Is Love an Addiction?

our kids, our friends. We're going to dig into the signs of love, looking at how psychologists and neuroscientists have tried to understand it and measure it, and we're going to ask the question, if love is addicting, can you manipulate it with drugs? So get ready to fall in love with the signs of love as we might as well face it. Are we addicted to love? Hey? Everyone,

Today we have a different kind of episode. It's thanksgeping Weak and I'm spending time with my family, So I'm going to play for you a chapter from the audiobook of my latest nonfiction book, Out of Your Mind, which I wrote with neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin. You know doctor Godwin. He's been on the show several times. And in this chapter, we ask the question why do we love? And we look at the evidence that says that love is basically

an addiction. It's one of my favorite chapters in the book because it goes into the whole history of how scientists have tried to get a handle on this lovely topic. And hey, if you like the chapter, be sure to check out the rest of the book. You can find Out of Your Mind in stores everywhere. Okay, the chapter starts with a quote from William Shakespeare, and the first question we tackle is whether humans are the only animals dad love. Here's Professor Dwayne Godwin reading from Out of Your.

and even the love of country Julius Caesar. To many, love may seem like the quintessential human emotion, but actually humans are not alone in showing signs of love. In the case of romantic love. About four percent of mammals pair up in lifelong monogamous couples. We share that distinction with prairie voles and beavers, among a few others, and up to ninety five percent of birds do. The majority of complex animals on the planet exhibits some form of

care and devotion to their young. Palaeontologists have even found fossils of dinosaur mothers that seemingly died while protecting their nest of eggs. At the same time, the human experience of love appears to be more vexing and complex than mere instinct. At the very least, it seems to be more dramatic. After all, how many beavers or birds of written sonnets or entire operas detailing the impossible situations that love puts us in. If you ask around, most people

will tell you that love is a feeling. It's what you feel when you look at your spouse, or your child, or your parents are the people who are close to you. It's the urge you feel to be near them, to care for them, and to make sure they're safe and happy. Unfortunately, these days, we also use the word to describe how we feel about a lot of things. We use it for objects love your shoes, food, who doesn't love pie?

And even abstract concepts. I love democracy. Clearly, it's hyperbole unless you actually feel the same way about shoes as you do about your kids or your spouse. But what is that feeling of love? How is it encoded in the brain? Is there a trigger for falling into it?

Though love may seem like the stuff of literature or sappy poems, psychologists and neuroscientists have been probing its mysteries for over eighty years, and with modern technology they've started to answer a few key questions about the loving brain, including these. Is there an area in the brain devoted to love? Does a love chemical exist? Do I really love pie the same way I love my kids? Interestingly, the answer to all of these questions, including the third one,

is sort of. Love is a many splendid thing. So let's take a dive and fall madly into its biological complexities. Trust us, you're going to love it. The love scales.

The history of love research starts in the nineteen forties. Psychologists, eager to prove their metal is scientists, started to tackle complex human emotions with more exacting methods The problem was that they didn't have the technology to peer into people's brains, and unlike basic skills like language or movement, there were no cases, at least at the time, of people with clear brain injuries that prevented them from loving or being lovable, so they had to resort to the same method most

of us use. To figure out how anyone feels, they had to ask. Of course, people are notoriously unreliable when it comes to knowing their own feelings or reading the feelings of others, so for psychologists, the first order of business was to standardize the set of questions one would ask to find out if someone felt love or not. The goal is to be able to measure love in a person so that you can then do scientific studies

with that information. For example, if you can figure out that a group of people definitely loves their spouses and that another group definitely doesn't, you might then look at the two groups to see where that difference could be coming from. It could be something inherent about the person or something external. In psychology, the go to tools for

measuring complex emotions like love are called scales. Basically, they are questionnaires that pose a series of statements and then ask you to rache your response depending on how much you agree or disagree with those statements. For example, one questionnaire might say true love lasts forever and then ask you to pick a number between one and ten. One equals strongly disagree, ten equals strongly agree, depending on how

you feel about that. Other questionnaires might have statements like I would rather be with my partner than anyone else, or I would feel deep despair if I couldn't be with this person, depending on whether you want to measure

a person's attitude or experience with love. In this way, a scale could get a rough measure of how you feel about love, whether you experience it in your life, and how often you experience it, whether you think it's a positive thing, whether you feel it toward a particular person, etc. It's not that different from one of those pop quizes you might find in a fashion or a romance magazine,

with the key difference of added scientific rigor. Psychologists take great care to make sure that the scales are reliable so the results don't depend on the person's momentary mood or immediate circumstances, and valid so the results actually measure what you're trying to measure. It's not a perfect assessment, but short of being able to read someone's mind, it's

the best anyone can do. Over the years, lots of psychologists proposed many different love scales with names like the Caring Relationship's Inventory or the Romantic Acts Questionnaire, and over the years a few have risen to the top in terms of their popularity or perception as being the most reliable.

Each of them has two things in common with the others. One, they are based on a theory that breaks down the different kinds of love, and two, they recognize that love is not just a feeling, but a combination of rational thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For example, Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love scale assumes that love is a mix of three basic ingredients, passion, closeness,

and commitment. For passion, it might ask you to weigh in on statements like I find this person to be very personally attractive, while for closeness, it might pose to you I share deeply personal information with this person. The idea is to make a model that maps all of the different kinds of love that people experience. Are you committed to someone and feel close to them but are not attracted to them, Then you are feeling companionate love

i e. Platonic or friend love. Do you have the hots for someone but don't particularly want to be close or committed to them, Then you are feeling good old infatuation love. Do you feel attracted to someone and feel close to them and want to commit long term to them, Then you hit the jackpot and found consummate love. Another well accepted scale, Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecker's Passionate Love Scale or PLS, measures romantic love and more explicitly breaks

down love into rational thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For example, if my post statements like for me, this person is the perfect romantic partner. To see what you think of that person, I melt when looking deeply into their eyes, to see how you feel about them, and I can't stop thinking about this person. To measure how it affects your actions, add up your scores for all thirty of the scale statements that should tell you how much you

love that person. If it was between one hundred and six and one hundred and thirty five points, you're wildly, even recklessly in love. Between eighty six and one hundred and five points, passionate but less intense, sixty six to eighty five points occasional burst of passion, forty five to sixty five points, tepit infrequent passion, and fifteen to forty

four points the thrill is gone. Psychologists have been using scales like this to try to get a handle on what it means to be in love and where it comes from. For example, in one study, researchers asked men and women from different cultures white people in the US, Japanese, and Filipinos to take the PLS Survey. The goal was to test whether Eastern and Western cultures loved or thought

about bove in the same way. They found that the scores of love intensity were not that different between different groups, underscoring the idea that is indeed a universal feeling. Of course, these scales only give us a view of love from the outside looking in. They don't actually tell us what's going on inside someone's brain. But these scales prove to be very important when the technology to do so finally became available.

them are related to addiction. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back. We're talking about the science of love and whether love is an addiction. So far, we've learned what love is and how the feeling of it maps to different versions of the love we all experience. Now we're going to ask what's happening in the brain when we love. It turns out love is actually something

you can do fMRI experiments on. Here is Professor Dwaine Godwin reading from the book we've wrote together called Out of Your Mind.

by measuring the oxygen consumed by active neurons. When neurons use oxygen, it changes the magnetic properties of the hemoglobin in your blood. This causes distortions and how the surrounding water reacts to strong magnetic fields and pulses. By measuring how this energy fluctuates, the machine can tell which brain areas are using more oxygen than others. But it's not fool proof, and two thousand and nine scientists scanned dead

salmon and got what looked like a live signal. fMRI machines are able to take a picture of your whole brain and highlight the parts that are active at any given time with millimeter precision. Up to the two thousands, fMRI scans have been used to reliably pinpoint areas that were mapped by electrical probes, confirming from previous studies where the brain's areas for sensing and moving were. Now the question was whether they could map more complicated functions, emotions,

and even love. Would they show that the brain has a love area or is love too complicated to narrow down to a particular spot. It turns out that the answer is a little of both. To find out, neuroscientists came up with an experiment in which test subjects were put inside an fMRI machine and shown pictures of people they loved. We know they loved these people because the subjects rated them highly on the PLS Love Scale, which

they filled out before the experiment. As of control, the subjects were also shown photos of friends and acquaintances who weren't rated highly on the love scale. This way, neuroscientists could measure their brain activity when feelings of love were triggered, and they could reliably assume that it was love from

the Love scale data. As you might expect from a complex emotion, lots of areas of the brain lit up, but in particular, neuroscientists saw intriguing activity in three specif as that give us clues as to how our brain processes being in love. The first area they saw light up is called the insula. The insula, which means island in Latin, is an interesting part of what is known as the limbic cortex. It's an area that is folded

up deep within the side of your brain. You can't see it from the typical surface view, and it's thought to be where emotions and empathy are processed. When this area is destroyed, as happens for example, with a brain disorder called fronto temporal dementia, people seem to have a harder time controlling their emotions, and they seem to lose the ability to perceive the emotions of others, otherwise known as empathy. This makes sense because love is an emotion,

and because empathy is critical to love. Putting ourselves in other people's shoes and caring for others are integral parts of what it means to love. An area where neuroscientists noticed interesting activity is called the amygdala. The amygdalae are a pair of nugget like bundles of neurons deep in the middle of your brain. These nuggets have a reputation as the center for anger and fear in your brain.

People who are missing their amygdala, if, for example, they suffer from a disease called herbach wiathy, which calcifies the amygdala, can still function, but they seem to lose the ability to feel fear. Tests show they have a hard time telling whether something is dangerous or not, and they are more willing to approach unfamiliar situations. The amygdala also seems to be responsible for aggressive behavior in mice, taking out

the amygdala seems to make them less territorial. What's interesting is that, in the case of the love experiments, activity in the amygdala actually decreased when subjects looked at pictures of loved ones. In other words, love suppresses your sense of fear and aggression, thereby lowering your defenses. The final area that neuroscientists took note of and the Love experiments is one that gives us the biggest clue about the

mechanisms for falling and staying in love. It's an area that helps explain why humans like to love, why we seek it, and why we sometimes even seem to be addicted to it. That area is the brain's rewards system.

love or when we see are loved ones. Love is supposed to feel good. This area rewards you for it. It's a network of structures at the very center of your brain that tell the rest of you when something is good, and it motivates you to seek it out and get more of it. That craving you have for fatty, sugary foods like chocolate, and the ensuing pleasure you feel when you finally indulge in them, that's the brain's reward

system at work. That feeling of joy when your favorite sports team wins the championship, and the impulse you have to buy next year's season tickets blame your reward system. That sense of peace and calm that washes over you when you're surrounded by your loved ones, and the sense that there's something missing in your life if you haven't seen them in a long time, well, that's also the

brain's reward system. What the brain scanning experiments found was that this reward system is activated when we look at pictures of our loved ones. Here's a little of how it works. When you do or experience something else, your brain is programmed to like a little cluster of neurons called the ventral tegmental area or VTA, releases a special chemical called dopinin This chemical travels to different parts of the brain, essentially yelling out, hey, this is good and important,

which triggers several actions. It inactivates the amydala, your brain center for fear and anger, making you more open to pleasure and enjoyment. It turns on the hippocampus, your brain's memory center, to record everything about this moment so you can remember later what led to this enjoyment. It triggers the nucleus occumbents, your brain's motivation center, making you want

more of this stimulus. And finally, it triggers the prefrontal cortex, which is where your higher thinking happens, so that you are aware of what's going on. There are two interesting things about this reward system. Number one, you can hack it. Number two, it can be triggered to different degrees by your range of things. Let's dig into each of these. One it can be hacked. It turns out that it's

relatively easy to hijack your brain's reward system. For example, in one famous experiment in the nineteen fifties, experimenters put tiny wires into the brains of rats, placing them directly on the VTA region. The wires were programmed to send a little jolt of electricity whenever the rats pressed the lever it was placed in their cage. This gave the rats the ability to self activate their brains reward system. As you might imagine, it didn't take long for the

rats to become obsessed with pressing the lever. They would press it over and over to the point where they would ignore basic necessities like food, water, and sex. Another way to hag their brains reward system is with drugs. Cocaine, for example, is a drug derived from the coca plant that cleverly circumvents the VTA to sound the this is good alarm in your brain. Normally, when dopamine gets released by the it eventually gets reabsorbed back into neurons so

that its effects don't linger. But cocaine blocks at reabsorption, keeping the dopamine around so that it continually activates all those parts of your brain that tell you something good is happening. Number two, it can be triggered by a range of things to different degrees. The second interesting thing about the brain's reward system is that lots of different

things seem to activate it. Somehow, evolution has managed to wire your brain so that different behaviors, from eating high calorie foods to getting a hug from your child, trigger this reward system. And this makes sense. In order for you to survive and for your genes to survive to the next generation, there has to be a way for your brain to tell your body when you're doing something

good that will ensure the survival. In the case of love, our evolution has somehow determined that being close to a lifelong made and caring for your children, parents, and community are good for the cuntnuation of our species. This is why love feels good. Your brain rewarding you for behavior that benefits future generations of humans. Of course, not everything that triggers the reward system does, though to the same degree.

Most people would agree that eating a piece of cake, as delicious as it may be, isn't quite the same as finding the love of your life. That's the other interesting thing about the reward system. Your brain is wired so that different things activated to different extents. Eating a tasty cookie that gives your reward system a small nudge mm, that's a tasty cookie. Your boyfriend holding back tears as

he says yes to your marriage proposal. That one lights up your reward system like a fireworks display on the fourth of July. You might have noticed that the same brain circuit that's involved in feelings of love, the reward system, is also the same brain circuit that's involved in drug addiction. That's because both love and drugs supercharge the reward system, and neuroscientists believe that when the war system is hyperactivated, it triggers a feedback loop that starts to change your brain.

We'll card this in more detail in the chapter about addiction, but the basic idea is that overwhelming amounts of dopamine burn into your brain the desire to seek the source of that enjoyment. This is why we crave love and sometimes even obsessed about love. Love is like a drug. Do you feel like you can't live without your loved ones? As the pop singer Robert Palmer famously sang in the nineteen eighties, let us bull face it. You're addicted to love. Yes,

it's true. I'm old enough to remember when that song came out on the radio. So one way that scientists look at love is as a sort of addiction. It engages the same brain circuits, presumably to make sure that our species survives. But now the big question is what determines who we fall in love with? If love is an addiction, what triggers it, Because it's probably not the case.

You're Madeleine love with everybody in the whole world. So when we come back, we'll answer this question, and we'll talk about whether you can take a drug that will cure you of love or maybe make someone fall in love with you. And then at the end, I'm going to talk to doctor Godwin about how writing this chapter affected our love life, I mean, our respective love lives. We don't love working together that much. Stay with us.

We'll be right back, and we're back. We're talking about whether love is an addiction, and the answer is yes, sort of. The same brain circuit that makes you feel good when you look at your partner, or your kids or your besties is basically the same circuit that is hijacked during addiction. Now, the question is how do we pick who we fall in love with? Is this something we can choose. Here's more of my reading from my latest nonfiction book, Out of Your Mind, The Bonds of Love.

One question we haven't answered yet is why do we love the people that we do. We know that love is a feeling, that this feeling is triggered by your brain's reward system, and we know that your brain is wired to activate this reward system under certain conditions. But what is it about certain people that makes this love them. The answer to this question is still largely a mystery to neuroscientists. One way to look at it is that your reward system gets input from lots of places in

your brain. Everything from your senses, your memories, your base instincts, and your higher thinking areas all feed into this reward system, chiming in with an opinion about what they think is good for you. And it could be that certain people just check all the boxes. Throughout your life, your brain has grown and been shaped by your genes and by your life experiences. You've developed opinions and likes, and subconscious

preferences and emotional triggers. All of this has set you up so that when you meet certain people, they cause multiple areas in your brain to pin your reward system at once, sending it the clear signal that somehow this is someone that you want to be close to. Of course, those of you with kids might be wondering, well, I didn't exactly get to choose my kid, and yet I still love them with all my heart. And for that we have another chemical to thank, oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone,

which means it doesn't just float around your brain. It also goes into your blood stream and travels to the rest of your body. In particular, it seems to be important in establishing the bond between a parent and child. Oxotocin is released after warm, positive interactions, especially those ending in hugs. For women, oxytocin levels increase as much as four times their normal levels. During labor, the active breastfeeding also releases oxotocin. What does oxytocin do For one, it

lowers the level of stress hormones in your body. It also turns down the amygdala, which, as we mentioned before, is the area that makes you fearful of new situations or other people. By suppressing your fear center, oxytocin essentially lets your guard down and makes you more open to love. Oxytocin also activates what it might be called the mommy

or daddy area of the brain. This area, called the medial pre optic area or MPOA, is a part of the brain that controls automatic functions like body temperature, hunger, and sleep. We know it's important for parenting behaviors because when it's turned off, either by drugs or by damage to the brain, these behaviors are interrupted. In experiments, might spit out the full use of the MPOA, stop nursing their young, and in some cases, even abandon their babies.

Disturbances in this area in men or women they explain why a small percentage of human parents have a hard time bonding with their children, or why some don't seem to bond at all. Lastly, oxotosin does what you might expect to help parents bond with their children. It activates the brain's reward system. It turns out that the regions of the brains that are part of the reward system are also sensitive to oxytocin, so when this hormone gets released,

it also causes the release of dopamine. And what about people who don't report falling head over heels for their partner, but grew to love them over time. It turns out that oxytocin also plays a role in helping love blossom. We know this from studying a cute little animal called the prairie role. The prairie role is one of the four percent of mammals dead. Like many humans, pair up

in couples for life to raise their young. Scientists have done experiments where the brains of female prairie roles were injected with oxytocin. Those that receive the injection were found to huddle more with their partners and seem to form stronger bonds. In other experiments, scientists blocked oxytocin and found that it disrupted how often the wolves formed couples. In humans, as in prairie voles, oxytocin is released by your brain during sex. It's your body's way of encouraging you to

form a lasting bond with that person. More interestingly, it points to the idea that who we fall in love with can be manipulated. For example, increasing the amount of oxytocin in your system might lower your guard and make you more likely to fall in love with the person you're with. Love potion anyone. Alternately, you might be able to sour a relationship by somehow disrupting the oxytocin in

a couple's brains. In fact, recent evidence suggests a species of animal very close to us may have taken advantage of our oxytocin system to hack their way into our hearts. Does your dog really love you?

they really love us? Researcher Takefumi ki Kosui noticed that his poodle tear it up when she nurished her puppies in a way that indicated a positive emotion. His team wondered whether other positive events, like interacting or seeing their owner might produce a similar result. In one set of experiments, they separated dogs from their owners. After a few hours, some of the dogs were reunited with their owners, while others were brought to someone who was familiar to them

but who was not their owner. They found that the dogs that reunited with their owners had more tears in their eyes than the dogs that didn't reunite with their owners. Were these tears of joy that the researchers found it prooves that dogs really love us, Oh not so fast. In another set of experiments, the team measured how long dogs staring at their owners and how that affected the

owner's oxytocin levels. They found that dogs that gaze at their owners longer produce the bigger rise in their owners oxytocin levels, and they found that owners would higher oxytocin levels were more likely to play with and pet their dogs. It could be love, or it could be that dogs learned to produce tears to take advantage of our weakness for puppy eyes. But whether some dogs really do form a bond with us or we're just bred to make us feel that way begs the question do we really care?

We're still learning a lot about oxytocin. For example, one recent study suggests that it may also be involved in regulating how much we eat, how we process emotions, and when our instinct to flea gets activated. Like all hormones, oxytocin acts in a mess and imprecise way, affecting lots of systems at the same time. Who doesn't love a

good ending to recap. While writers and poets have been trying to understand love for hundreds or thousands of years, psychologists and neuroscientists have made great progress in just the last few decades. Studies about the scale of love have taught us that love is universal and that to some degree it can be measured. fMRI brain imaging experiments tell us that there are many different brain areas involved in love, but the overall picture that emerges is a relatively simple one.

Love feels good. Therefore, you want more of it. If something feels good, especially if it's as powerful as the feelings we have towards the people that are close to us, your brain wants to repeat it. The reagions that form your brain's reward system. Make sure that you are aware of this, that you remember it, and it changes your brain to want it in your life as much as possible.

Breaking it down like this may make love seem clinical or just about pleasure, but the magic of love is in the subtleties the mystery still remains, why do we love certain people and not others. Nobody knows what's going to make one person stand out among others for that

initial attraction, and love takes time and patience. It may be helped along by brain chemicals and hormones, but it requires care for bonds to form and endure, It needs effort to grow, and that is something that neuroscience can't predict, at least not yet. Maybe in the future, neuroscientists will be able to scan your brain and predict who you will fall in love with, or they may be able to design drugs that can reinforce love in your relationships

or make you forget relationships that didn't work out. It's been a love filled ride, and there's still a lot we don't know about love in the brain. As Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the course of true love never did run smooth. Maybe Shake Spear was a neuroscientist after all. Well, it was lovely of you to join us. Hey, if you're interested in checking out the rest of the book, look for Out of your Mind wherever books or audiobooks are sold. Thanks for joining us.

We'd love to see you again. Next week. You've been listening to Science Stuff production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by me or Hey Cham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Jasey Peckram. And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform.

Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode. All right, Well, I would love it if people checked out the rest of the book, how about you.