"I'm looking for love," gushes Carrie, "real love, ridiculous,
inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love. And I
don't think that love is here in this expensive suite in this lovely
hotel in Paris."
~Carrie Bradshaw AKA Candace Bushnell of Sex And The City
The science of love and attraction or love science
What exactly goes on inside your brain when you fancy someone?
What does love do to your brain chemicals?
Is falling in love just nature's way to keep our species alive?
We call it love.
It feels like love, it looks like love, it tastes like love and it sounds like love.
With an irresistible cocktail of chemicals, our brain entices us to fall in love. Aahhhhhhhh!
The most exhilarating of all the human emotions, love has us believing we’re choosing a partner, when really perhaps we are the very happy victims of keeping our species alive?
Sound romantic yet?
It’s not what you say...
Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you fancy someone.
Research has shown this has little to do with what is said, rather
* 55% is through body language
* 38% is the tone and speed of their voice
* Only 7% is through what they say
The 3 stages of love
Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in the States has proposed 3 stages of love – lust, attraction and attachment. Each stage might be driven by different hormones and chemicals.
Stage 1: Lust
This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen –This happens in both men and women and enhances their libido & carnal yearnings. These lead to a heightened sense of basic sexual drivers such as appearance and pheromones.
Stage 2: Attraction
This is the amazing time when you are truly love-struck and can think of little else. Scientists think that three main neurotransmitters are involved in this stage; adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin.
A lovey dove potion of emotion and motion.
Adrenaline
The initial stages of falling for someone activates your stress response, increasing your blood levels of adrenalin and cortisol. This has the charming effect that when you unexpectedly bump into your new love, you start to sweat, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.
Dopamine
Helen Fisher asked newly ‘love struck’ couples to have their brains examined and discovered they have high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical stimulates ‘desire and reward’ by triggering an intense rush of pleasure. It has the same effect on the brain as taking cocaine!
Fisher suggests “couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship” .
Serotonin
And finally, serotonin. One of love's most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts.
Does love change the way you think?
A landmark experiment in Pisa, Italy showed that early love (the attraction phase) really does change the way you think.
Dr Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa advertised for twenty couples who'd been madly in love for less than six months. She wanted to see if the brain mechanisms that cause you to constantly think about your lover, were related to the brain mechanisms of Obsessive-compulsive Disorder.
By analysing blood samples from the lovers, Dr Marazitti discovered that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.
We really are crazy in love, head over heels obsessed.
Love needs to be blind.
Ph.D. student Andreas Bartels and his adviser Semir Zeki of the Imperial College of London used an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to scan brains in love. They discovered that the portions of the brain related reward and pleasure activate while portions related to moral judgment deactivate. A drop in moral judgment? This is apparently why people say that "love is blind".
Newly smitten lovers often idealize their partner, magnifying their virtues and explaining away their flaws says Ellen Berscheid, a leading researcher on the psychology of love.
New couples also exalt the relationship itself. “It's very common to think they have a relationship that's closer and more special than anyone else's.”
Psychologists think we need the view of rose-tinted glasses. It makes us want to stay together to enter the next stage of love – attachment.
Stage 3: Attachment
Attachment is the bond that keeps couples together long enough for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; Oxytocin and Vasopressin.
Oxytocin - The cuddle hormone
Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released by men and women during orgasm.
Note to self: This is why ladies, we get so attached to our men. The very hormone that bonds us to our babies also bonds us to our men when we engage in sexual activities. ~Cherish thy self, do not get involved too soon.
It probably deepens the feelings of attachment and makes couples feel much closer to one another after having sex. The theory goes that the more sex a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes.
Oxytocin also seems to help cement the strong bond between mom and baby and is released during childbirth. It is also responsible for a mom’s breast automatically releasing milk at the mere sight or sound of her young baby.
Diane Witt, assistant professor of psychology from New York has showed that if you block the natural release of Oxytocin in sheep and rats, they reject their own young.
Conversely, injecting Oxytocin into female rats who’ve never had sex, caused them to fawn over another female’s young, nuzzling the pups and protecting them as if they were their own.
Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex.
Vasopressin (also called anti-diuretic hormone) works with your kidneys to control thirst. Its potential role in long-term relationships was discovered when scientists looked at the prairie vole.
Prairie voles indulge in far more sex than is strictly necessary for the purposes of reproduction. They also – like humans - form fairly stable pair-bonds.
When male prairie voles were given a drug that suppresses the effect of Vasopressin, the bond with their partner deteriorated immediately as they lost their devotion and failed to protect their partner from new suitors.
And finally … how to fall in love
* Find a complete stranger.
* Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
* Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.
York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.
He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.
To read an interview with Dr. Fischer further on this subject click below.
Science of Love continues,
Why We Love, The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, by Helen Fisher is an incredibly intriguing look at the chemistry of romantic love.
Where's the passion?
If we reduce love to fMRI pictures of brains, have we not reduced the most powerful human experience to something dry and lifeless?
Without love there would be no poetry?
Without chemistry there would be no love?
Dr. Fisher speaks to three kinds of love. In her words, from Why We Love-The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, 2-4-04;
"What first drew you to the subject of romantic love?
I think romantic love is one of the most powerfully motivating forces on earth. But also because I have come to think that romantic love is one of three basic brain circuits that humanity evolved for mating and reproduction: the sex drive -- the craving for sexual gratification, evolved to get you out there looking for anyone; Romantic love -- the elation and obsessive thinking that happens when you first fall in love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual, thereby conserving courtship time and energy; and attachment -- that feeling of calm and security you can feel with a long term partner, evolved to enable you to tolerate this individual at least long enough to rear a child together. Because romantic love, I think, is the most powerful, the most beguiling, and the most memorable, I wanted to know its chemical basis and what this euphoria was all about."
[The chemical basis for both parties in the first stage is Testosterone.]
"Can you briefly describe how you conducted your study to find out the chemistry of romantic love?"
"Well, I wanted to put people who were madly in love into a brain scanner to see if I could find out which parts of the brain become active when someone feels romantic passion. My plan was to have them lie in the machine and look at two photographs, a photo of their beloved and a photo of a familiar but neutral individual who caused no strong emotion in them of any kind. Then I would compare what happened in the brain under both conditions."
"But of course it is hard to STOP thinking about a sweetheart. And I needed to cleanse the brain of all romantic feelings before each subject looked at the neutral photo. So between looking at these two photos, I decided to have our subjects mentally count backwards from a large number, like 8421, in increments of seven. This really cleans the brain of all emotion! Then we compared what happened in the brain under all these conditions."
"In the end, my colleagues and I scanned 144 pictures of each of the 10 women and 7 men who were newly, wildly in love -- and found some of the brain regions that become active when you feel intense romantic passion."
"What did this brain activity tell you about romantic love?"
"What we learned was truly thrilling and revealing. I had thought romantic love was a whole constellation of emotions. But we were able to determine that it is actually a drive, a basic mating drive."
"We found activity in two very primitive brain regions, the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. Both are part of the brain's “reward system” and are associated with focused attention and the motivation to win a reward. In fact, we discovered that dopamine, a powerful stimulant in the brain, is most likely central to the feeling of romantic love. And I suspect that we will someday discover that high levels of Norepinephrine and low levels of Serotonin are also involved."
"So I came to think that romantic love is a drive, an instinct as powerful as hunger. Then we tack on various emotions, depending on how we feel. When things are going well, we feel elation, hope and other joyous feelings; when things go poorly, we feel horrible sorrow instead. But we always feel that intense craving, the urge, the instinct, the drive to win our beloved."
"Interestingly, we also found activity in a brain region associated with the eating of chocolate, which made me begin to think that romantic love was an addiction."
[The chemicals involved at the attraction stage are; Attraction is marked by high levels of the neurotransmitter Dopamine (also activated by cocaine and nicotine), Norepinehprine (adrenaline), the heart-pumping hormone used to respond to emergencies, and low levels of Serotonin, another major neurotransmitter.]
Is romantic love and eating chocolate an addiction? Rhet Roh, as Scooby would say.
Love changes with time.
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies love at Rutgers University, sees three phases to the process:
1. Lust: the craze for sex. "Lust evolved to get you out looking for anything," she says.
2. Attraction: the stage of emotional involvement. When attraction goes right, Fisher says, "You're romantic, passionate, elated, giddy, euphoric."
3. Attachment: attraction may evolve into a long-term relationship marked by calm, peace and security.
Granted, it's enjoyable, but the attraction phase cannot last forever.
Well there you have it.
Love in a bottle = perfume. They extract pheromones and scents that make us love it.
FYI: It is said by the experts that men like us to smell of cookies and baked goods. Vanilla scents are tantalizing. Who knew?
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