Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, they
Speaker 1: are brain stuff, luring, 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, ventually life
Speaker 1: ruining decisions. A paper from the New York Academy of
Speaker 1: Sciences points out that common criteria for diagnosing drug dependence
Speaker 1: include life interference, tolerance, withdrawal, and repeated attempts to quit
Speaker 1: sound anything like your relationship with your X. If so,
Speaker 1: you're certainly not alone, But is there any more measurable
Speaker 1: basis for thinking love can be considered an addiction in
Speaker 1: the brain. Actually, yes, let's talk brain imaging. One way
Speaker 1: that addiction hijacks the human brain is by taking advantage
Speaker 1: of mammalian reward and motivation systems like the mesolimbic dopamine system,
Speaker 1: which includes the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbents.
Speaker 1: And this is part of the nervous system that gives
Speaker 1: us internal rewards when we do something with an evolutionary benefit,
Speaker 1: like eating or having sex. Essentially, it's how the brain
Speaker 1: tells itself, Hey, what you just did? Do that again
Speaker 1: and again and again, whether it's eating a nutritious meal
Speaker 1: or unfortunately, snorting cocaine. Back into thousand five, a study
Speaker 1: in the Journal of Neurophysiology used f m R I
Speaker 1: to look at the brains of test subjects who self
Speaker 1: reported that they were intensely in love with someone else.
Speaker 1: When these lovebirds were shown pictures of the people they adored,
Speaker 1: there was activation in sections of that same mammalian reward
Speaker 1: and motivation system, for example, the right ventral tech mental area.
Speaker 1: But that's not all. A follow up study in two
Speaker 1: looked at what happened to the brains of men and
Speaker 1: women who had been rejected but reported that they were
Speaker 1: still deeply in love. It wasn't pretty. When heartbroken lovers
Speaker 1: were forced to look at pictures of their exes, there
Speaker 1: was elevated activity in our old friends, the ventral tech
Speaker 1: mental area, and the nucleus incumbents. Researchers pointed out that
Speaker 1: the rejected lovers showed several neural correlates in common with
Speaker 1: the brain activity of cocaine addicts craving their drug, So
Speaker 1: at the level of brain chemistry, romantic love can be
Speaker 1: kind of like substance addiction. But there are reasons why
Speaker 1: you might not want to refer to your latest crush
Speaker 1: as a full on addiction just yet. For example, the
Speaker 1: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not officially
Speaker 1: recognize love addiction. And while cravings for love can be
Speaker 1: devastating when they're unrequited or self destructive, they can also
Speaker 1: be deeply fulfilling in a way that no drug habit
Speaker 1: ever could be. Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick
Speaker 1: and produced by Tristan McNeil. If you're listening to this
Speaker 1: the day it comes out, Happy Valentine's Day. If you
Speaker 1: don't celebrate, it's also National Ferris Wheel Day in the
Speaker 1: United States. I hope you have an excellent day regardless,
Speaker 1: and of course, for more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other brainy topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com.