Scientists Identify Brain Region That Controls How Deeply You Fall in Love

What happens in the brain when we are in love? While this might sound like a simple question, the reasoning behind romance is still largely a mystery. However, thanks to advances in neuroimaging technology, we are slowly beginning to unpick the molecular underpinnings of elusive experience.

"Romantic love is the basis for romantic relationship and family formation throughout most of the world," Adam Bode, Ph.D. researcher in anthropology at Australian National University, told Newsweek. "It is associated with some of the greatest pieces of art and music and poetry, and is responsible for the happiest and most despairing experiences of a people's lives."

And yet, for something so important, there is relatively little scientific literature on the nature of love. "We don't know as much as most people would think about the neuroscience of romantic love," Bode said. "There have only been about 30 neuroimaging studies of romantic love and many of them are simply replications of earlier studies."

Social bonding and attraction are known to be mediated by a cocktail of different hormones, including oxytocin and dopamine. But to influence our thoughts and feelings, these hormones need to interact with different areas of the brain.

Previous studies have shown that love is strongly associated with neural activity in parts of the brain involving rewards, emotions, sexual desire and arousal, and social cognition, as well as memory and attention. Now, for the first time, Bode and psychology professor Phillip Kavanagh have investigated the role of the brain's motivational circuitry, the brain activation system. Their study was published in the journal Behavioral Sciences.

"Numerous fMRI studies have implicated reward and motivation circuitry in romantic love, but to date, only a superficial explanation of what functions that serves has been posited," Bode said. "Our study is the first to demonstrate that the behavioural activation system plays an important role in romantic love. Parts of the brain involved in romantic love that are believed to form the behavioural activations system generate thoughts and feelings which guide behaviours."

In their study, Bode and Kavanagh first asked 1,556 young adults who self-identified as being in love to complete a survey, exploring the participants' emotional response to their partners, their behavior around them and the focus they placed on them. Their responses were then used to create a scale of how sensitive the behavioural activations system (BAS) was to their loved one.

This scale was then applied to 812 of these participants to see whether this BAS sensitivity scale was associated with an increased intensity in romantic love. "Our hypothesis was confirmed," the authors said.

Indeed, scoring on this BAS sensitivity scale explained roughly 9 percent of the variance in intensity of romantic love.

Bode hopes that their research will not only help inform the molecular underpinnings of romantic love but also its evolution. "Considering the evolution of romantic love tells us not only the role it played in our evolutionary history, but the role it plays in modern humans, it's a genuinely fascinating area of research," Bode said.