Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [75]
There is a great deal of emerging scientific evidence that being in love does strange things to the brain. According to functional MRI scans, infatuated love activates the same brain circuits as obsession, mania, and intoxication. One study found that the areas of the brain activated by cocaine were the same ones that became active when lovers were shown photographs of their partners. People in love also have high levels of PEA, a natural amphetamine found in chocolate. It may be what helps fuel the sudden ability to go without sleep as you stay up all night with your lover. Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist, has compared the brain activity of a person in love to that of a drug addict craving his next fix. And when people talk about the pain of a broken heart, they are being more literal than you would think. Rejection activates the same brain circuits as physical pain. In fact, being in love literally rewires the brain. One of the chemicals released is oxytocin. Along with causing feelings of euphoria, it also appears to melt old neural connections so that large-scale changes in the brain can take place. This makes it easier to learn new things, such as replacing feelings of love for an old partner with feelings of love for a new partner.
These physical manifestations of what once seemed to be merely metaphoric descriptions are not surprising when you start to explore how much physical space our sexual organs monopolize in our brains. Stefan Klein writes, “If the size of individual organs were commensurate with the space given them in the brain, the penis and the vagina could easily outweigh the entire upper body.” In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the brain itself is the most important sexual organ in the body and that, as Helen Fisher claims, the search for love is a fundamental drive like hunger or thirst.
When we fall in love or even when we simply experience desire, a whole slew of chemicals is involved—dopamine, nor-epinephrine, phenylethylamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin to name just a few. Of course, what goes on in men’s brains and what goes on in women’s brains are quite dissimilar. For instance, women in love have activity in different regions of their brain than men in love. This difference can be seen in a wide number of related areas as well. Take, for example, the issue of women’s sexuality. It is a much more elusive phenomenon than men’s sexuality. Physical cues, such as wetness or swelling, do not necessarily indicate sexual arousal or appetite, and according to one study, while heterosexual men were predictably turned on by footage of naked women, the opposite was not true. Videos of naked men did not necessarily cause more arousal for women than the control footage of snowcapped mountains. What really got women going was the degree of sensuality. When that was present, women put men to shame in the polymorphous nature of their desires. Not only did they respond to videos of naked men—they also responded to videos of naked women. In another study, women were even genitally aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating (which evoked no response from men), although the women did not consciously experience any sense of arousal.
Studies of our neurochemistry can tell us a great deal about the nature of sexual attraction. For example, the waning of desire is a common problem for all couples—and not just the human ones. Researchers have dubbed this the Coolidge effect because of a famous incident involving the