Science of…Love
My lab partner tells me that science has limits. She tells me: “Science can’t explain love.” It was hard to argue with this. Love has previously been the territory of poets and artists, and any scientist who ventured into the realm would surely end up floundering. Not anymore.
Pioneering work by Dr Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has discovered the scientific basis for love – it’s an addiction!
“Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth,” says Fisher.
Fisher spent the past few years studying people in love by placing them in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners. It appeared that people ‘in love’ have increased activity in an area called the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA).
Such fMRI experiments have shown that the VTA is also active in the brains of drug addicts and people with obsessive behaviour disorders. However, normally this area is part of the brain’s reward system – a system that makes us take huge risks when there are huge gains to be had.
There are other chemicals involved in love, notably oxytocin, a hormone which is important in sexual arousal, pair bonding and maternal attachment. New research, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, has found oxytocin can make ‘rude’ monkeys treat each other a little more kindly.
Steve Chang, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Neurobiology at Duke University, speaks to the London Student about this infamous ‘love hormone’.
“The most well-known role of oxytocin is in female reproduction. But, because of more recent work into its role mediating maternal behaviour, pair-bonding, and pro-social behaviours, it has come to be known as the love hormone,” says Chang. He goes on to explain: “A boost of oxytocin level in the brain increases trust and empathy toward a partner during social interactions in humans. In monogamous voles, a boost in oxytocin can directly promote pair-bonding between female and male voles upon introduction.”
In giving the rhesus macaques the hormone, Steve Chang and the research team have shown that they pay more attention to each other and make choices that give another monkey a squirt of fruit juice, even when they don’t get one themselves.
During the research, the monkeys, under the influence of oxytocin, let their gaze linger a bit longer when they made their choices. Was this love at first sight? Chang explains that it’s not that simple: “Oxytocin promoted them to look more frequently at the face of another monkey in the reward donation context. Our data are consistent with the idea that oxytocin is critically involved in gazing attention toward other individuals, and this effect might be related to an enhanced interest in what happens to others. How this type of boost in other-oriented attention might be related to ‘attraction’ remains an open and interesting question.”
Chang hopes that oxytocin can be used in a “therapeutic setting”, as it might be “greatly beneficial to individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions marked by social deficits”.
Romance may seem inexplicable, but scientists have and are continuing to challenge that notion – more research is expected in this area.
Pioneering work by Dr Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has discovered the scientific basis for love – it’s an addiction!
“Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth,” says Fisher.
Fisher spent the past few years studying people in love by placing them in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners. It appeared that people ‘in love’ have increased activity in an area called the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA).
Such fMRI experiments have shown that the VTA is also active in the brains of drug addicts and people with obsessive behaviour disorders. However, normally this area is part of the brain’s reward system – a system that makes us take huge risks when there are huge gains to be had.
There are other chemicals involved in love, notably oxytocin, a hormone which is important in sexual arousal, pair bonding and maternal attachment. New research, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, has found oxytocin can make ‘rude’ monkeys treat each other a little more kindly.
Steve Chang, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Neurobiology at Duke University, speaks to the London Student about this infamous ‘love hormone’.
“The most well-known role of oxytocin is in female reproduction. But, because of more recent work into its role mediating maternal behaviour, pair-bonding, and pro-social behaviours, it has come to be known as the love hormone,” says Chang. He goes on to explain: “A boost of oxytocin level in the brain increases trust and empathy toward a partner during social interactions in humans. In monogamous voles, a boost in oxytocin can directly promote pair-bonding between female and male voles upon introduction.”
In giving the rhesus macaques the hormone, Steve Chang and the research team have shown that they pay more attention to each other and make choices that give another monkey a squirt of fruit juice, even when they don’t get one themselves.
During the research, the monkeys, under the influence of oxytocin, let their gaze linger a bit longer when they made their choices. Was this love at first sight? Chang explains that it’s not that simple: “Oxytocin promoted them to look more frequently at the face of another monkey in the reward donation context. Our data are consistent with the idea that oxytocin is critically involved in gazing attention toward other individuals, and this effect might be related to an enhanced interest in what happens to others. How this type of boost in other-oriented attention might be related to ‘attraction’ remains an open and interesting question.”
Chang hopes that oxytocin can be used in a “therapeutic setting”, as it might be “greatly beneficial to individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions marked by social deficits”.
Romance may seem inexplicable, but scientists have and are continuing to challenge that notion – more research is expected in this area.
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