What happens to the brain while in love
The month before the New Year holidays is especially dangerous for relationships. David McCandles and Lee Bayran in 2010 visualized the status of parting on Facebook and found a surge of parting exactly one month before the western Christmas, although not on the holiday itself. Sad statistics is confirmed by research companies that deal with divorce. Almost every year they publish data for which it can be seen that the peak of requests falls on December and January. Many psychologists suggest that it is the awareness of the approaching new year that makes people think about what does not suit them, and start a new life.
Scientists over a hundred years trying to figure out what love is and how it affects us. It is known that, like all other emotions, it is associated with certain processes in the human body. Having fallen in love, people lose their appetite, sleep and sense of time, while feeling euphoric and ready to move mountains. Like other feelings, love goes through different stages of development, and lovers themselves have time to experience the whole range of emotions and sensations - from endless happiness and inspiration to frustration and indifference. The journalist and scientist Oleg Vinogradov understands what is scientifically in love, what processes occur in the brain at this time and whether they can be controlled.
Is it true that hormones are to blame
Hormones play a big role in romantic love. Oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, cortisol is a heterogeneous group of hormones. In the body, they regulate extremely diverse processes - from blood pressure and uterine contraction during labor to ephemeral pleasure from a smoked cigarette.
This knowledge was obtained thanks to small rodents - meadow voles. Thanks to research in the early 2000s, the whole world learned about the endless love of one type of meadow vole, Microtus ochrogaster. After the first pairing, these voles form pairs for the rest of their lives. Together they get food and raise children. Their relationship is accompanied by incessant tenderness. But mountain voles usually do not have a long relationship and behave like ordinary polygamous animals. The difference in their behavior is due to the fact that they have a different number of receptors for the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin in different parts of the brain.
The brain has oxytocin and vasopressin receptors - protein molecules that bind these hormones and cause changes in the work of neurons. In monogamous voles, there are much more receptors in the brain regions that are associated with the reward system: the nucleus accumbens, the pre-lymphoid cortex and the lateral parts of the amygdala. For example, the nucleus accumbens in popular literature is often called the pleasure center. Polygamous vole receptors in these areas of the brain were much smaller.
During mating, monogamous rodents excrete a lot of oxytocin and vasopressin. If we block the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, then after mating the meadow voles do not form a pair and will not be tied to each other. On the other hand, the introduction of additional oxytocin or vasopressin to polygamous (mountain) voles does not make them in love. But if using genetic engineering to increase the number of receptors for these two molecules in their brain, then they will really start behaving like their monogamous relatives.
In 2004, American researchers Lim and Young compared how meadow voles of different sexes respond to different hormones. They injected vasopressin and oxytocin directly into the brain to voles and watched their relationship. Female voles formed stable bonds after administration of oxytocin. Male voles did not respond to oxytocin, but the introduction of vasopressin immediately made them fall in love. There is no exact explanation for this. Scientists believe that this may be due to the work of the amygdala - the part of the brain responsible for the feeling of fear. Oxytocin inhibits the work of a part of the amygdala, and this is probably due to a decrease in anxiety and stress levels. Vasopressin activates another part of the amygdala and may be associated with increased fear. Dutch researcher Gert ter Horst believes that it is the study of these reactions that will help in the future to explain why men and women experience love and rupture differently.
How attachment is formed and what makes us intrusive
Oxytocin and vasopressin increase dopamine release. The nucleus accumbens, the ventral midbrain, are parts of the dopamine "reward" or "reward" system. In the brain there are at least five receptors for dopamine, but in the formation of relationships in all the same voles, two are involved - the receptor of the first type and the second.
Brenden Ginrich with colleagues from Emory University in Atlanta showed that if you activate the receptor of the second type, the voles will form a pair instantly, even before mating. If this receptor is blocked, the pair will fail. And if you selectively activate only the receptor of the first type, the number of which in the brain usually rises after creating a pair, the monogamous voles will never bind to the opposite sex. This is probably why rodents do not pay attention to all the representatives of the opposite sex, with the exception of their lover, and sometimes even behave aggressively towards other females.
The remaining love hormones are studied much worse, although they do not become less interesting. For example, serotonin levels decrease in the brain in love. The same happens in some mental disorders: depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) and anxiety disorder. Some scientists believe that this may explain the obsessive and obsessive behavior of lovers who constantly think about their beloved. However, when the relationship is already settled, the level of serotonin returns to normal.
Why love is blind
People's love is much more complicated than that of voles. With the advent of methods of visualization of brain activity, scientists were able to study the differences in the brain of loving couples and single people. In one of the most famous works on this topic, the British scientist Semir Zeki showed in love photos of their chosen and unknown people. It was possible to find out that when a lover is shown the subject of his adoration, the activity of the middle part of the island, the anterior part of the cingulate gyrus, the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, the midbrain lining increases.
As in the case of voles, almost all of these parts of the brain are associated with the experience of pleasure and the feeling of "reward." In addition, in the original Semir study, Zeki compared lovers and mothers. It turned out that in terms of brain activity, romance and maternal feelings are very close. Similar areas are activated, with the exception of the hypothalamus, which is not activated in mothers. It is associated with the hypothalamus sexual arousal, which lovers experience when looking at their lovers.
In the same study, the activity of some parts of the brain in lovers was lower than in the control group. According to the authors, a decrease in amygdala activity is associated with a decrease in anxiety in lovers and a sense of trust. The prefrontal cortex controls virtually everything that can be controlled in our behavior. Its deactivation may well be responsible for the fact that lovers see the world around us in rose-colored glasses and do not quite correctly evaluate their lover, thinking of him better than he really is.
Why passion is always replaced by friendship
Gert ter Horst criticizes many human studies and insists that love from people should be studied depending on what stage of the relationship the lovers are at. Helen Fischer from Rutgers University, a well-known researcher of romantic relationships, adheres to the same point of view.
According to Robert Sternberg's three-component theory of love, relationships develop over time and pass through the stages of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Psychologist Carlos Garcia identifies three stages of romantic relationships: being in love, passsional love, compassionate love. In love lasts an average of six months. It is accompanied by a high level of passion and stress. The second phase - passionate love - lasts for several years. The lover's euphoria gives way to tranquility. The level of stress is also reduced. It is believed that at this time cortisol level normalizes. According to the Czech endocrinologist Luboslaw Stark, oxytocin and vasopressin play a decisive role here, since they are connected with the formation of long-term relationships. "Friendly" love is accompanied by a decrease in passion and the formation of trusting relationships. Relationships can exist for decades in this phase.
Is it possible to return love
The rupture of relationships is also not deprived of the attention of neuroscience For example, in the well-known experiment Helen Fisher, people with a broken heart were shown photos of former lovers in a magnetic resonance imager. Thus, it was possible to find out that several parts of the brain are active in people in this severe condition: the lid of the midbrain, part of the basal ganglia, the shell. These subcortical parts of the brain are also part of the "reward" system. The authors associate such activity with a delayed reward, which corresponds to the feeling of uncertainty that most people experience after the breakup of a relationship. In addition, the orbitofrontal cortex, the lower part of the frontal lobe of the brain, is excessively activated. The activity of this department is connected with the fact that a person tries to modify his behavior and, for example, control anger.
In the MRI study, Christina Stossel showed that after breaking up, the activity of the same neuronal networks decreases as during the depression. In her work, the subjects of the heart-broken gyrus and the islet were deactivated in broken-hearted subjects, whose activation was also reduced in depressed patients.
Many researchers are convinced that in the near future we can fully regulate love artificially. For example, the American journal of bioethics has already published a review of potential pharmacological methods for ending love. On the other hand, studies of love and separation can help in the study of mental disorders. For example, the Dutch researcher Gert ter Horst, mentioned above, is sure that if we understand a little bit better how men and women overcome a relationship break, then a broken heart will be an ideal model for studying mental disorders associated with stress.
Photo: 1, 2, 3 via Shutterstock
The material was first published on Look at Me.
