ah, l'amour...and brain chemistry

'Her beautiful eyes. His strong shoulders. We'll stop there, but you go right ahead and think about all the body parts you want.
 -- Close your eyes for a minute and envision all the romantic parts of the human body.
Bet you didn't think about the caudate and the ventral tegmental areas, did you?
These areas of the brain, while little known to most people, are helping scientists explain the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love.
By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.
In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.
While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain -- which is involved in cravings -- became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.
Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine.
"The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel," Dr. Brown says.
Or as her colleague, Dr. Helen Fisher put it: When you fall in love, "exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine. You can feel intense elation when you're in love. You can feel intense elation when you're high on cocaine."
Is it love -- or sex?
Scientists then wondered: Does a brain in love look much like a sexually stimulated brain? After all, we associate love and sex and sometimes confuse them.
The answer is: Brains in love and brains in lust don't look too much alike.
In studies when researchers showed erotic photos to people as they underwent brain scans, they found activity in the hypothalamus and amygdala areas of the brain. The hypothalamus controls drives like hunger and thirst and the amygdala handles arousal, among other things.
In the studies of people in love, "we didn't find activity in either," according to Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist and author of "Why We Love -- the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."
"We now have physiological data that suggests there are different brain systems for sex and love," says Dr. Fisher.
At some point, the two do become linked. People in love have elevated levels of dopamine. Lots of dopamine, in turn, triggers the production of testosterone, which is responsible for the sex drive in both men and women.
This helps explain why falling in love can make someone all of a sudden seem sexy.
"Three weeks ago he was just another nice guy in the office and now everything about him is sexual," says Dr. Fisher.
All this research into sex and love got the researchers thinking: Most other mammals don't have this drive for romantic love and attachment. Why do humans have it? After all, we could easily propagate the species just with our sexual urges.
Dr. Fisher thinks it has a lot to do with how difficult it once was to raise children.
"Go back millions of years to the grasslands of Africa. A woman was carrying the equivalent of a 20-pound bowling ball in one arm, and sticks and rocks in another arm to protect herself in this dangerous environment. She needed a partner to help her. She couldn't do it alone," Dr. Fisher says.
And even today, when we have strollers and the environment isn't quite as dangerous, having a mate still helps. "There are women who raise a baby by themselves, but it's a lot harder," she says.
Male brain - female brain
In their work with the lovestruck, the scientists found brain differences between men and women.
"The men had quite a bit more activity in the brain region that integrates visual stimuli. This isn't surprising considering that men support the porn industry and women spend their lives trying to look good for men," says Dr. Fisher.
But she adds there's probably a more anthropological reason at work. Simply put: A man's evolutionary mission is to spread his seed. That won't work if he mates with an 80-year-old grandmother.
"Men have to be able to size up a woman visually to see if she can bear babies," says Dr. Fisher.
The women's brain activities were a bit more puzzling.
The scientists found that women in love had more activity than men in the areas of the brain that govern memories. Dr. Fisher theorizes that this is a "female mechanism for mate choice." There are no visual clues for whether a man is fertile, but if a woman really studies a man and remembers things about his behavior, she can try to determine whether he'd make a reliable mate and father.
Thus, if it sometimes seems like a woman remembers everything -- good and bad -- about a man, "it's not just her being picky. It's an old Darwinian evolutionary strategy."
What's love got to do with it?
In the end, Drs. Fisher and Brown say what they learned from lovers' brains is that romantic love isn't really an emotion -- it's a drive that's based deep within our brains, right alongside our urges to find food and water.
"This helps explain why we do crazy things for love," says Dr. Brown. "Why did Edward VIII give up the throne for Wallis Simpson? The systems that are built into us to find food and water are the things that were also active when he renounced the throne of England."
Now their research is centered on the flip side of love. They've recruited college students who'd just been rejected by their sweethearts. Again, the scientists performed MRI's while these students looked at photos of the objects of their affection.
This time, the results were different, Dr. Brown says. The insular cortex, the part of the brain that experiences physical pain, became very active.
"People came out of the machine crying," she said. "We won't be doing that experiment again for a long time.” '

Well, then…enough said? This article was e-mailed to me by a friend who knows of my interest in the intersection of our human biology and our hearts and minds. How much of what we choose is really dictated by biochemical fluctuations, and how much free will do we really exercise? Love is a divine ---or hellish--- madness, depending on the circumstances; the absence of love is a torment. Is there any sane response to it? And what can be done to improve our chances?
I found it most intriguing that there are separate responses to sex and love…It is probably true that sex is largely allied with a basic drive, while love has a more complex and multi-faceted origin. I do take issue with the conclusion that the difficulty of raising a human infant is what drove the process, though, at least in the sense of needing a mate. Yes, having a mate who assists in child-rearing might help, but their support is more important in the modern world, with its isolated nuclear family structure and work-vs.-home dichotomy, than in any traditional society. And over the course of human evolution, I suspect that more day-to-day child-rearing help came from other women or family members. Look at food-sharing patterns among so-called primitive societies throughout the world, and you will see that the main contribution of men is occasional “big” protein and sometimes fishing. Daily food tends to come from smaller animal and vegetable sources which can be gathered efficiently by anyone, not just “mighty hunters”, and all foods tend to be shared among the community. Basically, you feed yourself and your family, and contribute any surplus to the group. This lifestyle is not incompatible with raising children as a single mother. (Compare it to modern life, which expects people to pay someone else to mind their kids whilst the parents work outside their home for money, and to pay for their food and other needs which they can’t be at home to grow or produce…) I suspect that the real impetus for the development of our love-related brain chemistry had more to do with the profound neediness and long-term dependency of our fragile human babies. In order for human mothers to be so available for so long to their children, and to meet their needs appropriately, an extraordinary neurochemical network may have arisen that supports love. And the long, slow, incredibly complex development of a human brain from infancy to adulthood is also dependent upon appropriate nurturing and love. The infant needs a mother to love him, not just for physical nourishment and protection, but also for the normal unfolding of his brain and psyche. We are now wired to need love and to need to give love. I also suspect that many factors can negatively impact optimal human development, including parenting styles that do not emphasize attachment, drugs administered during delivery, sub-optimal nutrition in infancy and childhood, too early placement in schools, exposure in utero and post-partum to environmental pollutants, and stress during pregnancy and lack of support to the mother as she parents her infants and young children. These factors are not politically correct to discuss, but I believe that they should drive policy development. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a feminist; but above and beyond that is the necessity to protect and support our most vulnerable members of society---our children.
I should very much like to see the above studies repeated with a specific group of people: I’d like to see it run on adults who were raised as positively as possible. Obviously, they would have to be identified by others, possibly counselors or therapists who have worked with them and have lots of background data about the subjects’ upbringing. If you ask the average person to evaluate his own upbringing, you run into difficulty; some folks blame their parents for everything that has gone awry, while others suffer from a blinding inability to see anything negative in their family structures, (“I was raised properly---my mum and dad locked me in a cupboard because that’s how it’s done back home in Bogley Wallow, and I turned out just fine!”). I’ve gone on about child-rearing at length here because it affects how we think and act as adults. The current mainstream parenting styles tend to fall into one of two camps, both extreme. Camp A, the traditionalist or authoritarian style, stems from a belief that children (even infants) are blank slates with a slight tendency to chaos and that they must be actively taught to behave decently. They also emphasize independence from a very early age, with no regard to human biological needs or developmental stages. Camp B, the permissives, believe that hearing the word “no” is somehow damaging to the developing child. Uneasy in the role of authority figure, or perhaps reacting against an authoritarian upbringing or societal paradigm (or sometimes simply too tired and over-extended from dual requirements of work and parenting), they hardly provide any expectations or consequences to their children. They hope that somehow the child will grow into good behavior as part of a natural process. Of course this is all over-simplified, but it is useful for analysis of trends in mainstream society. The truth lies somewhere in between, and there are reams of data showing that the best parenting style is a blend of behavior falling between the two extremes. But the point is, what a child experiences determines the adult responses to all life situations, especially to relationships. An infant whose basic needs for milk on demand, physical closeness to a caregiver, including during sleep, and loving responsiveness go unfulfilled, or are erratically met, will have great difficulty growing into a trusting, happy, independent, empathetic soul who expects love and can give it. The indifferently or badly parented child will have a personal biochemistry that does not support his well-being. He may be vulnerable to addictions (food, drugs, alcohol, or emotional---they are all the same to our body-mind), and accept unsupportive situations as his due. One of the reasons it is so hard for any of us to change our behavior is that we have these individual biochemical norms. Whatever is “normal” for us, even if it is uncomfortable or sad, remains our mental and physical paradigm, unless we can consciously change it. There are three things needed to make such a change: recognition of the current state, directed effort to reprogram it through more positive attitude and experience, and replacement of the old patterning with new patterns. Recognition, replacement, and reinforcement. So, in love, if your “norm” is rejection, that is what you will subconsciously expect. And each rejection will reinforce your norm…Not a very cheering prospect, but it’s incredibly common. But it is possible to change the internal programming. Hard as hell, but possible. Basically it comes down to a recognition of the twin facts that a) you do not have the right to shit on others to get your needs met, and b) you have the right not to be shat on yourself. Everyone is worthy of love; not everyone recognizes this, and many who do recognize it have trouble believing it at the deepest level, particularly about themselves. Wow. I think I need a drink. Or maybe some chocolate, or opiate-class drugs…or, just maybe, someone to love me.