A breakup or the loss of a loved one can feel like you’re in withdrawal. Their absence can feel like yearning, physical pain — like an addiction no longer fed. And it’s that feeling of addiction that has got neuroscientists interested in a realm once dominated by philosophy and poetry. Neuroscientists are now providing answers to what love looks like in the brain.
They’re finding that love activates brain systems of reward and addiction — the same systems involved in cocaine use or video game addiction.
Research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex looked at six different types of love, including for romantic partners, friends, strangers, pets and nature.
“Basically, we carve[d] out maps of brain areas for different types of love,” said Pärttyli Rinne, Aalto University in Finland, who led the study.
The researchers found that the brain recruited different regions involved in social cognition for those different types of love, and that “the brain activity associated with a feeling of love depends on its object,” said Rinne — they spotted differences in love for a family member, for example, or love for a pet.
Yet the brain’s reward and addiction system was activated in all types of love.
Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said “[w]e’re beginning to build a framework of what the brain looks like when people are in love.”
Brown, who was not involved in the Finnish study, told DW that it “consolidate[d] the idea that romantic love and long-term attachments use a [reward and addiction] system in the brain.”
The six different types of love
The researchers measured the brain activity of 55 participants, using the brain scanning method functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It is the largest study so-far to measure the brain activity of love.
“Our results demonstrate that love in closer interpersonal relationships — like for one’s child, romantic partner, and friend — is associated with significantly stronger activation in the brain’s reward system than love for strangers, pets, or nature,” Rinne told DW.
Love of people also activated brain areas associated with thinking, feeling and understanding — also known as social cognition. Differences in brain activity in social cognition regions revealed whether participants had a pet or not.
“In pet owners, love for pets activates these same social brain regions significantly more than in participants without pets,” said Rinne.
Love of nature or art are also strong types of love, but we tend to feel it differently than a romantic or familial love of people. Indeed, love of nature lit up the brain’s reward system and visual areas associated with viewing landscapes, but not the areas associated with social cognition.
“This provides evidence that different types of love draw on partly distinct and partly overlapping brain regions,” said Roland Zahn, a psychiatrist and expert in mood disorders at King’s College London, UK, who was not involved in the study.
Love is old — older than humans
Neuroimaging studies in the US, UK, and China had already suggested that feelings of love recruits brain regions associated with reward, attachment, motivation, and reinforcement learning.
“This study strengthens these findings in a larger group of patients, and people from a different culture in Finland,” said Brown.
All these studies found a common feature of love — it always involves brain regions located evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain, which neuroscientists sometimes call reptilian systems.
“These systems have also been shown to activate, for instance, when monogamous prairie-voles form pair-bonds and attachments with their offspring. The biological root of human love experiences is in the attachment networks of the brain we inherited from our mammalian ancestors,” said Rinne.
While it’s difficult to prove whether animals feel love in the same way humans do, scientists believe they certainly form the same rewarding attachments we do.
We’re ‘addicted’ to the people we love
Brown thinks that the reptilian reward brain regions influence our higher thoughts when we are in love.
“We are addicted to the people we love. And when we lose someone, yes, it’s like withdrawing from a drug. Love activates this system when you need to know when something is good, like when you see someone that you love,” she said.
So, when people say a lover is driven by their genitalia or their hormones, it may be a reptilian brain pathway involved in addiction that’s causing their intense feelings.
But love comes in many forms. Rinne thinks that as human cultures became more advanced, our experiences of love became dependent not only on biological, but also cultural and subjective psychological influences.
We may have extended what we love beyond our families to include people we haven’t even met, such as celebrities. We even love other species, like our pets, and abstract things, like art, and nature.
Rinne’s study shows why we feel stronger affection for those we are close to compared to strangers, “even though the underlying brain processes of affection are the same for all types of interpersonal relationships,” said Rinne.
“This may help explain why religions and philosophical traditions such as Christianity or Buddhism refer to benevolence towards others as ‘neighborly love’ or ‘loving-kindness,’ even if it does not feel as intense as the love we have for close connections,” Rinne said.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:
Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas, published by Rinne P, et al. in the journal Cerebral Cortex (August 2024) https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae331
Intense, passionate, romantic love: A natural addiction? How the fields that investigate romance and substance abuse can inform each other, published by Fisher HE, et al. in the journal Frontiers Psychology
