My apologies for not doing any blogs since the first two, but sadly I’ve just gone from a not so good experience involving love. Thus, it came to me!
Hey! Why not make this my new blog? And that how this blog came to be.
So we all have fallen in love at least once in your brief lives. Whether it was in kindergarten or when you were a junior in high school, you fell in love profoundly. Your perception of life suddenly changed. You were not effectuated with this individual. Every time you were around that person you felt this high. You felt this deep and sudden connection that you thought was special. You practically became obsessed with that person. Then one day something happens and your left heartbroken. You try to forgive that person yet you can’t, they roam through your mind every second.
Well, as the field of the human mind, Psychology has research and analyzed what love was biologically. And the findings were enlightening as they found out the regions of the brain that correspond to it. An anthropologist at Rutgers Univ. named Helen Fisher conducted an experiment. His subjects were none only than individuals which just fell in love. Her scans reported that there was region in the brain that lilted up, called the tegmental area. This part of the brain is a base for creating Dopamine for the brains higher regions. Dopamine is that little chemical that is responsible for making you feel that feeling when you got an A on a ridiculously hard test, find a hundred dollar bill on the floor or you just found out your favorite team just won the super bowl. Drugs ad Narcotics can also provide the same feeling in higher doses. Thus then in turn, is responsible for why we love to be around them, because we are awarded when we are.
However Dopamine isn’t working by itself. For the exhilaration you get after winning a game or acing a test doesn’t last longer than a few hours, so there must be some other agent involve that retains that obsession which feels far deeper than any mere addiction and then we look at the nucleus accumbens. In the brains nucleus accumbens processes signals from the lower brain; these signals being dopamine, serotonin and a key chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the same chemical that flows throughout the body of mothers when they just have a child. So when a chemical like these flows through the bodies of new lovers it is quite clear why we feel this utter connection with that significant other.
Lastly we have a pair of shrimp-like structures called the caudate nuclei, which is the storage center for learned abilities and patterns. Such skills include riding a bike, driving a car, swimming and any other motor activity that isn’t easily forgotten. Thus when a newly fallen lover comes into term, this love becomes stored in this region and thus has a long permanence which is why it is basically hard to forget about a certain person for a prolonged period of time.
These three regions are the predominantly areas of the light up when the test of newly in love couples was done though some scans. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all relationships and this indeed does change after the relationship has become establish for a more prolonged time. However for the time being these three areas are active. More of the chemistry of love shall be discussed on later blogs.
Work Cited: "The Science of Romance". Kluger, Jeffrey. The Brain: A users Guide. Time Magazine. Time Inc. New York, New York 2009
