#100: 🧠💕 What Happens to Your Brain When You Fall in Love?
#100: 🧠💕 What Happens to Your Brain When You Fall in Love?
The biological reasons we go 'crazy in love'
Hey Friends,
Ok, big big big milestone for Nina’s Notes.
It’s #100.
When I started this newsletter, I remember that the goal of 10 newsletters felt impossible. Each week I would spend way too much time writing, editing and perfecting the newsletter.
I was so nervous about releasing my writing into the world, that I only sent those first 10, to about 20 of my closest friends.
Now, we’re 2 years down the road, 100 newsletters down, and we are a readership of 2000 subscribers across Substack and LinkedIn! I’ve completed more than 10x my first goal and earned 100x the readership.
Wow Wow Wow!
Thank you all so much for supporting my writing!
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💬 In this note:
🧠💕 What Happens to Your Brain When You Fall in Love?
📚 Trippy
⚡️Rattlesnakes
🧠💕 What Happens to Your Brain When You Fall in Love?
This is Part 1 in a two part series. Watch out for Part 2 – The Neuroscience of Heartbreak - coming soon.
SSummertime is a season of love.
The warm weather, outdoor gatherings, and the excitement of summer romances create a perfect atmosphere for falling head over heels.
Maybe you've experienced this feeling yourself this summer.
You might feel butterflies in your stomach, your heart races when your crush suggests a date, and you can't eat or sleep.
If this sounds familiar…
Uh oh.
You might be falling in love.
In last week’s Nina’s Note #99, I mentioned a study that looked at which parts of the brain are connected to different kinds of love. But how does love start in the brain in the first place?
Love may well be one of the most studied behaviors, but it still remains a mystery.
More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love, the kind that makes you feel excited and happy, in 147 of them. This shows that there might be something in our biology that makes us fall in love.
Today, scientists still believe that love is a natural part of who we are.
Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, author of “Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection” says that love is as important to our health as exercise, water, and food.
Richard Schwartz, an Harvard Medical School associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., agrees. He believes the ubiquity of love across cultures indicates that “romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature.”
Contrary to what many poets say, love does not actually come from the heart.
Love begins in the brain.
In 2005, Helen Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study that included the first functional MRI (fMRI) images of the brains of individuals who were in love.
Her team analyzed 2,500 brain scans of college students and compared the scans of people looking at pictures of someone they loved, to scans of people looking at pictures of friends.
When people looked at pictures of their loved ones, parts of their brains that deal with pleasure and reward became more active.
There are two brain regions that showed activity in the fMRI scans. The first part is called the caudate nucleus, which is connected to feeling rewarded, expecting things, and understanding how our senses work in social situations.
The second part is the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is linked to pleasure, focus, and wanting to get things we like.
The VTA is considered to be a primitive neural network, meaning it is evolutionarily old, and it is activated first when falling in love.
Now due to advancements in imaging technology, scientists now have a much clearer picture of what happens when people fall in love than when Helen Fisher did her groundbreaking studies in 2005.
Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo’s research team found 12 areas of the brain that work together to release dopamine, oxytocin and adrenaline, which induces a euphoric sense of purpose.
Her findings indicate that the brain’s reward circuit, made up of the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, all activated on fMRI scans when the study participant was talking about a loved one because blood flow into these brain regions.
Crazy in Love
The prefrontal cortex is the region of your brain associated with logic and decision-making. When you fall for someone, this region of the brain tends to slow down.
This might explain why we sometimes ignore red flags and make poor judgments, particularly during those love-struck early days of a romance.
During early-stage love, Cacioppo’s team also found that our serotonin drops.
Serotonin is referred to as our “happy hormone.” It is key in regulating appetite and intrusive anxious thoughts.
This explains why someone who is newly lovestruck feels like they can’t eat.
It also explains why people in the early stages of love can be obsessed with small details – like analyzing the meaning of a text message from their beloved.
If you’ve ever found yourself obsessing over every small detail your new romantic partner has said or did, you can blame it on this drop in serotonin.
As the saying goes, we are all fools in love, which we can partly blame on the decreased activity in areas of the brain connected to rational thought and self-awareness.
Does the Brain Look Different in Long-term Love?
Once the initial excitement of a new relationship fades, and the couple becomes more committed, more areas of the brain are activated.
Studies among newly-married couples, scientists found that parts of the brain’s basal ganglia, which controls movement, became active when the couples looked at pictures of each other
Longer-term love also boosts activation in more cognitive areas of the brain such as the angular gyrus, the part of the brain associated with complex language functions, and the mirror neuron system, a region that helps you anticipate the actions of a loved one.
That’s the reasoning behind couples who finish each other’s sentences or have a way of moving around a small kitchen cooking together without issue, Dr. Cacioppo said.
“People in love have this symbiotic, synergistic connection thanks to the mirror neuron system, and that’s why we often say some couples are better together than the sum of their parts,” she said.
“Love makes us sharper and more creative thinkers.”
In another study, conducted in 2011 at Stony Brook University in New York state, researchers found that it is possible to still be madly in love with someone after decades of marriage. The research team, which included Helen Fisher, performed MRI scans on couples who had been married an average of 21 years.
Richard Schwartz said this “state-of-the-art investigation of love has confirmed for the very first time that people are not lying when they say that after 10 to 30 years of marriage they are still madly in love with their partners.”
The brain scans showed the same pattern of activity in the reward centers as in people who are newly in love.
"For couples whose love has become more comfortable and routine, Dr. Jacqueline Olds said it's possible to rekindle the passion they had in the beginning.
“We call it the rustiness phenomenon,” she said.
“Couples get out of the habit of sex, of being incredibly in love, and often for good reasons: work, children, a sick parent. But that type of love can be reignited.”
For example, having sex can increase oxytocin levels and activate the brain's reward system, making couples desire each other more.
Dr. Olds said that this alone might be enough to bring some couples back to those earlier, exciting days when they couldn't stop thinking about their newfound love.
Brain Regions Involved in Lust and Passion
When a relationship starts, we often wonder if it's love or just lust.
It takes time to figure this out, but lust can still be part of a true love relationship.
Lust and passion come from the hypothalamus, a small, almond-shaped part of the brain.
This area is connected to our basic needs like thirst and hunger.
It also controls things like body temperature, blood pressure, and sleep.
One of its jobs is to regulate our sex drive. It sends signals that increase our desire for sex.
Lust involves a desire for sexual pleasure and gratification. There is an evolutionary basis for our need to reproduce, which is why, like our other basic needs, the hypothalamus is heavily involved in this aspect of falling in love.
The hypothalamus stimulates the testes and ovaries to release the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. Both play a role in fueling feelings of passion and lust.
Love for Pets, Children and Hobbies
As shown in the journal Cerebral Cortex, love for different things lives in different regions of the brain.
A 2020 review in Social Neuroscience, showed that face-to-face interaction and eye-gazing between mothers and their infants activated the brain’s reward system and increased gray matter volume in mothers. This helps to create a strong bond between mothers and their babies.
Even your love for a passion such as running, biking, knitting, or enjoying nature evokes activation of the brain’s angular gyrus, a region involved in a number of processes related to language, number processing, spatial cognition, memory retrieval, and attention, according to a study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, led by Cacioppo.
Dr. Cacioppo said, "Although the level of brain activity is different, the love between a parent and child, a dog and its owner, or even the love for a hobby or passion can give us the feeling of connection we all want and need to survive."
The scientific advancements in studying love have provided valuable insights into the neurological processes involved in romantic love, paternal love and many more types of love.
What the data tells us is that love is not merely a subjective experience.
Love is a complex biological phenomenon shaped by the intricate structure of the brain and the interplay of various brain regions and neurotransmitters.
And most importantly, love is crucial to our survival.
📚 Book of the Week
Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics by Ernesto Londoño
Rating: ★★★☆
I picked this book up for a few reasons - it was featured on my local bookstore’s instagram page, the title sounded intriguing, its neon yellow, and I honestly wanted to see what publishers are paying writers to write about psychedelics.
Trippy is a personal near-memoir of Ernesto’s personal mental health crisis and the psychedelic experiences that healed his depression.
It’s an informative account of this booming field and both the transformative power of psychedelic medicines, while also shedding light on the scam artists in the business and dark experience at some retreat centers.
While I tend to like books which are more scientific about psychedelic drugs and less about personal story, I did enjoy reading Trippy.
Pick it up if you are curious about the underground distribution of psychedelic medicines, and to learn about the retreat centers around the world.
⚡️ Check This Out
A live feed of Rattlesnake dens in Colorado and California.
The scientists hope to dispel the idea that rattlesnakes are usually fierce and dangerous.
The live feed seems to be working as it draws as many as 500 people at a time online.
Rattlesnakes are unique among most snakes in that they give birth to live young, rather than laying eggs. An average litter consists of eight pups, though the exact number can vary depending on the mother's size.
Unlike many reptiles, rattlesnakes exhibit parental care, even going so far as to protect and nurture the young of other snakes. According to Max Roberts, a graduate student researcher at CalPoly, adults provide warmth and protection to newborn pups until they enter hibernation in late fall.
“We regularly see what we like to call ‘babysitting,’ pregnant females that we can visibly see have not given birth, yet are kind of guarding the newborn snakes,” Roberts explained to AP News in a recent article.
There are approximately 36 species of rattlesnake, primarily found within the United States.
These venomous reptiles inhabit a wide range of habitats across the country, with a particularly strong presence in the Southwest.
The current study focuses on prairie rattlesnakes, a common species in the central and western U.S., as well as parts of Canada and Mexico
This was a reader recommendation too! Thanks Ashlyy for asking me to Check This Out!
Edited by Wright Time Publishing