The Brain In Love Summary

524 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Romantic attachment theory

The video “The brain in love” addresses the biological dimension of human sexuality. Helen Fisher and her colleagues put people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner to assess love on the brain. Robert Weiss (2015) explains fMRI scans track both the location and the degree of activity when any part of the brain is activated, triggered by thought, emotion, and activities, blood flow to that area increases.
When scanning people that were happily in love Helen Fisher (2008) had found activity in a little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, part of the brain’s reward system. There was also activity in some cells known as the A10 cells that produce dopamine and spray it to many brain regions. …show more content…

One region of activity was in the same brain region associated with “intense romantic love,” the ventral tegmental area. The VTA becomes more active when you can’t get what you want, which would be an appropriate mating partner. Another part of the brain, the core of nucleus accumbens, becomes active when measuring your gains and losses. According to Fisher (2008) it’s also the brain region that becomes active when you’re willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses. The last region found with activity was the brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. From the experiment we can think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive, stronger than the sex drive, and that romantic love is an addiction.
Like Fisher has stated, I believe that “love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other.” I agree that love is embedded in our brain and that everyone has the capacity and ability for love. Humans and animals both possess love and the ability to love. I can understand how falling in love releases the same hormones as eating chocolate or do cocaine, the brain is drenched and exposed to the same hormones which explains the feeling of “addiction” when seeing the

Show More
Related

  • The Definition Of Love By Barbara Fredrickson

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    The notion behind loving someone is simply very complicated and esoteric in nature. People often describe a certain chemistry, as in a certain attraction, needed between two individuals who are in love, but Barbara Fredrickson is able to coordinate the definition of love on the basis of chemicals. Barbara Fredrickson is able to provide the definition of love on the deductive reasoning based on chemistry, biology, and neurology explained in Love 2.0: How our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything we Feel, Think, Do, and Become. As Barbara explains, “With each micro-moment of love, then, you climb another rung on the spiraling ladder that lifts you up to your higher ground, to richer and more compassionate social relationships, to greater resilience and wisdom, and to better physical health.” (121).

    Read More

  • Laura Kipnis Against Love Essay

    1234 Words  | 3 Pages

    Humans have been wired in a way to look for a meaningful view of life through love, which can

    Read More

  • Understanding Love: Perspectives from Raymond Carver's Story

    704 Words  | 2 Pages

    Love: a small, four-lettered word that oozes with possibility. What is love? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines love as “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person.” However, can love really be defined? In the short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” by Raymond Carver, the four main characters discuss just that: what is love? Terri, in particular, has a unique perspective on love. This is exemplified in the beginning of the story, when Terri is introduced: “Terri said the main she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her,” (Carver 170). Terri’s dominant impression is that she is an easily influenced and manipulated character that is the most convinced and clear about

    Read More

  • Love the Right Chemistry by Anastasia Toufexis

    540 Words  | 2 Pages

    The article '' love: the right chemistry'' by Anastasia Toufexis efforts to explain the concept of love from a scientific aspect in which an amateur will understand. Briefly this essay explains and describe in a scientific way how people's stimulation of the body works when you're falling in love. The new scientific researches have given the answer through human physiology how genes behave when your feelings for example get swept away. The justification for this is explained by how the brain gets flooded by chemicals. The author expresses in one point that love isn't just a nonsense behavior nor a feeling that exhibits similar properties as of a narcotic drug. This is brought about by an organized chemical chain who controls different depending on the individual. A simple action such as a deep look into someone's eyes can start the simulation in the body that an increased production of hand sweat will start. The tingly feeling inside your body is a result of a scientific delineation which makes the concept of love more concretely and more factually mainly for researchers and the wide...

    Read More

  • T. C. Boyle's Modern Love

    1184 Words  | 3 Pages

    Love is just a man-made construct created to justify our decadence. Human are hedonistic animals: we always seek pleasure. Truthfully, we are inherently selfish, caring for only our own well-being, and even if we say we love without costs, we love because it gives us the utmost pleasure: the pursuit of happiness.

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Trust: Oxytocin And Trust

    1883 Words  | 4 Pages

    Kuchinskas, S. (2009). The chemistry of connection: How the oxytocin response can help you find trust, intimacy, and love. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.

    Read More

  • Sian Beilock How The Body Knows Its Mind Summary

    1213 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sian Beilock is the author of this novel, the information written by her would be considered credible due to the fact that she is a leading expert on brain science in the psychology department at the University of Chicago. This book was also published in the year 2015 which assures readers that the information it contains is up to date and accurate. The novel is easy to understand and the author uses examples of scientific discoveries to help make the arguments more relatable. Beilock goes into depth about how love, is something more than just an emotion, it derives from the body’s anticipation. “Volunteers reported feeling

    Read More

  • What's Love Got To Do With It?

    675 Words  | 2 Pages

    Yes, even a simple sentence such as "I love you" has to be encoded in a specific neurochemical process to exert its effect on the person who gets to hear it. Much of the control mechanism for our emotions rests with neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that act at the points where nerve cells connect with each other. The prevalence, or the presence or absence of specific amounts of neurotransmitters, as well as the density of receptor sites for specific neurotransmitters at nerve endings, will control to a wide extend the emotions to which we are subject (6).

    Read More

  • Reward System And The Reward System

    1408 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...lanced system. There is a great overlap in the psychology of drug addiction and human love that share the same levels of process when it comes to addiction (Fisher et al. 2010). Understanding these processes may help with future treatments when it comes to addiction in many different aspects of addiction (Fisher et al. 2010). In the article "The Behavioral, Anatomical and Pharmacological Parallels between Social Attachment, love and addiction", they state how "treatments used in one domain may be effective in the other; for instance, treatments used to reduce drug cravings may be effective in treating grief from loss of a loved one or a bad breakup" (Fisher et al. pg58, 2010 ). Over all, knowing that pair-bonding and drugs of abuse have such a strong correlation shows how intense human love really is. It is crazy to think we may be addicted to the ones we love.

    Read More

  • The Curious Lives Of Surrogates Analysis

    1004 Words  | 3 Pages

    By choosing to lover her child, the mother acknowledges that she doesn’t feel as if she is obligated to do so because she wants to love him or her and is prepared for the challenges that await her. Thoma Oord writes in his article “The Love Racket: Defining Love and Agape for the Love–and–Science Research Program” that the definition of love refers to the “promotion of well being of all others in an enduring, intense, effective, and pure manner” meaning that when a person loves someone, they will try to do whatever they can to their beloved’s benefit (922). The child is benefited in many ways when the mother chooses to love him or her, for example, the child’s anxiety levels and sense of fear are lowered because they have the security of the bond they possess with their mother (Tarlaci 745). In his article, “Unmasking the Neurology of Love,” Robert Weiss explains that love is a “goal-orientated motivation state rather than a specific emotion” which arises the possibility of a mother “falling out of love” with her child if neither feelings or goals are present. Tarlaci observed an experiment conducted by A. Bartels and S. Zeki in which they compared the brain activity of both a mother looking at a picture of her child to a lover looking at a picture of their beloved. In the experiment it was discovered that “just about the same regions of the brain showed activity in the same two groups except for one” the PACG, which has been confirmed to be “specific to a mother’s love” (Tarlaci 747). So the chances of a mother falling out of love with her child are there, but are different from that of a lover due to the areas of the brain involved. Therefore, explaining the bond between a mother and child as something that forms when a mother chooses to love him or her implies a greater sense of willingness and

    Read More

  • Relationship and Attraction: The Attraction-Similarity Model

    1474 Words  | 3 Pages

    Meyer, M. L., Berkman, E. T., Karremans, J. C., & Lieberman, M. D. (2011). Incidental regulation of attraction: The neural basis of the derogation of attractive alternatives in romantic relationships. Cognition & Emotion, 25(3), 490-505. doi:10.1080/02699931.2010.527494

    Read More

  • The Theme Of Love In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1631 Words  | 4 Pages

    Love is arguably the most powerful emotion possessed by mankind; it is the impalpable bond that allows individuals to connect and understand one another. Pure love is directly related to divinity. Without love, happiness and prosperity become unreachable goals. An individual that possesses all the desired superficial objects in the world stands alone without the presence of love. For centuries love has been marveled by all that dare encounter it. Countless books and poems have been transcribed to explain the phenomenon of love, but love surpasses all intellectual explanations and discussions. Love is not a definition, but rather a thought, an idea. This idea, the idea of love, burns inside us all. Instinctually, every soul on Earth is

    Read More

  • Asexuality and the Brain

    1357 Words  | 3 Pages

    Other areas that are sometimes activated include: the amydgala (Stoléru et al., 2011); the claustrum (Arnow et al., 2002; Stoléru et al., 2011); the orbitofrontal cortex (Stoléru et al., 2011); the hypothalamus (Redouté et al., 2002; Stoléru et al., 2011); the insula (Arnow et al., 2002; Moulier et al., 2006; Stoléru et al., 2011); the ventral striatum (Redouté et al., 2000; Stoléru et al., 2011); the cerebellum (Aalto et al., 2002; Ivry & Fiez, 2000; Stoléru et al., 2011). These areas are only a few of the many areas that are activated in response to sexual stimuli, and they activate for a variety of reasons and in response to various aspects of the stimuli.

    Read More

  • Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson: Love And The Power Of Love

    1327 Words  | 3 Pages

    Love is ubiquitous and universal, and we have all encountered and relished in the power of love.  Many people associate the meaning of love with feelings of strong affection and personal attachment. While this is very accurate, there are several different aspects of love that we neglect to acknowledge. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson steps up and takes up this challenge in convergence with the magic of science. In doing so, she concludes that the things in which our brain thinks love is, are actually just the products of love. Love itself is something much greater and it is worth figuring out what this supreme emotion is all about. Fredrickson’s work primarily centered around the broaden-and-build theory, in which states “positive emotions

    Read More

  • Importance Of Human Relationships Essay

    1172 Words  | 3 Pages

    Just as the brain allows us to see, smell, taste, think, talk, and move, it is the organ that allows us to love — or not. The systems in the human brain that allow us to form and maintain emotional relationships develop during infancy and the first years of life. Experiences during this early vulnerable period of life are critical to shaping the capacity to form intimate and emotionally healthy relationships. Empathy, caring, sharing, inhibition of aggression, capacity to love, and a host of other characteristics of a healthy, happy, and productive person are related to the core attachment capabilities which are formed in infancy and early

    Read More

More about The Brain In Love Summary

Open Document