Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works. Hey, they are brain stuff, luring, vogel bomb here, nicotine, chocolate, alcohol, opioids, work, gambling, sex, food, You might as well face it. Life is basically a gauntlet of substances and behaviors that humans can become obsessed with and dependent on. But what about love? Not just sex, but the deep interpersonal attachment we call love? Can it be addictive? The notion of obsessive, all consuming, and even
addictive love goes back literally thousands of years. The ancient Greek poets Sappho wrote about watching her lover marry someone else, and she describes being seized with trembling, drenched in cold sweat, and feeling nearly dead. She might as well be describing opium withdrawals or singing a verse of addicted to love.
Romantic love does have a lot of external features in common with drug addiction, initial feelings of bliss and euphoria, and obsessive fixated behavior, often leading to poor, ventually life
ruining decisions. A paper from the New York Academy of Sciences points out that common criteria for diagnosing drug dependence include life interference, tolerance, withdrawal, and repeated attempts to quit sound anything like your relationship with your X. If so, you're certainly not alone, But is there any more measurable basis for thinking love can be considered an addiction in
the brain. Actually, yes, let's talk brain imaging. One way that addiction hijacks the human brain is by taking advantage of mammalian reward and motivation systems like the mesolimbic dopamine system, which includes the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbents. And this is part of the nervous system that gives us internal rewards when we do something with an evolutionary benefit, like eating or having sex. Essentially, it's how the brain
tells itself, Hey, what you just did? Do that again and again and again, whether it's eating a nutritious meal or unfortunately, snorting cocaine. Back into thousand five, a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology used f m R I to look at the brains of test subjects who self reported that they were intensely in love with someone else.
When these lovebirds were shown pictures of the people they adored, there was activation in sections of that same mammalian reward and motivation system, for example, the right ventral tech mental area. But that's not all. A follow up study in two looked at what happened to the brains of men and women who had been rejected but reported that they were
still deeply in love. It wasn't pretty. When heartbroken lovers were forced to look at pictures of their exes, there was elevated activity in our old friends, the ventral tech mental area, and the nucleus incumbents. Researchers pointed out that the rejected lovers showed several neural correlates in common with the brain activity of cocaine addicts craving their drug, So at the level of brain chemistry, romantic love can be
kind of like substance addiction. But there are reasons why you might not want to refer to your latest crush as a full on addiction just yet. For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not officially recognize love addiction. And while cravings for love can be devastating when they're unrequited or self destructive, they can also be deeply fulfilling in a way that no drug habit ever could be. Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick
and produced by Tristan McNeil. If you're listening to this the day it comes out, Happy Valentine's Day. If you don't celebrate, it's also National Ferris Wheel Day in the United States. I hope you have an excellent day regardless, and of course, for more on this and lots of other brainy topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.