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Romantic Chemistry

I picked this up from my student newspaper.

Apparently the feelings that we all feel when we are in love with someone, are related to the hormones and the neurotransmitter dopamine in our brain.

I'll just fully quote this.

The butterflies in your stomach when he walks into the room. The way you can't help but smile when someone mentions her name. The rush of excitement when you realise that text message is from him. Henry Louis Mencken said, "Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence, " but can we use science to explain why we suddenly turn from sensible to ridiculous over a special someone?

Dr Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and author at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and neurologist Dr Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, carried out studies in which MRI scans were taken of the brains of young people in love. The scans showed activity in the ventral tagmentum area of the brain when the subjects looked at pictures of their loved ones and revealed the
neurotransmitter dopamine to be the main culprit for sending us head-over-heels.

The results gave scope for dividing love into three categories, with different chemicals responsible for each stage. The first category is lust, unsurprisingly driven by those crazy sex hormones, the androgens and the oestrogens. Second is attraction, or romantic love. This is where high levels of dopamine and noradrenaline come in, and also a fall in serotonin, the 'happy hormone', which may explain the often obsessive nature of romantic love (I'm talking about Facebook stalking here.) And finally there is attachment - the sense of stability and calm in a long term relationship - driven by the 'trust hormones' oxytocin and vasopressin.

The ventral tagmentum areas may not sound rock 'n' roll but they are, in fact, the same areas activated by cocaine. Cocaine addiction is strongly associated with dopamine and this dopamine-rich area of the brain is thought to be linked with rewards and motivation. When we obtain something we deeply desire, whether it be food, water, or love, these regions 'light up'. So was Bryan Ferry correct when he sang 'Love is the Drug'? These findings strongly suggest that love isn't so much as emotion as a fundamental drive similar to thirst and hunger.

What is more, the caudate area of the brain, which also became active in the love-struck subjects of the study, is associated with cravings. So perhaps there really is such a thing as love addiction.

No wonder that cute boy you met on Saturday night never called you or the girl who was once crazy about you decided that she had changed her mind. Our bodies just couldn't handle it if we were in this euphoric 'high dopamine' state permanently - and so all these effects are designed to be short-lived. This is where oxytocin comes in, to calm our over-excited selves down and produce a more sustainable and mellow love.

There is also scientific evidence that may help to explain that feeling you never want to experience again - being dumped. This is associated with a change in the location of dopamine, as it disperses to the brain regions associated with physical pain, risk-taking, addiction and obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of an 'it's not you, it's me' speech may recognise the above symptoms.

It seems, then , that we are pre-programmed to experience the giddy highs and sorry lows of love, time after time. So, the next time you lock eyes with that tall handsome stranger in the library, remember that you may just be craving you next fix.

Kate Pringle

So it seems that these findings provide cause to say that love is not an emotion but more like hunger and thirst. Whoa. Very interesting.

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