Love Comes From Head, Not Heart

Biological Studies Examine Brain's Love Circuit

(AP)  Like any young woman in love, Bianca Acevedo has exchanged valentine hearts with her fiance.

But the New York neuroscientist knows better. The source of love is in the head, not the heart.

She is one of the researchers in a relatively new field focused on explaining the biology of romantic love. And the unpoetic explanation is that love mostly can be understood through brain images, hormones and genetics.

That seems to be the case for the newly in love, the long in love and the brokenhearted.

"It has a biological basis. We know some of the key players," said Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. There, he studies the brains of an unusual monogamous rodent to get a better clue about what goes on in the minds of people in love.

In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.

The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain.

"These are cells that make dopamine and send it to different brain regions," said Helen Fisher, a researcher and professor at Rutgers University. "This part of the system becomes activated because you're trying to win life's greatest prize - a mating partner."

One of the research findings isn't so complimentary: Love works chemically in the brain like a drug addiction.

"Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly," Fisher said. "People kill for love. They die for love."

The connection to addiction "sounds terrible," Acevedo acknowledged. "Love is supposed to be something wonderful and grand, but it has its reasons. The reason I think is to keep us together."

But sometimes love does not keep us together. So the scientists studied the brains of the recently heartbroken and found additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is even more strongly associated with addiction.

"The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I'll call craving," said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist also at Einstein medical college. "Similar to craving the drug cocaine."

The team's most recent brain scans were aimed at people married about 20 years who say they are still holding hands, lovey-dovey as newlyweds, a group that is a minority of married people. In these men and women, two more areas of the brain lit up, along with the VTA: the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

The ventral pallidum is associated with attachment and hormones that decrease stress; the raphe nucleus pumps out serotonin, which "gives you a sense of calm," Fisher said.

Those areas produce "a feeling of nothing wrong. It's a lower-level happiness and it's certainly rewarding," Brown said.

The scientists say they study the brain in love just to understand how it works, as well as for more potentially practical uses.

The research could eventually lead to pills based on the brain hormones which, with therapy, might help troubled relationships, although there are ethical issues, Young said. His bonding research is primarily part of a larger effort aimed at understanding and possibly treating social-interaction conditions such as autism. And Fisher is studying brain chemistry that could explain why certain people are attracted to each other. She's using it as part of a popular Internet matchmaking service for which she is the scientific adviser.

While the recent brain research is promising, University of Hawaii psychology professor Elaine Hatfield cautions that too much can be made of these studies alone. She said they need to be meshed with other work from traditional psychologists.

Brain researchers are limited because there is only so much they can do to humans without hurting them. That's where the prairie vole - a chubby, short-tailed mouselike creature - comes in handy. Only 5 percent of mammals more or less bond for life, but prairie voles do, Young said.

Scientists studied voles to figure out what makes bonding possible. In females, the key bonding hormone is oxytocin, also produced in both voles and humans during childbirth, Young said. When scientists blocked oxytocin receptors, the female prairie voles didn't bond.

In males, it's vasopressin. Young put vasopressin receptors into the brains of meadow voles - a promiscuous cousin of the prairie voles - and "those guys who should never, ever bond with a female, bonded with a female."

Researchers also uncovered a genetic variation in a few male prairie voles that are not monogamous - and found it in some human males, too.

Those men with the variation ranked lower on an emotional bonding scale, reported more marital problems, and their wives had more concerns about their level of attachment, said Hasse Walum, a biology researcher in Sweden. It was a small but noticeable difference, Walum said.

Scientists figure they now know better how to keep those love circuits lit and the chemicals flowing.

Young said that romantic love theoretically can be simulated with chemicals, but "if you really want, you know, to get the relationship spark back, then engage in the behavior that stimulates the release of these molecules and allow them to stimulate the emotions," he said. That would be hugging, kissing, intimate contact.

"My wife tells me that flowers work as well. I don't know for sure," Young said. "As a scientist it's hard to see how it stimulates the circuits, but I do know they seem to have an effect. And the absence of them seems to have an effect as well."

[scienceman1-2009]

HEY brannigon - OBVIOUSLY you don''t have a brain so I guess you would think the heart is a thinking ORGAN???

[vm7488-2009]

WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT WOULD THINK THAT LOVE COMES FROM THE MIND RATHER THAN THE HEART?
----Posted by brannigon at 03:32 PM : Feb 12, 2009

=======================================
NO, "what kind of IDIOT will actually theorize that love comes from the HEART"? That''s the main question. The heart cannot develop emotions, only the BRAIN can. the heart reacts to an extreme emotion that the brain sends that''s why people tend to feel their heart beating faster when in love or in an adrenaline Rush.

But still, DUH... It''s a no brainer, everybody should have known that by now... It''s so obvious to any 4th grader who studied Anatomy and Physiology. Why the top-story report on this?

[doorgunner3]

To reduce love to chemical reaction is to confuse mechanics with the mechanic.

[doorgunner3]

Tot reduce love to chemical reaction is to confuse mechanics with the mechanic.

[displeased]

WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT WOULD THINK THAT LOVE COMES FROM THE MIND RATHER THAN THE HEART???
Posted by brannigon

Again, you can''t feel anything without the brain. The brain is where emotions develop, not from a muscle.

[brannigon]

WHAT CLOWN WROTE THIS? BETTER YET, WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT WOULD THINK THAT LOVE COMES FROM THE MIND RATHER THAN THE HEART??? I GUESS YOU CAN THINK YOUR WAY INTO LOVE RATHER THAN FEELING IT! "DUH, I THINK I''LL FALL IN LOVE TODAY; DUH." WHAT A BUNCH OF STUPIDITY!!! PEOPLE WILL COME UP WITH ALL KINDS OF TRASH JUST TO GET NOTICED. NEXT THING YOU KNOW, THIS DUFUS WILL WRITE A BOOK AND GET RICH MISLEADING GULLIBLE PEOPLE THAT WILL BELIEVE THIS ***!!!

[wolf563]

IDIOTS AND MORONS REJOICE IN THE FACT THAT EVEN WITHOUT SMARTS THEY ARE EQUAL TO PEOPLE OF HIGH EDUCATION .

[rf35]

This research has some real potential. Development of a drug to help people who have been thrown into a deep depression due to a broken heart (addiction to a person) is one obvious example. Another would be the possibility of treatment for people with emotional problems related to feelings of love and attachment in that they are incapable of these feelings. I agree, however, that the title is somewhat inane. The fact that emotions are based in the brain rather than the heart muscle should not be surprising to anyone who made it through grade school.

[displeased]

Is that what you think, or what you feel?
Posted by alphaa10000

You can''t think or feel without the brain.

[jenagain2005]

some of us should be shot in the head then and not the heart for falling for the wrong "special someone" lol

[docpeter1953]

pervious post, ''As was so fascinatingly pointed out to our gross human anatomy class when we were studying the reproductive organs, there is no brain in the ***, sure makes you wonder why so many men try to use it to think with.''

____________

GEEZE CBS, when did the anatomical word p e n i s become vulgar, nasty, rude, and/or worthy of censure? I teach anatomy to high school students, what am I to call it now? You''re p ee p ee.

[docpeter1953]

As was so fascinatingly pointed out to our gross human anatomy class when we were studying the reproductive organs, there is no brain in the ***, sure makes you wonder why so many men try to use it to think with.

[wl7bzh]

Could that be the problem? Your remarks about CBS already say a great deal about you.

Posted by alphaa10000 at 04:14 AM : Feb 12, 2009

And your pretense and arrogance says a lot about you. You appear to be the one with the problem. Tell ya what, just keep playing with yourself verbally and maybe somebody will be impressed.

You do the pompous thing quite well. Enjoy!

[scienceman1-2009]

I''m sorry but everyones heart is just pumping muscle - it doesn''t think. all the comments about the heart every day are just cliche''s! LOVE COMES FROM A THINKING ORGAN!

[jetranger7]

NOPE- LOVE COMES OUT OF MOST MENS POCKET BOOKS, AND STRAIGHT INTO HER HANDS TO GO SHOPPING !! YOU AIN''T FOOLIN ANYBODY !!!

[scienceman1-2009]

IS THIS A JOKE - OF COURSE EVERY EMOTION COMES FROM THE BRAIN!

[wl7bzh]

Which is one of the best things about the web medium in which print predominates-- thoughts are judged on their merit, not the face of who delivers scripted lines.

Posted by alphaa10000 at 12:20 AM : Feb 12, 2009

Fer crying out loud alphaa, as previously mentioned the posts to this article had started out to be smart azz remarks made in fun. But nawww, ya had to do yur usual intellectual ego jurkoff.

Here''s a headsup alf. This blog will last fer about 3 days and then go into journalism oblivion. Try and have some fun slick.

[tucson23]

In other news, the sky is blue.

...And to you who thinks that humans and other mammals are not biologically similar, you might not want to call others morons at the very moment you''re proving that you are one. Is it because the Bible doesn''t say so? Why did you bother going to school (you must have, since you have a third-grade understanding of biology), when all the answers are in a book written thousands of years ago to scare ignorant people into being easily-governable sheep?

[ms1-1-11]

a face has certain measurements that are close to the golden ratio human face is based on the Golden Ratio
In addition to simple measurements and statistical average ratios, ... The so-called "Golden Rule" for proportion and perspective. ...measure angles-degrees mouth, nose, eyes

The total length a + b is to the longer segment a as a is to the shorter segment b.

Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal.

The book The Golden Ratio the author:: Mario Lavivo


thanks for the email Brian.

[ms1-1-11]

snake *** pheromone

sorry for the misspelling....