"Love Is the Drug..."
Jun. 28th, 2005 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonThis article just crossed my desk -- too funny. I'd like to think (and choose to believe) that there's something more to love than physiochemical reactions. And certainly there is an important distinction to be made between the transitory thrill and intensity of "being in love" and choosing to and being capable of maintaining deeply romantic and passionate relationships over the long haul (and I note that they're doing a followup study on people who sustain passionate relationships over 20+ years).
I've always felt that the experience of being "in love" is like a scaffolding -- an intense, ecstatic opportunity, within which a true thing of beauty, an enduring love, may (or may not) be created. When the blinding madness of "being in love" fades (as it almost inevitably does), the scaffolding falls, clarity returns somewhat, and you then see whether there was anything true and real built there, or whether you just have leftover bits of scaffolding ;>
Of course what these scientists so recently discovered, our ancestors and artists have known and described for thousands of years. And another way of looking at this study is that it is strong scientific evidence for the innate and inborn human desire to get out of our own little skull-bound ego-prisons and open ourselves to deeply merging with the world around us, in order to experience life beyond the limits of our own small brains.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=47560
Love Is the Drug...
By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, June 10 (HealthDay News) -- In love songs, passion lifts you up or cuts you like a knife, wreaking havoc with your emotions as it tosses logic out the window.
But what if love isn't about emotion at all? What if it isn't even about sex?
That's exactly what a team of scientists is discovering as the watch new love literally blaze its trail across the living brain. Using real-time MRI brain images of people in the initial throes of passion, they're finding that love originates far from the brain's logic center, its emotional nexus and, perhaps most surprisingly, its centers of sexual desire.
In fact, love may vie for the same real estate in the brain as drug addiction.
"There's this general craving-and-desire system that's engaged, only in this case the desire isn't for money or a drug or power or freedom. The desire is for merging with another person," explained co-researcher Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
"Furthermore, the neural systems engaged by sex and love are really quite distinct," he added. "This is really the first unambiguous evidence that they really are separate systems."
According to Aron, the findings help explain instances where people fall in love with people they aren't even sexually attracted to; or why others can feel equally strong, sudden emotion for a newborn child or even God.
In their study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, Aron and his co-researchers used functional MRI to watch the real-time brain activity of 17 college students (10 women, seven men), all of whom were in the early weeks or months of new love.
Brain activity was monitored under two conditions: first, when the participants were given a picture of their beloved to gaze at, and then when they were asked to look at the picture of an acquaintance.
Staring at their lover's image "lit up a lot of brain areas, but the two most important ones were, first, the ventral tegmental area -- a little factory near the base of the brain that makes dopamine, a natural stimulant -- and the caudate nucleus, a large organ in the middle of the head that looks a bit like a medium-sized shrimp," said co-researcher Helen Fisher, an anthropologist researcher at Rutgers University.
"Both of these areas are part of the reward system in the brain -- the dopaminergic system associated with very focused attention, elation, energy, craving, motivation," she said. Based on this evidence, "we feel now that romantic love is a drive, not an emotion. It's a basic mating drive."
In fact, the brain's emotion centers tended to light up only as new love grew old, she said. "When we took a look at those who had been in love between eight to 17 months, in fact we did see new activity in regions associated with the emotions," she said.
But early love, rooted as it is in the caudate nucleus, is all about addiction.
"It is a drug addiction," Fisher said. "It's certainly got some of the main characteristics of drug addiction -- as with drugs, once you fall in love you need that person more and more, so much so that, after a while, you have to marry them. There are other things, too -- real dependence, personality changes, withdrawal symptoms."
And just like the need for cocaine or heroin, love can make people do crazy, sometimes dangerous things.
"It's a major source of depression, suicide, stalking, homicide," Aron pointed out. "Of course, on the more positive side, it's a major source of overcoming depression and making life more meaningful, too."
The findings make sense to Paul Sanberg, a professor of neuroscience at the University of South Florida whose early work concentrated on the caudate nucleus. "From a behavioral point of view -- having been in romantic love in my life -- I can say it is addictive," he said. "And from an anatomical point of view, they're talking about dopamine."
Most intriguing was the finding that romance and sex are not neurologically linked, although behaviorally they usually go hand-in- hand.
"Sex is only a tiny part of love," said Fisher, also the author of Why We Love. "You want to have sex with the person, but much more than that you want them to call you, to write, to return your love, to be loved back."
People in love often describe the experience as an "expansion" of self, she said, a more general merging with the other: "Your edges get very porous -- you lose yourself in order to include the other person."
And when that person leaves, real withdrawal -- heartache -- sets in. In a second, as-yet-unpublished experiment, the researchers conducted functional MRI scans on individuals who had been recently dumped by the objects of their affection.
"These people were in terrible pain," Fisher said. Again, areas of the brain linked to passionate love lit up on fMRI when participants were given a picture of the loved one. "We all know that when you are dumped you just love the person harder -- I call that 'frustration attraction,' " she said. "And that reward system in the brain, when it realizes that the reward is delayed in coming in, it still sustains its activity."
According to Aron, the next step is to find out what happens to brain activity as new love passes away and settles into a more secure, albeit less intense, emotional realm.
"We're hoping to get funding to do studies where we follow the same people, keep scanning them every few months and see how things change," he said.
The team is also gathering a study group of people who claim to feel great passion for their partner 10, or even 20, years into the relationship.
"They aren't common, but enormously interesting," Aron said. "How can it be that you've been together that long and you're still intensely in love with them?"
Fans of Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights may worry that all this neuroscience will drain the poetry out of passion. But Fisher says there's no reason to fret. "Look, you can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake," she said. "Then you can sit down with that cake, and taste every bit of its poetry and just revel in the joy of it."
SOURCES: Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor, psychology, State University
of New York, Stony Brook; Helen Fisher, research professor,
department of anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.;
Paul Sanberg, Ph.D., professor, neuroscience, and director, Center
of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair, University of South
Florida College of Medicine, Tampa; June 2005, the Journal of
Neurophysiology
Copyright © 2005 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Daily Health and Medical News
I've always felt that the experience of being "in love" is like a scaffolding -- an intense, ecstatic opportunity, within which a true thing of beauty, an enduring love, may (or may not) be created. When the blinding madness of "being in love" fades (as it almost inevitably does), the scaffolding falls, clarity returns somewhat, and you then see whether there was anything true and real built there, or whether you just have leftover bits of scaffolding ;>
Of course what these scientists so recently discovered, our ancestors and artists have known and described for thousands of years. And another way of looking at this study is that it is strong scientific evidence for the innate and inborn human desire to get out of our own little skull-bound ego-prisons and open ourselves to deeply merging with the world around us, in order to experience life beyond the limits of our own small brains.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=47560
Love Is the Drug...
By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, June 10 (HealthDay News) -- In love songs, passion lifts you up or cuts you like a knife, wreaking havoc with your emotions as it tosses logic out the window.
But what if love isn't about emotion at all? What if it isn't even about sex?
That's exactly what a team of scientists is discovering as the watch new love literally blaze its trail across the living brain. Using real-time MRI brain images of people in the initial throes of passion, they're finding that love originates far from the brain's logic center, its emotional nexus and, perhaps most surprisingly, its centers of sexual desire.
In fact, love may vie for the same real estate in the brain as drug addiction.
"There's this general craving-and-desire system that's engaged, only in this case the desire isn't for money or a drug or power or freedom. The desire is for merging with another person," explained co-researcher Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
"Furthermore, the neural systems engaged by sex and love are really quite distinct," he added. "This is really the first unambiguous evidence that they really are separate systems."
According to Aron, the findings help explain instances where people fall in love with people they aren't even sexually attracted to; or why others can feel equally strong, sudden emotion for a newborn child or even God.
In their study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, Aron and his co-researchers used functional MRI to watch the real-time brain activity of 17 college students (10 women, seven men), all of whom were in the early weeks or months of new love.
Brain activity was monitored under two conditions: first, when the participants were given a picture of their beloved to gaze at, and then when they were asked to look at the picture of an acquaintance.
Staring at their lover's image "lit up a lot of brain areas, but the two most important ones were, first, the ventral tegmental area -- a little factory near the base of the brain that makes dopamine, a natural stimulant -- and the caudate nucleus, a large organ in the middle of the head that looks a bit like a medium-sized shrimp," said co-researcher Helen Fisher, an anthropologist researcher at Rutgers University.
"Both of these areas are part of the reward system in the brain -- the dopaminergic system associated with very focused attention, elation, energy, craving, motivation," she said. Based on this evidence, "we feel now that romantic love is a drive, not an emotion. It's a basic mating drive."
In fact, the brain's emotion centers tended to light up only as new love grew old, she said. "When we took a look at those who had been in love between eight to 17 months, in fact we did see new activity in regions associated with the emotions," she said.
But early love, rooted as it is in the caudate nucleus, is all about addiction.
"It is a drug addiction," Fisher said. "It's certainly got some of the main characteristics of drug addiction -- as with drugs, once you fall in love you need that person more and more, so much so that, after a while, you have to marry them. There are other things, too -- real dependence, personality changes, withdrawal symptoms."
And just like the need for cocaine or heroin, love can make people do crazy, sometimes dangerous things.
"It's a major source of depression, suicide, stalking, homicide," Aron pointed out. "Of course, on the more positive side, it's a major source of overcoming depression and making life more meaningful, too."
The findings make sense to Paul Sanberg, a professor of neuroscience at the University of South Florida whose early work concentrated on the caudate nucleus. "From a behavioral point of view -- having been in romantic love in my life -- I can say it is addictive," he said. "And from an anatomical point of view, they're talking about dopamine."
Most intriguing was the finding that romance and sex are not neurologically linked, although behaviorally they usually go hand-in- hand.
"Sex is only a tiny part of love," said Fisher, also the author of Why We Love. "You want to have sex with the person, but much more than that you want them to call you, to write, to return your love, to be loved back."
People in love often describe the experience as an "expansion" of self, she said, a more general merging with the other: "Your edges get very porous -- you lose yourself in order to include the other person."
And when that person leaves, real withdrawal -- heartache -- sets in. In a second, as-yet-unpublished experiment, the researchers conducted functional MRI scans on individuals who had been recently dumped by the objects of their affection.
"These people were in terrible pain," Fisher said. Again, areas of the brain linked to passionate love lit up on fMRI when participants were given a picture of the loved one. "We all know that when you are dumped you just love the person harder -- I call that 'frustration attraction,' " she said. "And that reward system in the brain, when it realizes that the reward is delayed in coming in, it still sustains its activity."
According to Aron, the next step is to find out what happens to brain activity as new love passes away and settles into a more secure, albeit less intense, emotional realm.
"We're hoping to get funding to do studies where we follow the same people, keep scanning them every few months and see how things change," he said.
The team is also gathering a study group of people who claim to feel great passion for their partner 10, or even 20, years into the relationship.
"They aren't common, but enormously interesting," Aron said. "How can it be that you've been together that long and you're still intensely in love with them?"
Fans of Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights may worry that all this neuroscience will drain the poetry out of passion. But Fisher says there's no reason to fret. "Look, you can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake," she said. "Then you can sit down with that cake, and taste every bit of its poetry and just revel in the joy of it."
SOURCES: Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor, psychology, State University
of New York, Stony Brook; Helen Fisher, research professor,
department of anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.;
Paul Sanberg, Ph.D., professor, neuroscience, and director, Center
of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair, University of South
Florida College of Medicine, Tampa; June 2005, the Journal of
Neurophysiology
Copyright © 2005 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Daily Health and Medical News
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 01:57 am (UTC)Very good analogy but rather than the scaffolding falling, imagine instead that the core of it is something so strong that the scaffolding could rise 1000 times higher than you think it should.
There is. It is about heart, soul, body and mind. All sides of the puzzle pieces have to fit together, no matter which way you turn them.
NEVER "change" for the other person. You are who you are and always will be. To supress yourself is wrong, to "become" what they want is wrong. Either of these things will lead to the downfall of the scaffolding. Guess now we know why.
I know many married polyamors. In truth, they are nothing but people who use love / sex / relationships to feed an addiction. The real answer is to stop using people as a "fix" for your lacking of emotional stability.
Hope you don't mind my radical views. I added you to my friends.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 04:16 am (UTC)No problem, I enjoy it when people feel free to express their own truths and opinions, whether I agree with them or not -- heresy is an old avocation of mine, and thoughtful radicalism is a stance I deeply respect ;> I'm curious how you ran across my LJ, though, if you don't mind my asking. I've been running into a number of old friends on LJ recently, but I don't think our paths have crossed before?
Very good analogy but rather than the scaffolding falling, imagine instead that the core of it is something so strong that the scaffolding could rise 1000 times higher than you think it should.
I'm not sure I entirely get your meaning here (the 1000 times higher part) -- but I'm thinking you're agreeing that the "being in love" period is an opportunity to create something deeper rooted....or not.
Absolutely, loving another person(s) is about heart, soul, body and mind, if it's real -- all parts of the self are deeply engaged. I should have been more clear -- I'd like to think that there's something more to falling in love than a physio-chemical reaction. But perhaps not. On the other hand, the study didn't address the process of falling in love at all -- all it studied was the brain activity associated with being in love.
NEVER "change" for the other person.
Hmm. On one level I completely agree with you -- trying to change who you are, or expecting another person(s) to change who they are, for a relationship is doomed to unhappy failure. But where's the line between changing your Self, who you deeply, truly are, and changing a behavior, a habit, a preference, a tendency, and so on? There's plenty of grey area there. My own experience is that successful long-term relationships require frequent negotiation and renegotiation, adjustment and accomodation, and at times much soul-searching about the difference between needs, wants, whims and desires, between core aspects of self and those characteristics which are more surface. I suspect that inflexibility or unwillingness to accomodate to the other(s) in a relationship cause more breakups than being too accomodating. I like to think there usually a middle ground to be found between being purely selfish and purely a selfless martyr, of knowing what you truly need and knowing how to openly and honestly ask for it.
I know many married polyamors. In truth, they are nothing but people who use love / sex / relationships to feed an addiction. The real answer is to stop using people as a "fix" for your lacking of emotional stability.
Another hmm. I know many people, married, single, polyamorous or monogamous, who use love/sex/relationships to feed addictions, to fill an empty place, to be in a constant roller-coaster cycle of emotional turmoil. And I also know that it's possible to be in long-term, stable polyamorous or monogamous relationships (married or not) that do not fall into this pattern. I'd agree that there is a real answer in not looking outside oneself for the answer, to never expecting another person, or relationships of any kind, to make you "complete." As the classic "Dysfunction" entry in the Demotivator series (http://www.despair.com/demotivators/dysfunction.html) says, "The only consistent feature of all your dissastisfying relationships is you." ;> Or to put it into a more positive context, "for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without."
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 04:24 am (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/users/harpiequeen/109536.html
Bravo. You cannot truly love another until you love and accept yourself.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-29 02:25 pm (UTC)The Rilke quote below talks about "bodily delight," but I think it applies equally well to the intensity of falling in love, particularly what you refer to as the pattern of using people as a "fix" or looking outside for the knowledge and wisdom that really only exists inside onself:
"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments."
--Rilke
And I can't take any credit for the final quote, above -- it's from Starhawk's adaptation of Doreen Valiente's "Charge of the Goddess" (http://www.reclaiming.org/about/witchfaq/charge.html)