Studying love scientifically – brain imaging, laboratory experiments – gives us deeper insight into the workings of love. We are beginning to see exactly how affect works, tracking a complicated series of biological reactions cascading through your body, changing your behavior in ways that affect the people around you when you are feeling loved. There are lots of chemical races going on around your brain and body as you are falling in love, and also when you are engaged in long-term commitment. After people are in love for some time, the body builds up a tolerance for the chemicals that make it feel good.
Being in love floods the brain with chemicals and hormones that create feelings of pleasure, obsession, and attachment. Love decreases levels of a brain chemical called serotonin, which is a common attribute of OCD. The thrill of emotion, as well as release of brain chemicals including dopamine (pleasure), adrenaline (fight-or-flight), and norepinephrine (vigilance), make falling in love seem like a heady, addictive rush. Together, the dopamine produces elation, high energy, sleeplessness, cravings, appetite loss, and concentrated focus, according to Helen Fisher, a famous researcher on love and a Rutgers anthropologist.
With less dopamine, you are likely dampening your ability to experience strong, romantic love. In other words, couples who are that-crazed are focused intently on their relationship, often on very little else.
If you feel like you are lacking a meaningful relationship, it is like your body is thirsty for society, and your brain is sending signals telling you have to do something about it. We occasionally hear about people taking SSRI medications, suddenly feeling like they do not have any passion for their partners, and they fall out of love, too. We speak about the moment we fall in love like being shot with cupids arrow – it is intense, overwhelming, sometimes quick, and it can feel as though fate has decided.
The first thing is we identified the part of the brain that becomes active when you are thinking or looking at a photo of somebody that you are deeply in love with – this is something that shows up even with really long-term couples who are really deeply in love. The second is that, once you are in a long-term relationship (after several months), doing things with your partner that are exciting, that are difficult, novel, kind of rejuvenates this feeling of love and excitement. The areas of the brain that make dopamine, that get lit up when we are in love, are close to the other areas that handle thirst and hunger. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans reveal the pleasure centers in the brain lit up when people are in love.
Being in love increases blood flow to the brains pleasure center, nucleus accumbens. Along with the brain which is a locus of our feelings of being in sync with another person, and is the focus of exciting new research on how this happens, our feelings of being in sync with another person, are three central characters in love biology. Researchers from University College London found that those who are in love have lower levels of serotonin, as well as that the neural circuits associated with the way we evaluate others are down-regulated.
