A new study shows that love, in all its forms, stimulates the brain’s reward and addiction systems – the same parts of the brain involved in behaviors like drug use and video game addiction. The results of the current research make it more clear why breakups and losses are marked by depth of emotional suffering and intense physical pain.
This research was published cerebral cortex It explores how different forms of love—romantic, familial, friendly, and even love for pets or nature—affect the brain. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland, led by Parteli Rinne, explored the brain activities associated with different types of love and discovered that each activity activated different areas of the brain related to social understanding. However, all varieties of love had in common the stimulation of the brain’s reward system, which is also involved in the perception of addictive behavior.
Neuroscientist Lucy Brown of the Einstein College of Medicine in New York said the study confirms that romantic love and long-term attachment use the brain’s reward and addiction circuits. He said research is slowly painting a clearer picture of what the brain looks like when someone is in love.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a brain scanning technique, to analyze the brain activity of 55 people.
“Our results show that love in close interpersonal relationships — such as for one’s child, romantic partner, and friend — has significantly stronger effects on the brain’s reward system than love for strangers, pets, or nature,” Rinne said. Engaged in activism.” Deutsche Welle.
People’s love also activates brain areas associated with thinking, feeling, and understanding – also known as social cognition. Differences in brain activity in social cognition areas were revealed depending on whether participants owned a pet or not.
“In pet owners, love for pets activated these same social brain regions significantly more than in participants without pets,” Rinne said.
Love of nature or art is also a strong type of love, but we feel it differently from romantic or familial love of people. In fact, love of nature lit up the brain’s reward system and visual areas associated with viewing landscapes, but not areas associated with social cognition.
“This provides evidence that different types of love act on partly distinct and partly overlapping brain regions,” said Roland Zane, a psychiatrist and expert on mood disorders at King’s College London in Britain, who was not involved in the study. Is based.”
This study provides new insight into the powerful impact of love on the brain and how it can impact both emotional and physical states.