February 16, 2007

• Love – A Powerful Drug

  

  This made the wires today, conveniently the day after Valentine’s Day.  It’s an important study because it ironically confirms what people have known in their hearts for some time.  Scientists can now prove that love is as powerful as cocaine, and that the feeling can last for months, sometimes years.  This concept has been romanticized in everything from Shakespeare to Desperate Housewives.  It’s postulated (though never proven) in Desmond Morris’ book, The Naked Ape, which I wrote about on December 29th.

  It’s also the underlying theme in the opera La Boheme, which later became the musical Rent.  No matter how hard the characters try to fight it, they all come to the realization that love is the strongest force we know.  Stronger than heroin, stronger even than death.  Be it the “starving artists” in the Latin Quarter of 19th Century Paris, the “Bohemians” like Jack Kerouac in the 50′s or the drug addled, AIDS victims in Jonathan Larson’s masterpiece; they all knew this “fact”, and they lived their lives accordingly.  Today, whether you’re an “Emo” or a “Geek” (love ya Tyson ) in this age of Facebook and MySpace, and a truly wired global technosphere, it’s good to be reminded that love is still that powerful, and that a broken heart truly truly hurts.

  Bye Mark.

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  Click the player on the top of my page to hear “Seasons of Love”.  It’s a fitting song to listen to while thinking about this.

  

  Story Highlights

  • MRI scans show activity in caudate area of the brain at the sight of one’s beloved
  • When you’re in love, caudate area flooded with dopamine, a pleasure chemical
  • Researcher: “Exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine”

   

  By Elizabeth Cohen
  CNN Medical Correspondent

   

  Close your eyes for a minute and envision all the romantic parts of the human body.

  Her beautiful eyes. His strong shoulders. We’ll stop there, but you go right ahead and think about all the body parts you want.

  Bet you didn’t think about the caudate and the ventral tegmental areas, did you?

  These areas of the brain, while little known to most people, are helping scientists explain the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love.

  By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.

  In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.

  While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain — which is involved in cravings — became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

  Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine.

  “The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel,” Dr. Brown says.

  Or as her colleague, Dr. Helen Fisher put it: When you fall in love, “exactly the same system becomes active as when you take cocaine. You can feel intense elation when you’re in love. You can feel intense elation when you’re high on cocaine.” Read More….

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