Author: Medical Alliance
Love itself remains largely a mystery
Why do you feel a feeling of vertigo when someone you have a crush on comes to you?
Where is the "place" of love in the brain?
What effect does it have on our brains and bodies?
Why do we fall in love with the people we love?
Why do we always love each other, and what makes us stop loving each other?
Scientists have been studying for decades to understand the mechanisms of love, including how love is expressed in the brain and how love "makes us act." While we may not yet fully understand this profound human experience, we do have some good pointers – brain science and neurobiology.
In this issue, we will solve these mysteries to you based on these research results...
Where is love in the brain?
Professor Seymour Saki and students at University College London in the UNITED Kingdom conducted a scientific study: they conducted a study of 17 healthy volunteers, including men and women aged between 21 and 37. The volunteers described themselves as "really, deeply, and madly in love with someone."
Their findings were published in the journal NeuroReport. In the study, they performed brain scans on volunteers while having them look at images of their loved ones. The scans showed that certain specific areas of the brain were "activated" when the volunteers gazed at the faces of their loved ones. These are the inner parts of the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the dorsal striatum. However, there are also some brain regions that appear to be inactivated. These areas include the right frontal cortex, the bilateral parietal cortex, and the temporal cortex.
The commentary appeared in a February 2007 letter in which Professor Zecker noted that "the fields he has covered (the neurochemical of love) are the reward mechanisms in the medial insula of the cortex, the anterior cingulate and hippocampus, the inferior cortex, the striatum and part of the nucleus accumbens, which together constitute the core region of the reward mechanism." ”
Because of the complex "mapping" of love in the brain, harming any area of the brain associated with that emotion is actually unlikely to prevent a person from feeling love. And because love involves too many brain regions, neurotransmitters, and hormones, people with specific brain damage don't necessarily have love problems. ”
How does love affect our minds?
There are some brain science hypotheses that the activation and inactivation of specific areas of the brain are related to specific behaviors and attitudes related to love.
British brain scientist Professor Zekee has made the point that romantic love activates "a high concentration of the brain's neuromodulatory substances associated with rewards, desires, addictions and euphoria, dopamine." ”
That's why people in relationships are constantly "excited," he argues — because dopamine makes us want to connect with others and strengthen existing ones. However, he added, when dopamine levels rise, levels of serotonin, another brain chemical, drop. The chemical is "associated with appetite and mood." Changes in this substance within the brain could explain why people in relationships are more likely to focus on the people they like, which can lead to them thinking less about other things, including food and emotions.
People in the early stages of romantic love may experience "a decrease in serotonin levels ... Reach the general level of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder".
It turned out that "the lover's eyes out of the West" is like this
When a person is in love, the other two neurochemicals in higher concentrations are oxytocin and antidiuretic hormone. Professor Zekey noted that based on the findings of animal studies, both chemical messengers help to make connections and are linked to the aesthetic system of the brain.
Professor Zekey also pointed out that in romantic love, a small area of the brain called the amygdala becomes inactive. The amygdala is the part of the brain that coordinates the fear response, helping people stay safe in potentially dangerous situations. He believes that when a person falls in love, fear is suppressed, and this fact also means that the fear response is suppressed.
He also added that another area of the brain, the frontal cortex, has less activity, which may explain why people "turn a blind eye" to red flags from potential lovers when they fall in love. "All the fascinating passions in romantic love are reflected in the pause or relaxation of our criteria for judging others, which is a function of the frontal cortex."
Do love and desire overlap?
When we think of romantic love, many people also think of sexual desire. For many couples, love and sex go hand in hand.
But do love and sex also "turn on" the same areas of the brain?
Dr. Stephanie Cachopo, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, believes that there is some overlap between romantic love and sexual desire. In a 2012 paper, she noted that when people see a picture of someone, they feel sexually excited, and brain regions activated by romantic love become active. These areas, including the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, are also involved in the human reward circuit. This reinforces the behaviors on which species depend for their survival, such as diet.
However, other researchers have pointed out that love and desire, while overlapping in the brain, do not overlap completely. Researchers at Concordia University in Canada reviewed studies that aimed to "map" the brain between romantic love and sexual impulses. The team concluded that although both love and desire seem to be related to the striatum region of the brain, they both activate specific, different locations in that region.
Desire activates parts of the striatum associated with "instinctive" gratification responses, such as eating, drinking, and making love.
And love activates the part of the striatum associated with the "unborn" gratification response—or the pleasant sensations we produce through experiences and the passage of time.
Co-author Professor Jim Puffles pondered the "place" of love and sexuality in the brain, speculating that "love is actually a habit formed by sexual desire when sexual desire is rewarded".
Why men and women in love are easily confused and defenseless
Why love is addictive
It's also part of the striatum associated with addiction, prompting researchers to suggest that love itself may manifest itself as an addiction in the brain. He added: "It works in the brain the same way people do when they are addicted to drugs."
Can we control love?
Because love is so complex and often an experience that surprises us, can people control it?
In 2016, brain science researcher Langeslag and colleagues turned their research to this topic. The researchers studied 32 participants, all ages 18 to 30, all in a state of love. The researchers' aim was to assess whether these people were able to exert any control over their feelings.
Their research shows that "some people think that love is a natural process that should not be controlled, or that the regulation of love is very difficult, or even impossible." At the same time, she adds, "People can actually increase or decrease their feelings for someone." ”
How to control it? The answer is actually quite simple:
If you want to reduce your love for someone, you should think about his or her negative qualities (like he throws stinky socks every time he finishes playing) and the negative qualities in your relationship (like we fight a lot), and you can also imagine negative future scenarios (like he cheats on me, splits his legs). Negative thoughts like these reduce the intensity of infatuation, love.
At the same time, the opposite approach can also work. If you want to increase your love for someone, you should think about his or her positive qualities (like he's funny) or the positive qualities of your relationship (like we have the same values). ”
However, Languslag also cautions that "love conditioning doesn't work like a switch." "Negative or positive thoughts like these will only change your love feelings a little bit, and the effect will go away in a short time."
Sixth, the troubles of love science
There is a lot of research on how love and love are expressed in the human brain, but there is still a lot that is unknown. This is because studying love is a daunting task. One reason is that romantic love seems to have more than one — or rather, more than one emotion and experience associated with romantic love.
In brain science studies, there are at least three different types of love: sexual desire, infatuation (or passionate love), and attachment (or buddy love). Then, there's a question about the extent to which humans and other animals share the same experience of love or attraction. Animals mate, so they must have some form of sexual desire. Some animals also form a mate relationship, so they must experience some form of attachment. By studying the behavior of these animals in this situation, we learn a lot about the neural basics of libido and sexual dependence. However, we don't know if animals have experienced infatuation, or how we can know when they have.
Since much of the research to date — even those related to love — has been conducted in animals, it's hard to tell how far these findings apply to humans as well. As a result, we know very little about the neural basis of infatuation (passionate love).
The poet Elisabeth Barrett Browning wrote nearly 200 years ago: "How do I love you? Let me count the answers she summarizes in her poems, "freely," "purely," and "with passion," but scientists still have a long way to go to understand how these attributes of love contribute to our specific human experience.
This article is reproduced from other websites and does not represent the views and positions of the health community. If you have any copyright objections to the content and images, please contact us in time (Email: [email protected])