We all have an idea, more or less formed, of what is love, most of us have lived the emotions that invade us when we fall in love, but what is going on in our organization?What does science say about love? In recent years, science has analyzed the issue to find out what drives us to fall in love and what processes occur in our brains when it happens.
Love has a big impact on our lives. This changes our behavior, our mood and the person in question invades much of our thoughts, and may even interfere with the performance of our daily tasks, adaptive love aims to ensure the offspring and care necessary in the early years. for scientists, it becomes easier when we group into pairs.
- When we are in the passion phase.
- There is a lot of involvement of various neurotransmitters.
- The chemical activity of our brain changes.
- Triggering typical symptoms.
- The neurotransmitters most related to this process are dopamine.
- Norepinephrine and serotonin.
Dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) levels increase, while Serotonin levels decrease, the first two are involved in reward mechanisms, attract attention to focus on it or her, and thus the person becomes the center of our world. The only goal is to be reciprocal and receive care from that person.
This chemical pump is very similar to what happens with cocaine use, so the initial phase of passion can be considered addictive, dopamine reminds us of the small details of the person, while norepinephrine facilitates the memory of new stimuli in us. Decreased Serotonin makes us have obsessive thoughts.
There are two areas of the brain that are more directly related to love, is the ventral tegmental area (ATV), which produces dopamine and causes that euphoria, the feeling of fullness that drives us to achieve our goals. The core is also important in love, it’s about passion and it’s one of the most primitive areas.
Thanks to neuroimaging, scientists were able to detect activity in these areas of lovers’ brains, the areas involved are part of the reward system that forces us to focus all our efforts on achieving something, in addition, it has been observed that the activity is similar to where, for example, we eat chocolate: it produces a similar activation pattern.
The addictive characteristic of love brings out obsession and compulsion, with the couple being the target of these behaviors. There is emotional, physical dependence and even a change in our personality and tastes. This feeling of not being able to live without this person is due to increased dopamine in these areas of the brain.
Desire and love is not the same. Although when you love someone, especially in childhood, you also love them, loving someone doesn’t mean loving them, desire has a hormone, testosterone. Testosterone is released in greater quantity when we are in love due to the increased dopamine and norepinephrine that stimulate its production.
But what about the opposite?It’s possible, but not a certainty. Increased testosterone can be the cause, increasing the neurotransmitters associated with love, but when we have a relationship motivated solely by desire, it doesn’t matter if the other person has relationships with other people, which doesn’t happen when we’re in love.
While we are in love there is an obsession with being loved and we analyze everything the other does, if we feel that we do not have the attention of the other, the obsession can give way to jealousy, which are nothing more than proof of our insecurity. Jealousy would have a different evolutionary explanation for each sex. Women are afraid to grow old on their own. Men, for fear of creating descendants other than yours.
Rejection or stopping is difficult to manage and the brain and neurotransmitters are also involved in this phase. When there is a partner crisis, the release of dopamine increases: it is because there is a tendency to fight for what you want and to preserve it. By increasing dopamine and not getting the reward we are looking for, the amygdala is activated and anger appears, which is the first step.
Anger means that there is only one step of love of hate, as the brain cannot afford that energy expenditure for a long time, once the first phase is overcome, the renunciation of loss enters, this second phase begins with a deep sadness, we abandon ourselves to the fact that they no longer love us.
Dopamine levels drop dramatically, causing sadness and melancholy; it is a kind of catharsis mechanism that prepares us to start from scratch; it should also be noted that although the duration of sadness depends on many factors, both external and internal, of each person. , brain chemistry will be restored and, in a time that varies chemically, we will be ready to meet a new partner again.
This is a difficult question to answer, as we have many examples to support the no and yes answers. Although science has tried to answer this question as precisely as possible, research suggests that we are truly monogamous, but in succession. In other words, we would have favorable brain chemistry for a single partner, but for a certain period of time, around 4 years.
There is a universal tendency to change partners and re-start the cycle of passion with a new couple, in a cyclical way, which from an evolutionary and adaptive point of view would have the function of achieving greater genetic diversity and more offspring, spreading DNA in many corners of the world.
But the truth is that today many still yearn to find a partner for life, although some biological facts hinder the idea of having a partner for life, this does not mean that it is impossible, there are couples who make desire, complicity, love and trust lasts forever. Fortunately, we are more than a repeated sequence in which our different levels of neurotransmitters vary, going through the same states over and over again.