If Love is a Matter of Heart, why Does our Brain gets High when our Favorite Person is Around?

Everyone feels butterflies in their stomach and gets excited when someone they like, is around them. Love itself is a mysterious thing, no doubt about it. How can a person fall in love and what makes us stay in love with a person. There are thousands of questions that are still unanswered by the researchers, but scientists from different fields are working on what makes being in love…. well, being in love?

Where in the brain is love?

In the year 2000, two scientists from University College set out to find out what love is and wherein the brain is love. They studied the brain scans of many people who said that they were genuinely, truly and madly in love with their significant other.

The findings of the study revealed that whenever they saw a photo of their partner, a specific area of their mind lit up. That area was the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex and some segments of the dorsal striatum.

How does love affect our minds?

Some hypotheses relate the activation and deactivation of some specific brain areas with having relation to certain behaviors and attitudes while taking into account romantic love. One of the scientists said that whenever the subject was asked to think romantically about their partner, some areas that were rich in neuromodulator got immediately activated.

Those areas were associated with the addiction, reward, desire, and some euphoric states, which is known as dopamine. Researchers said that people who are in love get a constant high because the presence of dopamine makes them get in touch with the other person and strengthen the existing relationship.

Do desire and love light up the same areas of the brain?

One of the main things that come to everyone’s mind when they think about romantic love is physical attraction. There are uncountable relationships in which love and physical attraction go together but do both things light up the same parts of the brain?

According to new research, it has been noticed that love and sexual desire do lit up some of the similar parts of the human brain. The study concluded that when the subject was shown a picture, they found sexually arousing, certain parts of their brain which usually get activated due to romantic affection also became active. However, another early study has shown that although both things overlap when it comes to brain activity, they do not lit up all the similar areas of the brain.