The Brain In Love

The most basic need of all humans is the need to feel loved, and to belong to a group of people and a place.

However, before a person ‘falls in love’, little do they realise that a cocktail of three chemicals produce the neural phenomenon called love, that we associate with a person.

Using two techniques, medical science has found the real science behind love.

1. Functional Magnetic Resonance(fMRI)- It creates images of the brain, revealing regions of the brain most active in certain circumstances.

2. Event-Related Potentials(ERPs)- This measures the changes in brain activity in response to different stimuli.

These three main chemicals are, namely Dopamine, Vasopressin, and Oxytocin secreted in the Ventral tegmental area(VTA), Ventral Pallidum(VP), and Nucleus Accumbens(NA) respectively.

VTA starts the process of love, using neurotransmitters to send dopamine and other hormones to other regions of the brain. The NA links the pleasurable feeling of romance to our sensory organs. This is the reason why we instantly recognize our partner’s perfume or our favorite song in milliseconds. VP processes feelings of motivation, craving, and reward in the brain.

Overproduction of all three of these hormones can have different consequences on our behaviors and brains. Excess dopamine over time, the brain’s response to it lessens, and we may lose interest in people and activities that earlier interested us. Oxytocin, my favorite hormone, is associated particularly with love, called the ‘love hormone’ or the ‘cuddle hormone'. It makes us biased toward our partner, and the in-group that we belong to. However, it does have scientific drawbacks too. If it promotes in-group bonding, it increases out-group(foreign group) derogation too. We become prejudiced, that ours is the only group that matters, sometimes obliviously treating the other groups with disrespect.

Now, there certainly must also be a reason that people fall out of love. Though we cannot put a label on a subtle thing as falling out of love, a memory bias or emotional protection strategy can be used as an excuse. Novelty is one of the prime factors of brain plasticity, which means the brain craves novelty. If the couple has the same mundane routine, they can easily fall apart given time. Love is unhealthy emotional dependence on a person, similar to cocaine addiction. So basically, breakups hurt because they are to the brain like withdrawal from an addictive drug.

But again, science says that people can fall in love more than once, so the search should never cease.