Jay Dixit - Love in the Age of Neuroscience

Science is trying to classify every human experience with brain images - but the image is NOT the feeling or the experience. It's like confusing the map with the territory.

Love in the Age of Neuroscience

on whether love can be quantified using neuroimaging.

By Jay Dixit

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. I would rather be with you than anyone else.
(strongly disagree 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 strongly agree)

2. I yearn to know all about you.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

3. For me, you are the perfect romantic partner.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

4. You always seem to be on my mind.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

5. I sense my body responding when you touch me.
(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

These are questions from the Passionate Love Scale, a questionnaire psychologists use to measure the intensity of romantic love. What they find is that love declines steadily from moment it starts. One study finds that average marital happiness falls sharply for the first ten years, then enters a slow slide from which most couples never recover. The more stable, less exciting companionate love often takes its place—but the passion fades away.

My friend Sam Schechner reports in today's Wall Street Journal on a rare class of "outlier" couples who somehow keep the spark alive—extraordinary people "way off the curve" who claim they stay wildly in love year after year.

Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University, working with Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Psychology Today Blogs' own Helen Fisher, did an fMRI study in which they examined people while they looked at images of their lovers. Among people who had just fallen in love, there was a flurry of activation in the ventral tegmental area—the primitive reward-mediating part of the brain that activates when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or an addict gets a blast of cocaine.

In that sense, love is an addiction. The brain knows what it wants and won't take no for an answer. The other person becomes a goal for which you would surmount any obstacle. "It's not a craving," says Brown. "It's a high."

But researchers found the same activation among subjects who said they were still madly in love after being together for decades. They said they were still in love, and the scan confirmed it.

Implication: Love can not only be quantified, but can be measured in the brain. The next step is to figure out what these love wizards are doing differently—and what the rest of us can learn from them.

Tags: Psychology, love, brain, relationships, Jay Dixit, Love in the Age of Neuroscience, Psychology Today, blogs, Brainstorm, neuroscience, addiction