcher. “After you’ve been kicked around by life, however, you start to have a dual response to handsome con men: “Wow!” and “Arrrrrgh!” She adds, “It takes not will power but painful experience to make us wise.”
Somehow, it all comes together, for better or for worse, the sum total of what’s found in the passion of the limbic brain and the logic of the neocortex!
O, pagibig. Pag ikaw ang pumasok sa puso ninuman, hahamakin ang lahat, masunod ka lamang!