Where does love come from?

Take a second and remember your last bad break up(s). Did you ever ask yourself why is it that we love? Why do we choose to love when it causes us such pain? Well, we choose love because it’s a natural drive.

My interest on how relationships affect our identities, led me to research the psychological effects we endure during our experience with love. While researching, I came across an eye opening Ted talk given by Helen Fisher, who conducted an experiment with her colleagues to determine a correlation between the brain activity in humans and love. Fisher’s research opened my eyes to the idea that love is not something that comes from the heart, but instead comes from the brain.

Many were raised to believe that love comes from the heart because because from an early age we are taught that an image of a heart is the symbol of love. The influence of this concept not only derives from the mindset of our social understandings, but also from religion. As someone who practices a religion, we are taught from a young age that emotions like love and faith originate in the heart because like religion, love and faith can’t be scientifically explained. With my background in mind, I put my beliefs aside and listened to what Mrs. Fisher and her colleagues had discovered about love and the brain.

In attempts to discover where love comes from, Mrs. Fisher, initially began to experiment on couples who claimed to be in love after 25 years of being together. As she studied their brain activity, she noticed activity in a section of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, which activates the brain’s reward system. This particular part of the brain contains cells that release dopamine, which is a natural stimulant that controls the brain’s reward system and its pleasures. This same area of the brain also contributes to the desire of romantic love. In order to support her previous study, Mrs. Fisher and her team conducted the same experiment on a group of post heartbroken individuals, whose results demonstrated that the same regions of the brain were active as those who claimed to be in love. The active regions were those associated with romantic love, the reward system, and the desire of deep attachment.

To conclude her presentation, Mrs. Fisher explained how the experiments results influenced her to believe that love is a need, a romantic drive, and an can be classified as an addiction because it contains all of its characteristics. The characteristics of an addiction are tolerance, withdrawals, and relapse. All of these characteristic take place when in love, tolerance — when we learn to tolerate our partner, withdrawals — when we miss them even after we just saw them, and relapse — when we feel that our world is falling apart after a breakup. To end it all, she reminds her audience that love is deeply rooted in the brain.

Now, as I refer back to the idea of love originating in the heart, I can now see that science has a way of explaining itself. It has made me question why we use a heart icon to symbolize love instead of a brain icon. The fact that love can be explained by activity in specific parts of our brain not only has made me question society’s concept of love, but it has also caused me to reflect on my own knowledge and beliefs about love. With this new perspective, I’m left thinking that perhaps, like love, faith also comes from the brain. Perhaps, our religious beliefs are also embedded in our brains like love. And perhaps, one-day, science will be able to explain religion.

As Mrs. Fisher mentioned, love is a natural drive, and it will always be, for as long as we exist because it’s embedded in the brain. Learning about this concept not only opened me to new perspectives, but also led me to answer another of my pending questions, if we are capable of putting relationships aside without any effects. In her study, Mrs. Fisher also found that loving or longing for a loved one is dominated by the brain, which therefore can indicate that dismissing someone from your life could have emotional, mental, and even physical effects.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with something to think about: Did you believe love originated as a survival instinct and continued its way from there?

Source: Watch it!

https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love/transcript?language=en#t-31262