WORLD SCIENCE

"Long before it's in the papers"
January 20, 2006

Jan. 20, 2006
Courtesy National Geographic
and World Science staff

To be madly in love might be exactly that—madness. The term “lovesick” is surprisingly accurate, claims a cover story in this month’s National Geographic magazine, citing research published over the last several years.

Voles, small rodents whose mating systems have been extensively studied. Some of the same brain regions and genes are thought to be involved in vole attraction and human love. (Courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture)

People experiencing romantic love have a chemical profile in their brains similar to that of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, noted the author, psychologist Lauren Slater.

Research has begun to illuminate where love lies in the brain and the particulars of its chemical components. Key points covered in the article are as follows:

• Love lights up areas of the brain linked to reward and pleasure, the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. It releases chemical messengers such as dopamine that, in the right proportions, provoke intense energy, focused attention, recklessness and exhilaration.
  
  

• Doing novel things together triggers dopamine in the brain, stimulating feelings of attraction. So first encounters that involve a nerve-wracking activity, like riding a roller coaster, are more likely to lead people to pursue a relationship.
  
  

• Love also could be as simple as following our noses. Swiss researchers asked women to choose which T-shirts worn by a variety of men smelled the best. They found women preferred the scent of a shirt worn by a man whose genes were most different from their own—genes possibly linked to an immune system that has something theirs does not. In this way a woman may boost her chance of having healthy offspring. 
  
  

• Love and obsessive-compulsive disorder could have a similar chemical profile: low levels of the brain chemical serotonin. Thus, love and mental illness may be hard to tell apart. 
  
  

• For those wishing to escape the grip of runaway passion, there is hope: Prozac, the medication that increases the amount of the serotonin available at the junctures between brain cells. Prozac jeopardizes one’s ability to fall in love, and stay in love, by dulling the keen edge of love and its associated libido.
  
  

• Studies around the world show that passion usually ends. Biologically speaking, the reason romantic love fades may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pulse of dopamine. Perhaps the brain adapts to the excessive amounts, and the neurons become desensitized.
  
  

• Anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., suggests relationships often break up after about four years because that’s how long it takes to raise a child through infancy. Fisher is the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, a 2004 book.
  
  

• Oxytocin, a chemical thought to be plentiful in long-term couples with warm, comfortable relationships, is a hormone that promotes feelings of connection and bonding. It is released when we hug our children or our long-term spouses or when a mother nurses her infant. In long-term relationships that never get off the ground, chances are the couple has not found a way to stimulate or sustain oxytocin production.
  

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