![]() ![]() ![]() Rather, Brown argues, drugs are exploiting the brain’s reward systems - dopamine pathways - that flare with loving affection. “Unlike other addictions (that afflict only a percentage of the population), some form of love addiction is likely to occur to almost every human being that lives now and in our human past few avoid the pain of romantic rejection either,” she and her colleagues write.īut it’s not that love is hopping onto the circuitry of addiction. Just like drugs of abuse, romantic love - “a normal altered state” - starts with euphoria and ends with craving. In follow-up papers, Brown and her frequent collaborator, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, have argued that “romantic love is a natural (and often positive) addiction that evolved from mammalian antecedents by 4 million years ago as a survival mechanism to encourage hominin pair-bonding and reproduction,” which can be seen across human cultures around the world. ![]() “Signs of lack of emotion control” happened for weeks or months after the initial breakup, the authors found, including “inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much, and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love.” (And there you have the shape of every romantic narrative.)īrown says that when she tells heartbroken reporters about her research, there’s often a sense of relief about all this happening at a neurophysiological level, so it’s more real. Indeed, in the 2010 paper that came from this tearful inquiry, all 15 of her crestfallen participants reported thinking about their beloved for over 85 percent of their waking hours, and all reported a yearning to rejoin in emotional union with their former partners. “We crave the other person just as we crave nicotine or pain pills you want to be near the other person, you’re constantly thinking about them, we even do dangerous things sometimes to win them back - we don’t eat or sleep.” “In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the same areas of the brain that were active in the brains of cocaine addicts were active in these people who were heartbroken looking at a picture of their former romantic partner,” Brown tells Science of Us. The brains of the forlorn study subjects looked a lot like drug addicts fiending for a fix. The flyers had one sentence highlighted: “Have you just been rejected in love but can’t let go?” Soon enough, Brown recalls, she had college students - who were asked to bring a photo of their beloved with them - crying in the brain scanner. If you ever wondered about the psychology of breakups, we’ve got you covered.Ī few years ago, Yeshiva University neuroscientist Lucy Brown and her research team distributed flyers across several campuses in the New York area to recruit participants for a brain-imaging study. In honor of Valentine’s Day, Science of Us is spending this week talking about love - specifically, what happens when it goes wrong. ![]()
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