3 Strange Ways Your Brain Shapes Who You Love And How Deeply You Feel It, Says Research
Adrian Ordonez | Unsplash The brain is such a powerful organ because it rarely stops working while you are alive, and while it is working, it has a huge effect on how you feel love. When people talk about the brain and the heart, they tend to pit them against each other.
The brain is supposed to be this logical organ, and the heart is supposed to be all about emotion and love. "Love is a high-order function that requires the brain's prefrontal cortex to send the amygdala signals that are powerful enough to overcome the automatic fight or flight response," revealed neuroscientist Dr. Lucy Brown.
It turns out that the brain contains many of your emotions in ways you might not have known about, and they deeply shape who you're attracted to and how intensely you feel that attraction.
Here are 3 strange ways your brain shapes who you love and how deeply you feel it:
1. The thin line between love and hate lies within the brain
The common saying actually has some weight to it: A study at University College London found that the brain's "love" and "hate" circuits have identical structures.
"Hate is often considered to be an evil passion that should, in a better world, be tamed, controlled, and eradicated. Yet to the biologist, hate is a passion that is of equal interest to love," said Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist who specializes in studying the primate visual brain, who carried out the brain scan study. "Like love, it is often seemingly irrational and can lead individuals to heroic and evil deeds. How can two opposite sentiments lead to the same behavior?"
Both emotions include regions such as the putamen and insula, and those are linked to aggression and distress. So the next time you fly off the handle in an argument with your partner, remember it's because love and hate exist in the same place.
2. Love physically hurts thanks to your brain
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"Love hurts" isn't just a beautiful lyric; it's reality. There is also a reason why some old couples die within months of each other. Neuroimaging studies have found that regions that process physical pain are tied to social anguish.
When you go through a breakup or lose someone you love, your brain runs the experience through the same neural pathways that light up when you hurt yourself. Researchers call the phenomenon of widows and widowers dying after their spouses "broken heart syndrome." This is a very real medical condition where the sudden emotional shock of losing a partner triggers a heart dysfunction.
3. The brain also uses love as a pain reliever
Stanford University School of Medicine found that intense feelings of love can actually alleviate pain and can be just as powerful as illicit drugs. So it turns out that anything you are feeling gets intensified by your brain.
"When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that impact their experience of pain," said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the Division of Pain Management and senior author of the study.
"We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine, a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward, and motivation."
Love is wired into the same neurotransmitters that handle pain, reward, and survival, which is why it can feel consuming. Dr. Brown has described the brain in love as having a safety mechanism that lets us tolerate the risk of getting close to someone. The overlap between love, hate, pain, and pleasure is your brain working exactly the way it was supposed to.
Nicole Weaver is a senior writer whose work has been featured in New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, Psych Central, Yahoo, Huffington Post, MSN, and more.
