Love is Blind

love is blind and lovers cannot see.

Love is Blind

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Crazy in Love MRI images show that when people gaze at pictures of their loved ones, the rational parts of their brains shut down, allowing the heart to rule the head. As a result, wouldbe suitors, their critical faculties dulled, are more likely to overlook niggling personality traits.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, believes that the “rose-tinted spectacles” effect encourages people to take greater risks.

“What seems to be happening is that you have subconsciously made up your mind that you are interested in the person and the rational bit of the brain — the bit that would normally say ‘hang on a minute’ — gets switched off,” he said. “The more emotional parts of the brain are given a free ride. It looks very much like the rose-tinted spectacles kicking in.”

Professor Dunbar’s theory emerged after he analysed findings of brain scan experiments carried out a decade ago at University College London. The research by Semir Zeki and Andreas Bartels used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to look at the brain activity of 17 volunteers as they were shown pictures of their boyfriends or girlfriends. The volunteers were recruited to the experiment because all professed to be “truly, madly and deeply in love”. As they lay in the MRI scanner, they were shown three images of friends and

one of their partner. “What struck me looking at the data was that parts of the frontal lobe, which is the region of the brain that does the heavy rational work, were deactivated when they looked at pictures of their beloved, compared to pictures of their friends,” said Professor Dunbar, who discussed the science of falling of love at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival last night.

The brain regions affected by “rose-tinted spectacle syndrome” are the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex.

These are important in theory of mind, or the ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective, and in rational thought and reasoning.

“In a relationship you are in a trade-off between caution and just going for it,” Professor Dunbar said. “There is a view that emotion exists to get you off the fence.

A purely rational organism would sit on the fence all the time to avoid being hurt.

But if you don’t engage, you won’t form relationships. If the prefrontal cortex is shut down, that protective and cautious element goes.”

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Love is Blind

When you’re in love, four portions of your brain are stimulated and you literally light up!

Neurobiologists at the University College in London, England used MRI brain scans to analyze the brain activity of people experiencing early romantic love. In the tests, four parts of the brain activated significantly when these individuals were shown photos of their love interests.

The MRI images were compared to the brain scans of people in other emotional states including sexual arousal, happiness and cocaine-induced euphoria. However, the activity pattern for romantic love was unique because looking at the photo of their loved one also reduced activity in three portions of the brain that are active when someone is either upset or depressed.

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Love is Blind

How to Know You’re in Love?

Romantic love lights up the same brain regions of lovers, whether they’re heterosexual or homosexual or male or female, a new study indicates.

Pictures from functional magnetic resonance imaging scans (fMRIs) show similar activity in cortical and sub-cortical brain regions when lovers, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, see images of their romantic partners, according to researchers at University College London. These regions are known to be rich in dopaminergic activity. And dopamine, the scientists point out, is the socalled “feel good” neurotransmitter.

Serotonin is thought to be important in regulating emotional relationships as well as in bonding between individuals Semir Zeki, a professor in the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging, and John Romaya, a senior programmer, scanned the brains of 24 volunteers as they viewed pictures of their romantic partners. The participants also looked at pictures of friends of the same sex as their lovers, but to whom they were not attracted.

While some brain regions showed increased activity when lovers viewed images of romantic partners, others shut down, such as parts of the temporal, parietal, and frontal cortex, which are thought to be important in judgment. That finding lends credence to the adage that “love is blind,” says Zeki.

Half of the volunteers were males, half females, and six of each sex were homosexual and the other six heterosexual. And all told the researchers they were passionately in love with their partners. The participants ranged in age from 19 to 47, and relationship lengths ranged from four months to 23 years.

All were asked to rate their feelings toward their romantic partners before and again after scanning, and to declare their sexual orientation in groups ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual.

“Passionate romantic love is commonly triggered by a visual input and is an allconsuming and disorienting state,” Zeki says in a news release. “Previous studies have demonstrated that despite the complexity of this emotion, the brain patterns triggered when viewing the face of someone you’re in love with are limited to only a few, though richly-connected brain regions.”

Zeki says the study was influenced by a reading of world literature about love, including works by Shakespeare, Plato, and Dante. Their writings describe similar sentiments whether in the context of opposite sex or same sex relationships.

All volunteers provided six to eight picture portraits of their lovers and also portraits of other friends of the same sex about two weeks prior to undergoing their fMRI scans.

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Love is Blind

When falling in love the skin flushes, breathing is heavier, and palms become sweaty because the brain is experiencing a biochemical rush of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine which are chemically similar to amphetamines. However, tolerance to these stimulating bio-chemicals can occur easily and it therefore takes more of the substance to get that special feeling of infatuation. For this reason some neuroscientists believe that people who jump from one relationship to another have become addicted to the chemicals produced when falling in love.

Where long-term romantic love is concerned the mere presence of one’s love partner stimulates the production of endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are the bio-chemicals behind the experience of “runner’s high” and are a naturally-occurring pain-killer in the body.

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Love is Blind

Love on the Mind Brain scans could reveal whether new couples have found long-lasting love, researchers have revealed.

Scientists noticed patterns in the brain activity of volunteers who had recently fallen in love and found they could predict whether the couples would be together three years later.

The findings showed even if volunteers believed they were in passionately love when their brains were scanned, by examining their neuron activity scientists could detect whether those feelings were strong enough for the relationship to last.

Volunteers were shown photographs of their partner and were asked to think of memories of them while their brains were scanned.

Where volunteers’ brains showed more activity in the caudate tail area - which reacts emotionally to visual beauty - but less in the medial orbitofrontal cortex - the area linked to criticism and judgement - their relationships tended to last.

Surprisingly the pleasure centres of the brain were less active in the brains of couples who stayed together.

The scientists say reduced activation in this area, which relates to addiction and seeking rewards, has been linked to satiety and satisfaction.

Of the 12 participants studied, half of them remained with their partner at the end of the

three-year period.

Professor Arthur Aron, a s­ ocial psychologist at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, said: ‘All of those involved in the study felt very intensely in love with their partner and this was reflected in their scans, but there were some subtle indicators that showed how stable those feeling were.

‘If that strong feeling was combined with signs that they could regulate emotions, to see the partner positively and deal with conflict, then it seems to be really productive in staying with the person.

Aron said the research could have a practical application in helping people having relationship problems.

Xiaomeng Xu, the lead author of the study at Brown University in Rhode Island, said: ‘Factors present early in the early stages of romantic love seem to play a major role in the development and longevity of the relationship.

‘Our data provides preliminary evidence that neural responses in the early stages of romantic love can predict relationship stability and quality up to 40 months later.

‘The brain regions involved suggest that reward functions may be predictive for relationship stability.’

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“Once you fall in love with somebody, once they trigger the brain system for falling in love, love is blind, no question about that,�

helen Fisher

Love is Blind

Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice that “love is blind and lovers cannot see.” More than 400 years later, brain imaging has offered some scientific support to that iambic verse.

Looking at a brain in love is like watching a neurological fireworks display.

The ventral tegmental area and ventral striatum, nestled in the center of the brain, light up excitedly as the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine spring into action, causing a person to have short attention spans, feel giddiness and crave the object of her desire.

A 2005 study by Rutgers University biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and colleagues examined the fMRI brain scans of 17 men and women who reported being truly, madly in love. Each of the images showed the same activity in the brain’s reward system as that which occurs in the brain of a cocaine addict.

What’s more, the love-struck participants could readily tick off traits or characteristics they didn’t particularly like about their beloveds, but under the influence of pleasure-enhancing dopamine and other monoamines, they quickly overlook those faults.

“Once you fall in love with somebody, once they trigger the brain system for falling in love, love is blind, no question about that,” said Fisher, who recently wrote Why Him? Why Her?, which explores the neurological underpinning of romance.

And once people fall in love, they’re essentially at the mercy of the brain’s reward system until the neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin, which are associated with long-term bonding, produce their calming, stabilizing effect.

But before that dizzying dopamine-fueled process even begins, Fisher told Discovery News that people have much more power to decide who’ll receive their affections.

“Love is extremely blind once you’ve chosen your partner, but it’s not so blind while you’re making that choice,” Fisher said. “Basically, this concept of who you choose, it’s like a funnel. At any point, there are breaking points, moments where it’s just not going to work.”

Mate selection -- as opposed to being in love -- is fairly pragmatic, in fact.

People subconsciously select mates who come from common socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, geographies, education levels and upbringings.

For better or worse, we tend to pick potential partners who are a lot like us.

So while we’re searching around for a sweetheart, the ball is our court to reject those who don’t share commonalities and mesh with what Fisher calls our “love maps,” or the temperaments and features we develop attractions to from childhood. That way, we don’t fall for just anyone.

“In other words, you and I can walk into a room and if everyone was a Pygmy and came up to our hips, we probably wouldn’t

fall in love with them…because they’re too unfamiliar,” Fisher explained.

Gordon G. Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at State University of New York at Albany agrees that people are generally more drawn to others with mutual interests and backgrounds.

“At least for the development of healthy, long-term relationships, it’s not the case that opposites attract,” said Gallup, an expert in interpersonal attraction.

In addition to the lifestyle and temperamental traits that draw two people together, Gallup’s extensive research has also found that innate physical attraction is far from blind. Instead, it engages all of our senses to detect whether someone is a reproductive match.

Take hearing someone’s voice, for instance.

Gallup and fellow researchers found that for women who aren’t taking birth control, their voices are rated as most attractive during the middle of their cycle when they’re most fertile.

Furthermore, Gallup’s studies indicate that hourglass figures for women and wedgeshaped bodies for men also subconsciously signal greater reproductive potential.

“So first impressions, like when you first meet somebody, involve a convergence of information in the visual domain and the auditory domain,” Gallup said.

When that convergence grabs our lusty attention, and passionate kissing eventually ensues, Gallups says an even more potent information exchange occurs.

“The first kiss may not make a relationship, but it can clearly break a relationship,” Gallup said.

“What happens is a lot of information from a lot of different modalities is brought to bear on the first kiss -- the posture, the odor, the extent to which there’s an open mouth kiss, the extent to which there’s an exchange of saliva.”

That intimate interaction subconsciously communicates prospective mates’ genetic and interpersonal compatibility, which explains why human culture has attached such deep meaning to an otherwise unremarkable form of physical contact.

Circling back to Fisher’s research, an explosive, heart-pounding first kiss can ignite that blinding neurological love reaction, activating the dopamine reward system and setting off an addictive response to one’s beloved.

But while humans are hard-wired to fall in love intensely, those neurochemical blinders eventually wear off as we settle into relationships.

Fisher’s studies have also shown that, as with drugs, people develop a tolerance for the neurotransmitters that produce the head-overheels feelings and excitement of early love.

“By and large, we are an animal that pairs up to rear our young,” Fisher said.

How long that euphoric pair bonding lasts, however, is the more unanswerable question, varying from person to person – or lover to lover, as Shakespeare would probably say.

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Hightened Activity

Deactivated

Deactivated

Deactivated

Deactivated

Left: Brain of a volunteer whose relationship lasted. Right: Brain of a volunteer who later split from their partner.

Deactivated

Hightened Activity

Hightened Activity

Hightened Activity

Hightened Activity

Love is Blind

Research indicates that romantic attraction is actually a primitive, biologically-based drive similar to hunger or thirst. The urge for romance is what causes a person to focus on one particular individual. Therefore this biological need for romance explains why someone would willingly walk several miles for a simple hug from their loved one, or experience enormous despair in the face of later rejection.

Research has proven that romantic attraction activates portions of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine which is the chemical messenger associated with feelings of euphoria, cravings and even addictions. Studies have linked high levels of dopamine (and norepinephrine) to better attention spans and short-term memory, hyperactive behaviour, sleeplessness and also goal-oriented behavior.

Therefore when people are falling in love they often exhibit signs of elevated dopamine levels including increased energy, less need for sleep and food, as well as highly focused attention.

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Love is Blind

Love is Blind... And Numb?

The fMRI has come in handy for researchers wanting to know more about what happens when we’re falling in love. In the past, psychologists had to rely entirely on selfreport when trying to understand what people feel from one moment to the next. Now we can take a picture.

The advent of fMRI technology makes it easier than ever to see what happens to the brain in love. It’s also inspired a whole slew of studies in which volunteers are hooked up to devices designed to shock, scare, or burn them. While this merely resurrects the image many of us psychologists had hoped to put to rest once and for all—that of the mad scientist gleefully marching people across dangerous bridges, ordering them to administer shocks, or hooking them up with as many intrusive and uncomfortable electrodes and probes as good grant money can buy—the latest of these studies could tell us a lot about why it’s so easy to ignore the little hurts and slights our partners dole out when we’re busy fawning over them.

Arthur Aron, PhD, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Sean Mackey, PhD, at Stanford University, recently recruited fifteen newly smitten undergraduates willing to be subjected to various levels of discomfort—in this case, by heating their palms to “an uncomfortable temperature.” Nice.

The purpose of the study: to find out if merely looking at a photo of their loved one would have any effect on the subjects’ experience of pain. The undergrads reported no change in their level of pain while staring at the photo of an acquaintance, but when they had a chance to ogle their loved one’s image, something amazing happened: they felt less pain. A closer look at the fMRI images revealed a kind of neurological anesthetic at work. As soon as the love-struck subjects glimpsed their loved one, the reward center of their brains started to light up.

This study arrives against the backdrop of other, similar ones in which volunteers in committed, loving relationships were administered “mild shocks,” either while holding their partner’s hand or toughing it out on their own. When they had a chance to hold their partner’s hand, amazingly, the subjects reported less pain than when they didn’t have the comfort of a loved one. Their fMRI image revealed that when the volunteers held hands with their loved ones during the shock, the pain centers of the brain were relatively quiet; in contrast, when they had to go it alone, their pain centers lit up like a Christmas tree. (Holding a stranger’s hand reduced the intensity of the pain, too, but less so than holding a partner’s).

For over a hundred years, beginning with Freud, researchers and theorists have explored

the phenomenon of “idealization,” in which we view our loved ones through such rose colored glasses it seems they can do no wrong.

Blinded by the glow of romantic love (or the love of one’s children), we tend to miss the faults, the disappointments, the slights—minor and sometimes even major—in the people we love the most. Now it appears there may be a powerful neurological component to love-blindness; and if the pain we feel, not just at the hands of a wild-eyed experimenter wielding electrodes, but at the hands of a loved one, remains subject to the same analgesic influence seen in these studies, maybe love isn’t just blind; maybe it’s also numb.

Perhaps this is why when trying to help people tune into what’s wrong with an exciting new relationship, you run up against a peculiar sort of amnesia: the bitter dissapointment about being “blown off” by a love interest may simply vanish from one week to the next, replaced, puzzlingly, by a loving paean—an adoring catalogue of of their date’s many gifts and accomplishments. When asked about the pain and anger of the previous week, these people often pause, dumbfounded, and say something like. “What do you mean?” If pressed for an answer, they might even offer an admission of sorts: “I guess I’m not as upset anymore.”

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Love is Blind

We’ve all heard the expression that “love is blind” and the chemical factor supports this as it creates an altered state of consciousness and therefore perception. We idealize those we love and overlook the flaws they may possess which paves the way to a long-term relationship because its as respectful as it is forgiving!

However if passionate romance acts upon us like a drug it’s possible that one can build a resistance it the effects over time. If the relationship has grown in the meantime, and the partners have come to a deeper appreciation of each other, then it’s a good bet that while the chemically-induced may be diminished, it would be replaced with other, deeper and more robust emotions.

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Love is Blind

Still Madly in Love?

Couples can still be intensely in love even after many years of marriage and experience the same types of intense romantic feelings as people who have recently fallen in love.

That’s the key conclusion of a new study in which scientists at Stony Brook University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of long-term married couples and compared the images to those of men and women who’d recently fallen in love.

Researchers scanned the brains of 10 women and seven men who said they were still intensely in love with their spouse after an average of 21 years of marriage.

The participants viewed facial images of their partners and images of a close friend, as well as that of a person whose face was not all that familiar. Brain activity was measured while participants looked at the images.

Next, the scientists compared the fMRI results of long-term partners with those from an earlier study that used the same scanning methods with 10 women and seven men who reported that they’d fallen madly in love just within the past year.

The scans showed “many very clear similarities between those who were in love long-term and those who had just fallen madly in love,” Arthur Aron, PhD, of Stony Brook’s department of psychology, says in a news release.

The dopamine-rich region called the ventral

tegmental area “showed greater response to images of a long-term partner when compared with images of a close friend or any of the other facial images,” Aron says.

Dopamine-rich regions are considered feelgood areas. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasures related to sex, music, and even good food.

Colleague Bianca Acevedo, PhD, says the ventral tegmental area “showed greater activation for those in the long-term couple group who scored especially high on romantic love scales and a closeness scale based on questionnaires.”

The researchers say their study is the first to image and analyze “neural correlates” of people in long-term romantic love, and might offer clues as to why couples stay in love.

The scans showed very similar brain activity in both groups in brain regions associated with reward, motivation, and what the scientists described as “wanting.”

motivation, as well as of awareness.

- Relationship length was strongly associated with activity of the ventral and dorsal striatum areas. The activity was similar to that seen in people who yearn for a deceased loved one or who experience cocaine-induced highs.

- Sexual frequency was positively correlated with activity of the brain region known as the posterior hippocampus in an area previous studies have shown to be involved in craving and hunger, in addition to obsession.

Aron is investigating whether the study results can be used to help save the marriages of soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also, the researchers write that the study may have practical applications, “suggesting that educational and therapeutic programs for long-term married couples may be able to set higher standards.

Acevedo and Aron say that while romantic love is a mystery, and maintaining it may never be fully understood, the study provides evidence and possibly clues to what may be essential activity in the brain for love to last.

The study also found that: - Greater closeness with a partner was associated with activity reflecting reward and

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