Your brain in love

Op-Ed: The ageless and ever beautiful Tina Turner confounded us with the question “What’s Love Got To Do With It” on her 1984 album “Private Dancer.”  She was partly correct when she said it’s  “physical,” but not in the way we think of it usually. “A heart can be broken,” but what does our brain have to do with love, and can the presence or absence of love be measured?

The Chinese believe they have discovered some answers. “The use of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan (MRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, showed that love involves a dozen areas of the brain, with one area – the caudate nucleus – dealing with the ending of a love affair. A cocktail of chemicals also carries messages from one region to another,” reported by The Independent.

For those who have experienced love, one is keenly aware of the differences of “being in love” and “not being in love.”  We realize there is a difference in our emotions, and now thanks to MRI imaging those emotions are measurable.  This discovery is on the cusp of creating a calculable “love test.”

The researchers scanned the brains of men and women who said they were in love, and by comparing them to people who had fallen out of love or never been in love, they were able to map the changes that occur in the brain, which is shown on the picture included in this story. 
 
“Our study provides the first evidence of love-related alterations in the underlying architecture of the brain and the results shed new light on the mechanisms of romantic love,” said Professor Xiaochu Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, who led the study, which is published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

When the researchers showed lovers pictures of their partners while scanning the brain, the experiment demonstrated the “possibility of applying a resting-state MRI” method for actually developing a test for romantic love using MRI test results as a diagnostic tool.

The areas of the brain involved in reward, i.e. seeing one’s love interest, are the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, insula, caudate, amygdale, nucleus accumbens, and the temporo-parietal junction and other related areas of the brain that became visually active and seen on an MRI.

Psychologists define romantic love as a motivational state creating a desire to enter or maintain a close relationship with a specific other person.  Not surprisingly, love can alter cognition and behavior.  On the negative side is can promote compulsion, distortion of reality and obsession, but it also produces euphoria and feeling of well being or all is right with the world.  A person’s personality can change, however, and they begin to take risks.  The complicated manifestations of romantic love show it’s a complex sentiment, involving emotional, cognitive and behavioral components.

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While reading the extensive report in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience about romantic love, the idea occurred to me about the many different kinds of love we experience, and could the same MRI results be captured for those experiences as well.  For example, can loving one’s work or participating in a recreational or leisure time activity that we love produce the same MRI measurable result?

The creative arts like writing and painting have personal rewards not necessarily based on remuneration. Writing is considered one of the most difficult creative professions; it can also be one of the most rewarding from a creative point of view.  Writers are not only compelled to write, but also they love writing and seek the personal satisfaction of accomplishment and creativity. It’s its own reward. 

Writers can experience a state when the words and ideas flow effortlessly. During these events, the writer is truly “in love” with what they are doing. There is no sense of time—only focus on the work.  Conversely when writer’s block takes over, they have “fallen out of love” with the mercurial creative force that seemed ethereal, timeless and wonderful in the love state.  The interesting part of this dynamic, however, is once a high level of creativity has been experienced a writer will endeavor to reach that plateau again and again—sort of like looking for love again. 

Similarly, runners experience an altered state called “runners’ high,” when the brain tells them they can run forever.  In the past it was thought that endorphins were responsible, but new research has shown that endorphin molecules “are unable to pass the blood-brain barrier,” said Matthew Hill, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York, reported in the New York Times. A new emerging field of neuroscience indicates that an altogether-different neurochemical system within the body and brain, the endocannabinoid system, may be more responsible for that feeling.  Still, the runner—like the writer—is compelled to constantly seek the highest level of brain gratification. 
Mapping the human brain and the broader adaptations together with the ability to measure its changing architecture is the frontier for learning about different kinds of love, not only romantic. But for now the Chinese researchers have definitely captured our imagination for developing a romantic love test. 

The question now is would you ask your partner to take the love test?

Resources
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-of-love-it-really-is-all-in-the-mind-say-experts-10108781.html#
Tina Turner’s official video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpFcHTxjZs
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00071/abstract
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00071/full
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/phys-ed-what-really-causes-runners-high/?_r=0

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