This Is Your Brain on Love

Young MC, illustrious hip-hop artist of my middle-school generation, described it like this: “Reception’s jumpin’, bass is pumpin’, look at the girl and your heart starts thumpin’.”

When we feel that coursing rush of love, we say we’ve got “chemistry.” It should come as no surprise that inside the brain, that chemistry is quite literal. And now we can see what it looks like.

Researchers at Syracuse University, led by Stephanie Ortigue, recently published an article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine summarizing all the studies looking at fMRI brain scans of love over the past decade.

Their essential conclusion: different parts of the brain are involved in different kinds of love. There’s a consistent pattern of activity in our brains when we think about someone we love passionately, Young MC-style, and it’s distinct from the pattern that arises when we, say, gaze into the face of our child.

The studies generally looked at the difference between how we react to a photo or the name of our lover vs. someone else. So, they used a formula approximately like this:

(brain response to your lover’s face) – (brain response to a stranger’s face) = (brain response caused just by love)

All kinds of love, from passionate to maternal, sparked activity in the so-called “reward pathway,” the system of neurons that gets flooded with the chemical dopamine to make us feel pleasure and want more of whatever we’re doing — the same mechanisms triggered by cocaine.

These dopamine areas are known to be involved in creating states of motivational drive (think: “I MUST get that chick’s phone number!”), as well as pair-bonding. Some of these regions are also implicated in sexual response. Surprise.

Romantic love lit up a diverse array of brain regions, including the emotional center and areas that mediate certain kinds of complex thought, such as body image and social interaction. Interestingly, when the study participants thought about their lover, it quieted activity in brain areas involved in anxiety, fear and grief.

“These fMRI results suggest that passionate love is more than a basic emotion,” Ortigue and colleagues wrote. “Passionate love is a complex positive emotion and also a reward-based goal-directed motivation toward a specific partner. … Love also involves cognition.”

The neuroimaging of maternal love showed some overlap with the truly-madly-deeply variety. But it turns out maternal love also comes with a surge of activity in the periaqueductal gray matter, or PAG, which has direct connections to the brain’s emotional system and has a lot of receptors for vasopressin, a natural chemical involved in maternal bonding.

Interlude: This song by one of my favorite musicians, Willy Porter, is a beautiful tribute to the forms of unconditional love that we humans get to experience.

So… what do we do with this information?

Someday there could be implications for healing. “It’s another probe into the brain and into the mind of a patient,” Ortigue said in Syracuse’s announcement. “By understanding why they fall in love and why they are so heartbroken, they can use new therapies.”

The article’s authors argued that the better we understand love, the more we respect its power in shaping mental and physical health.

Dissecting love into its cellular, biochemical parts might seem to suck the romance out of it. But it doesn’t for me. The washes of chemicals and tiny electrical signals in our brains are inseparable from our experience. To examine the complex orchestra of biological signals in love doesn’t diminish the elation, the yearning, the closeness, or the reception’s jumpin’-bass is pumpin’ that we feel — they are one and the same, physical and spiritual forms of the same force.

I’ll leave you with this song from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s underappreciated musical Aspects of Love (yes, it’s a little maudlin, so sue me). The company sings:

Off into the world we go, planning futures, shaping years
Love bursts in and suddenly all our wisdom disappears
Love makes fools of everyone, all the rules we make are broken

You can fMRI that all you want. We’ll still be helplessly, hopelessly living it.