“It’s also true that like the Moon—a trigger of its own legendary form of madness—love has its phases,” said Dr. Richard Schwartz, an associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a consultant to McLean and Massachusetts General hospitals. Schwartz—whose research interests revolve around social isolation, loneliness, social connection, and lasting marriage—claimed in an article in the Harvard Gazette that although Science has had more frequent meetings with love throughout the years, very little has been discovered regarding its pleasant—sometimes confusing—and often disarming mysteries.
For all of recorded history, scientists and philosophers alike have been fascinated and intrigued by the idea of love—how it blossoms, perseveres, and fades.
Quantifying the unseen
We all seem to know when we feel love. People often describe and understand it as an inimitable feeling that catches them by surprise. Seemingly born out of spontaneity, the romantic feelings associated with love occur inside the brain which performs various computations in a matter of seconds. For some, however, love is not a feeling, but rather a choice.
“Love is about compromise, first and foremost,” establishes Seth Gabon (IV, CS-CSE). “It’s a choice. A lot of people confuse love as a feeling although it’s not. One person’s choice to love another is an effort—it’s not passive. You have to choose to love someone each and every day you’re with them.”
“Falling in love is a different experience in the brain,” shares Jim Baloloy, an assistant professorial lecturer from the Psychology Department. He explains that aside from dopamine—a neurotransmitter responsible for the sensations of pleasure and satisfaction—flooding an individual’s brain, resulting in racing heartbeats, sweaty palms, and flushed cheeks, the stress hormone cortisol also joins the mix. Baloloy states that cortisol is a hormone that controls one’s mood, motivation, and fear.
He furthers, “As stress levels increase, serotonin levels decrease, which result in your mind being meddled with hope, rumination, and even fear,” elaborating that serotonin plays an instrumental role in influencing an individual’s overall mood due to its role as a neurotransmitter along and in-between nerve cells.
Measuring love is a difficult task, Baloloy emphasizes, as it can mean different things for different people. “If you ask 10 people what love is, it’s possible [that] you’d get 10 unique definitions,” he claims. Baloloy further details that measuring something entails tangibility—it has to be directly observable, thus measurable. “While there are many observable representations of love—[like] kissing, hugging, texting each other at three in the morning—could we say that a person who shows less of these has less love?” he inquires.
We love being in love
Based on the landmark research findings of Dr. Helen Fisher and her team back in 2005, a person in love exhibits the same brain activity as a person addicted to cocaine or other drugs of the same nature. Fisher—a biological anthropologist who has revolutionized the world through her groundbreaking research on the evolutionary origins of human behavior and romantic love—shared that romantic love is a “universal craving,” apart from being a very strong addiction.
Among these major brain regions, the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Tegmental Area, both of which are instrumental in producing dopamine, showed notably increased activity. These regions are principal components in the brain’s reward circuit, a pathway connected to various parts of the brain that establishes links between pleasure and activity.
To put this into perspective, the reward circuit is well beyond an individual’s cognitive thinking process, or the mental processes associated with acquiring knowledge and comprehension, as it is also linked with craving, wanting, and motivation—essential sensibilities that critically affect a person’s overall physical and mental composure.
Fisher revealed that the reward system is counterintuitively more active when an individual is unable to attain what they desire. She, along with her team and fellow neuroscientist Dr. Lucy Brown, an associate from the Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered this upon examining data on people who had recently gone through a breakup.
Life’s greatest prize
“For those who are already in a relationship, the experience of love in the brain is also different. [You] have the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin which are responsible for attachment, calmness, security, and bonding,” explains Baloloy.
He elaborates that the amount of oxytocin levels produced by the brain is directly proportional to the measure of physical interactions that an individual has with his or her partner. That is to say, more interactions presumably translate to extended feelings of security and attachment. Baloloy further points out that vasopressin, a hormone known to regulate blood pressure and kidney function, is also related to behaviors that lead to long-term and faithful relationships.
Overall, how these hormones affect a person compelled by love could explain why long-term couples appear less passionate yet more attached as compared to newly-formed couples, he reveals.
“Biologists and neurologists may look at love in terms of physical and biochemical responses. Sociologists may look at love in terms of the formation of relationships. Psychologists look at love [depending] on their theoretical orientation,” Baloloy ruminates, expanding on how different disciplines yield diverse schools of thought with regard to love. “The point is that love is not only a social construct. At the very least, it is also biological, psychological, mathematical, physical, and even meta-physical.”
