All you need is love. Or so say so many songs, movies and books. But what does love have that changes our lives, our behavior and even our concentration? Beyond the romantic explanations, neuroscience has a lot to say about it and that is that falling in love involves such drastic brain changes that they continue to be the source of lots of scientific studies. In this article we will see some of these changes.
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There are tons of explanations about what love is, from the most literary to others based on biology. In this case, we focus on the explanation given for TED by Helen Fisher, anthropologist, researcher and writer of various scientific books on sexuality and love, among many other subjects..
According to Fisher, love is the union of three components. The first component is passion and is related to sexual gratification. The second is romantic love, related to euphoria and "obsession" with the loved one and the third is companionship, related to the feeling of calm when being with someone. Love is therefore a balanced combination of these three factors, which affect brain function..
When we fall in love, our brain experiences a great hormonal alteration, an authentic avalanche of hormones that make us feel everything with greater intensity. One of these hormones that is increased is oxytocin, also known as the hormone "love", a fascinating neuropeptide produced by the hypothalamus that intervenes in processes of pleasure, learning and memory, as well as in maternal and sexual behavior.
Love also produces an increase in sex hormones such as estrogen or testosterone, as well as adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster. This has consequences in the intensity with which we feel the feelings of excitement and euphoria, among other sensations.
In the words of Helen Fisher: "Romantic love is an obsession, it owns you." This means that when we fall in love, our brain behaves as it would with any addictive substance: We cannot think of anything other than the person we love and we feel bad when we are not around.
This happens because falling in love activates the brain's reward system in the same way that some addictive drugs would. Specifically, falling in love activates the ventral tegmental area, a very important region in the reward system in which A10 cells are found, which begin the process of production of dopamine and other transmitters that reach the nucleus accumbens. Also the nucleus accumbens, a brain region known as the "pleasure center", is more activated in people in love, as well as the insula, another region that is responsible for assigning value to pleasant activities. These are the areas that are also activated in people addicted to drugs such as cocaine or heroin.
The contact or the mere association with the loved one activates the brain's dopaminergic reinforcement system, causing us an irrepressible desire to stay with the loved one and this is what makes lovers have some behaviors that resemble obsessive behaviors to some extent..
The stages of love make our brain change in one way or another. It can be perceived through functional magnetic resonance images, that when we fall in love our brain shows great activity in the reward center of the brain, as we talked about before. However, breakouts achieve a sharp decrease in this activity, as well as in reward expectations..
According to a study published in 2011 in the prestigious Journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, love can last longer than we think. The researchers found the same similarities in the brains of people recently in love, as well as in couples who had been together for many years..
Specifically, the activity of the ventral tegmental nucleus showed a great response to images of the loved one for a long time, compared to the activation caused by photos of friends or other people. In fact, the more lovers showed the couples that obtained the highest scores in questionnaires about love in their relationships, the greater the activity in this area. That is why, contrary to what commonly happens, there are some couples who maintain love during very long relationships. Be that as it may and how long it lasts, the important thing is to enjoy this important emotion in the healthiest and most balanced way possible..
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