BRAIN IN LOVE

- Dhanashri Shinde

“Love”! After reading the word you started to imagine your specific person, started to feel romantic; oh! Sorry I just forgot about that romantic song is playing in your mind, and I know you’re also dancing with your person. Sounds romantic, isn’t it!

Love isn’t just a word; it’s just a beautiful feeling. But the value of love, definition of love varies from person to person; for someone is a beautiful feeling, it's a pain, for someone it's just a physical attraction, for someone it’s an attachment, for someone its whole world, for someone is the beautiful song & for someone is just a heart touching poem. Many authors write on love, many poets make a poem on love.

  

 

Love can make you happy, foolish, obsessed, distracted, passionate, exhausted or pretty or much everything in between. So it should come to as little surprise that falling in love does quite a number on your brain. When you fall in love with someone, a whole host of changes are taking place in your brain and body to create that passion and happiness and of course the less desirable effects too.

Every one of us once falls in love. Anyone is here who never? Almost everyone passes through this phase. But have you ever stopped for a second to think that what is science and psychology of love? Why we fall for that specific person? Did you ever notice love is a lot of mysterious natural emotion in us? Or it’s a just beautiful feeling helping species remain alive? If not, then it’s time to be mindful because reading continuously will definitely help you to envision and live a fuller life.

We simply called these mysterious feelings “LOVE”. But believe it or not, there is complexity behind the wheel driving us to cogitate our involvement to these devoted or passionate feelings. Science has sought long to detect the basic phenomenon behind love and has concluded at many stages that love is the most alluring feeling in our life; aiding us to thrive fidelity, compel us to accelerate the process of reproduction. Staying over the rainbow and in love with the world is not casual nexus.

LOVE

“Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you,” Dr Helen Fisher (anthropologist and author why we love) said in a TED talk about the brain and love. “You can’t stop thinking about another human being. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth”.

When you first fall in love, you experience a rush of hormones to the brain including love hormone Oxytocin, pleasure hormone Dopamine and sex hormones estrogen and testosterone, and other hormones like adrenaline which make the heart beat faster.  Hormones play an important role when you fall in love. Now, neuroscience research has shown that love quite literally is like a drug: Falling in love activates the same system in the brain as cocaine addiction. Romantic love and attraction can activate the brain’s opioid system, which is the part of the brain involved in ‘liking’ something. Scientists have suggested that this system may have evolved to help us choose the best partner.

Anyone who’s been in love knows that it can be more than a little distracting, and now we understand why. Neuroscientists have linked passionate love with intense changes in emotion and attention as we as reduced cognitive control (less able to control attention). The type of love that’s cultivated through the practice of loving-kindness activates the empathy and emotion in the brain.

 

THREE STAGES OF LOVE

1. Lust
2. Attraction
3. Attachment

LUST

It is the initial stage of love. ‘TESTOSTERONE’ and ‘ESTROGEN’ are two basic hormones present equally in both men and women body that excites the feeling of lust. The limbic process in the brain is a response to lust that has health-promoting and stress-reducing potentials. 

    ATTRACTION

     His or her impatience for attracting somebody leads to excitement and the individual is left with no other option but only to think about that specific person. Scientifically it has proven that there are three basic hormones of attraction that portray drastic changes to our personality.

 These are –

A.    Adrenaline

B.    Dopamine

C.    Serotonin

           Attraction is a charming process of life and slight personality changes are positive for this reason. Whenever you bump into your crush, your sense decline, your heart beats like a drum, your mouth gets dry and your tongue feels like sandpaper.

       ADRENALINE

Scientists have elaborated that –

·       Stress Response

·       Increase in Level of ‘ADRENALINE’ and ‘CORTISOL’

·       Attitude reaction

          This happens when we get attracted to someone.

      DOPAMINE

The brain of a new couple in love is observed using FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). It was shocking to discover that the brain of both male and female have a large strike of dopamine (pleasure hormone). The couples revealed that they examined the following fact in themselves from the day they fall in love to until now –

·       Surge  of Energy

·       Decrease of hunger

·       Sleep less

·       More attention

         SEROTONIN

It diverts your mind to think about your lover and nothing else. Its level is less in men than women.                              

   ATTACHMENT

        Attachment helps the couple to take the relationship on an advanced level (like children bearing). Two hormones help to retain the feeling of love with your specific person.

 

These are –

•             Oxytocin
•      Vasopressin

 

        OXYTOCIN

      This is known as the ‘CUDDLE HORMONE’ release equally in both men and women (especially during orgasm). It helps to build a strong bond between mother and infant during birth; this is a sensitive hormone that signals the breast to release milk on baby’s cry or touch.

      VASOPRESSIN

It’s known as ‘ANTIDIURETIC HORMONE’, it performs operation along with kidney and control thrust. It released in major quantity just after physical contact, this hormone is secreted by the pituitary gland. It’s a hormone of a long-lasting relationship. 

 REFERENCES

8 Crazy Things Love Does To Your Brain, According To Science | HuffPost

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