Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hi
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and this is a
Speaker 1: classic brain Stuff episode. This is actually a script that
Speaker 1: we wrote back when we were doing brain Stuff videos,
Speaker 1: so I tried to adapt it to work without visuals.
Speaker 1: In this one, we get into the sticky science of
Speaker 1: whether being in love can actually be an addiction. Hey,
Speaker 1: they're brain Stuff Lauring vogel Bomb. Here, nicotine, chocolate, alcohol, opioids, work, gambling, sex, food,
Speaker 1: You might as well face it. Life is basically a
Speaker 1: gauntlet of substances and behaviors that humans can become obsessed
Speaker 1: with and dependent on. But what about love? Not just sex,
Speaker 1: but the deep interpersonal attachment we call love? Can it
Speaker 1: be addictive? The notion of obsessive, all consuming, and even
Speaker 1: addictive love goes back literally thousands of years. The ancient
Speaker 1: Greek poets Sappho wrote about watching her lover marry someone else,
Speaker 1: and she describes being seized with trembling, drenched in cold sweat,
Speaker 1: and feeling nearly dead. She might as well be describing
Speaker 1: opium withdrawals or singing a verse of addicted to love.
Speaker 1: Romantic love does have a lot of external features. In
Speaker 1: common with drug addiction, initial feelings of bliss and euphoria
Speaker 1: and obsessive fixated behavior, often leading to poor, potentially life
Speaker 1: ruining decisions. A twenty ten paper from the New York
Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences points out that common criteria for diagnosing
Speaker 1: drug dependence include life interference, tolerance, withdrawal, and repeated attempts
Speaker 1: to quit. Sound anything like your relationship with your X.
Speaker 1: If so, you're certainly not alone, but is there any
Speaker 1: more measurable basis for thinking love can be considered an
Speaker 1: addiction in the brain. Actually, yes, let's talk brain imaging.
Speaker 1: One way that addiction hijacks the human brain is by
Speaker 1: taking advantage of mammalian reward and motivation systems like the
Speaker 1: mesolimbic dopamine system, which includes the ventral tegmental area and
Speaker 1: the nucleus incumbents. This is part of the nervous system
Speaker 1: that gives us internal rewards when we do something with
Speaker 1: an evolutionary benefit, like eating or having sex. Essentially, it's
Speaker 1: how the brain tells itself, Hey, what you just did?
Speaker 1: Do that again and again and again, whether it's eating
Speaker 1: a nutritious meal or unfortunately, snorting cocaine. Back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology
Speaker 1: used f m r I to look at the brains
Speaker 1: of test subjects who self reported that they were intensely
Speaker 1: in love with someone else. When these lovebirds were shown
Speaker 1: pictures of the people they adored, there was activation in
Speaker 1: sections of that same mammalian reward and motivation system, for example,
Speaker 1: the right ventral tech mental area. But that's not all.
Speaker 1: A follow up study in two looked at what happened
Speaker 1: to the brains of men and women who had been
Speaker 1: rejected but reported that they were still deeply in love.
Speaker 1: It wasn't pretty. When heartbroken lovers were forced to look
Speaker 1: at pictures of their exes, there was elevated activity in
Speaker 1: our old friends, the ventral tech mental area, and the
Speaker 1: nucleus incumbents. Researchers point it out that the rejected lovers
Speaker 1: showed several neural correlates in common with the brain activity
Speaker 1: of cocaine addicts craving their drug, So at the level
Speaker 1: of brain chemistry, romantic love can be kind of like
Speaker 1: substance addiction. But there are reasons why you might not
Speaker 1: want to refer to your latest crush as a full
Speaker 1: on addiction. Just yet. For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical
Speaker 1: Manual of Mental Disorders does not officially recognize love addiction,
Speaker 1: and while cravings for love can be devastating when they're
Speaker 1: unrequited or self destructive, they can also be deeply fulfilling
Speaker 1: in a way that no drug habit ever could be.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick and produced by
Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other topics about brain Stuff, visit howstworks dot com.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of I heart Radio. For
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