The Loving Brain – Dipping Into Light

Although poets and musicians insist that love is a matter of the heart, it is your brain that falls in love. Now neuroscience and functional brain imaging allow us to finally understand the realm once called “the madness of the gods.”

This recent brain mapping can help us get better at finding our own path. It can also help explain why wily financial or political machinations tied to love so often fail, and even why beautiful trails often peter out. Evidence also shows that the most reliable life path through this realm of madness is ultimately quite simple. More on that later.

To start at the beginning, the brain is so deeply invested in love because it is profoundly motivated by reproduction. To have mates who are irresistibly drawn to each other, yearn for each other’s touch, and obsess about one another increases the odds of both reproductive “events” and the survival of the resulting offspring. The origins of love are that simple. The results, of course, are anything but.

The Nitty vs. the Gritty

Helen Fisher, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute who spent a lifetime studying love, has broken down romantic love into three basic phases. The first is the libido, our basic sex drive fueled by neurochemicals like testosterone in men and estrogen in women, set ablaze by dopamine, the same neurochemical that drives cravings and addiction. Adding dopamine is the molecular equivalent of throwing gasoline on hot coals.

The second phase is romantic attraction. It, too, involves a great deal of dopamine but also chemicals like norepinephrine, which provide drive and focus, as well as endorphins, the brain’s endogenous opio-peptide system that produces the high of falling in love. A couple may become inseparable for the simple reason that separation may be accompanied by cravings similar to withdrawal from prescription opioids. As one friend put it, this is “the phase where we turn into love junkies.” It is a roller-coaster ride because the neurochemicals arrive in higher concentrations and in different combinations—waves of bombardment that we experience as joy and despair. People can fall in love with being in love because what they really love is the roller-coaster ride.

The final phase—if we don’t go off the rails—is resolution and attachment, where the couple has profound feelings for each other as long-term partners. It is characterized by trust, warmth, and affection. This aspect of romantic love is dominated by oxytocin, a large neurotransmitter molecule that generates a complex emotional and behavioral response of stability and bonding. Originally, oxytocin was a chemical that drove the intense closeness between a mother and her newborns—and females typically make five times more oxytocin than males. But evolution increased the number of brain areas with receptors that respond to the molecule in both women and men. Mothers who have high levels of oxytocin show higher levels of maternal attention and are more affectionately responsive to their children. Men with higher levels of oxytocin play more with their children. Couples with higher levels of oxytocin describe increased satisfaction with their marital relationships.

One study, done in Zurich, Switzerland, asked a group of couples to write down the subject areas or questions that created the greatest disagreement in their marriages. The couples were then divided into two groups: one group received oxytocin and the other a sham control. The couples that received the oxytocin reported a higher ability to listen attentively to their spouse and a greater tendency to compromise and were less argumentative than the couples in the control group.

Helen Fisher, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute who spent a lifetime studying love, has broken down romantic love into three basic phases.

The Art of Loving Conversation

Let’s say we begin to chat. If I listen attentively to what you have to say, your levels of oxytocin will rise. As that happens, I will sense your attachment growing, and I will listen even more attentively or ask questions to indicate my level of interest—and my level of oxytocin will rise as well. Oxytocin is the molecule of reciprocity. The good news is we can easily induce oxytocin in each other by paying attention. By doing so, we grow closer.

One study evaluated levels of oxytocin at a wedding. Please don’t ask me how you set up a wedding like this—one part family ceremony and one part medical research experiment—but somehow, they did. All of the attendees at the wedding agreed to have blood drawn so the researchers could measure their oxytocin. So, who scored highest for oxytocin? That’s right. The bride and the groom. Who came in second? The parents and siblings of the bride and groom. Just by looking at their data, you get a sense of the attachments among the group—a gigantic web of interconnections revealed by this incredible circulating molecule. Now imagine what might grow if we started crop-dusting the whole planet with oxytocin.

What a Loving Brain Looks Like

Here’s a question answered by brain imaging: How does the brain activity of somebody who’s madly in love and whose love is requited compare to the brain activity of someone who is madly in love but has been rejected? The answer (drumroll, please!) is that the brains of the requited lover and the rejected lover look the same. The brain activity of being in love appears the same—no matter how it plays out with the other person.

Here’s something else: As madly and as passionately as we may think teenagers or younger adults feel when they fall in love, there’s no difference in brain imaging activity between young couples who have just fallen in love and old couples who have been together for decades. In other words, the brain activity that is the signature of love looks the same whether I’m a teenager making out in the back seat of a car or I’m a geezer sharing a cup of coffee with my wife. Whether it’s new love or old, love shines just as brightly in the brain.

Not surprisingly, oxytocin levels are also markers for successful marriages; the higher the levels of oxytocin circulating in a couple’s bloodstream, the greater the likelihood that their bond will last.

The Growing Framework of Love

It has been well established that children who do not receive warmth and affection from a significant adult will not develop normally. Now we know that the very anatomy and morphology of such unloved brains become distorted and highly abnormal. Being unloved during one’s first four years is uncorrectable. The templates we acquire from our parents, siblings, and close family are the templates we need to create emotional connections to friends, spouses, extended families, and sometimes even strangers.

Here’s an extreme example. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting three winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest decoration for valor. Many such “winners” don’t survive to accept their medals, and yet in these three cases, each man claimed he had done nothing special and seemed almost embarrassed about the decoration. They proclaimed that anyone in their unit would have done the same. The three were essentially saying, “These men were my family. So whatever act of courage I may have displayed was motivated out of love for the soldier who served to the right of me and the soldier who served to the left.”

The Bible says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And these heroes suggest that’s true. What started off as a molecular seed of mammalian attachment has morphed into the framework supporting some of the most profound and uplifting values of the human race.

Why a Life of Love?

The longest-lasting medical study in history is the so-called Harvard Study of Adult Development. It started in 1938 (when “adult” meant male) and followed several hundred young men at Harvard University and compared them to men from some of Boston’s poorest and most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Both groups—rich and poor—were followed closely to answer the question: Which factors in a person’s life make them happy and successful? All of these men were repeatedly given psychological evaluations and physical assessments. They were also regularly queried regarding their goals at different points in their lives: career satisfaction, marital stability, physical and mental well-being, and retirement satisfaction. As scientists discovered that women are adults, too, the study expanded to to include interviews with the men’s spouses. More recently, the study was extended to include the next generation, which now comprises more than 2,000 individuals who are the offspring of the original subjects.

On the study’s 70th anniversary, in 2012, psychiatrist George E. Vaillant, M.D., published results from the entire lifespan of the original subjects. Vaillant’s first finding was that financial success (which many of the subjects had reported early in life as a primary goal) was not strongly correlated with either intelligence or one’s initial socioeconomic situation; however, financial success was correlated with the amount of affection experienced in social relationships. In other words, money may not buy love but love marks a path to money. The lifetime study also showed that the amount of connectivity an individual felt to the other important people in their lives was the single most important predictor of physical and mental well-being and longevity.

One reporter asked, “Doctor, after so many decades of study, what made people successful, happy, and fulfilled?” And Vaillant answered, “Love. Full stop.” That’s wisdom to hold metaphorically in your heart—and at the top of the “to do” list in your brain.