Addicted to Love

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS.

Can you believe that it was only in 2000 that they first slid people in the throes of infatuation into MRI machines?  Do the results surprise anybody besides scientists?

[R]omantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. [...]

People in the early throes of passionate love [...] can think of little else. They describe sleeplessness, loss of appetite, feelings of euphoria, and they're willing to take exceptional risks for the loved one.

Brain areas governing reward, craving, obsession, recklessness and habit all play their part in the trickery.

The L.A. Times runs a chatty pop-science piece on recent attempts to track love through the jungle of the brain, tracing the pathways of different chemical signals through its specialized regions.  Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher and colleagues put lovesick people in a functional MRI machine:

"We found some remarkable things," she said. "We saw activity in the ventral tegmental area and other regions of the brain's reward system associated with motivation, elation and focused attention." It's the same part of the brain that presumably is active when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or when gamblers think they're going to win the lottery. [...]

Other studies also suggest that the brain in the first throes of love is much like a brain on drugs.

Lucy Brown, professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has also taken fMRI images of people in the early days of a new love. In a study reported in the July 2005, Journal of Neurophysiology, she too found key activity in the ventral tegmental area. "That's the area that's also active when a cocaine addict gets an IV injection of cocaine," Brown says. "It's not a craving. It's a high."

You see someone, you click, and you're euphoric. And in response, your ventral tegmental area uses chemical messengers such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin to send signals racing to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens with the good news, telling it to start craving.

"The other person becomes a goal in your life," Brown says. He or she becomes a goal you might die without and would pack up and move across the country for. That one person begins to stand out as the one and only.

Biologically, the cravings and pleasure unleashed are as strong as any drug. Surely such a goal is worth taking risks for, and other alterations in the brain help ensure that the lovelorn will do just that. Certain regions, scientists have found, are being deactivated, such as within the amygdala, associated with fear. "That's why you can do such insane things when you're in love," Fisher says. "You would never otherwise dream of driving across the country in 13 hours, but for love, you would."

"I am not afraid, not anymore, not like before."  Those words* are from the lovely jazz song "Moody's Mood," a scatty riff on "I'm in the mood for love," but how many love-song lyrics say that?

Sooner or later, excited brain messages reach the caudate nucleus, a dopamine-rich area where unconscious habits and skills, such as the ability to ride a bike, are stored.

The attraction signal turns the love object into a habit, and then an obsession. According to a 1999 study in the journal Psychological Medicine, people newly in love have serotonin levels 40% lower than normal people do -- just like people with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

All this talk of mental illness and neurotransmitters leads to a rather chilling companion piece in the LAT:  Are antidepressants taking the edge off love?

LOVE'S first rush is a private madness between two people, all-consuming and, if mutually felt, endlessly wonderful.

Couples think about the other obsessively -- on a roller coaster of euphoria when together, longing when apart.

"It's temporary insanity," says Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Now, from her studies of the brains of lovers in the throes of the initial tumble, Fisher has developed a controversial theory. She and her collaborator, psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson of the University of Virginia, believe that Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and other antidepressants alter brain chemistry so as to blunt the intense cutting edge of new love.

Fisher and Thomson, who describe their theory in a chapter in the book, "Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience," aren't talking just about the notorious ability of the drugs to damp sexual desire and performance, although that, they believe, plays its part. They think the drugs also sap the craving for a mate -- perhaps even the brain's very ability to fall in love.

And that would be bad news, given the widespread use of antidepressants in this country -- about 10% of adult women and 4% of adult men take the drugs, according to a 2004 report by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. [...]

The chemicals involved in the heart-pounding fall over the cliff into another's life, including dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, are the very chemicals altered by many anti-depressants. [...]

SSRIs are also known to curb obsessive thinking, the kind of focused state that is central to the first blush of romance.

There's very little experimental evidence so far, at least in humans, but there are some anecdotal warnings:

Jerry Frankel, a urologist from Plano, Texas, who's been married for more than 40 years, was so conflicted about his experience on antidepressants he wrote to a national newspaper.

"My usual enthusiasm for life was replaced by blandness," he wrote. "My romantic feelings for my wife declined dramatically." He was willing to risk depression again in order to regain his old zest for romantic depth.

Naturally, the story goes on to worry that saying these things, like the warnings about the uncommon side effect of suicidality, will prevent people from taking drugs that could save their lives.  (Shades of "For whosoever would save his life shall lose it" . . .)

Fisher doesn't quarrel with the drugs' benefits for many with chronic, severe depression. But she worries about people who take the drugs to get through a break-up, a death or a job loss, then keep taking them.

"I'm concerned about well-adjusted men and women who go through a crisis and start taking antidepressants," she says. "They continue taking them, not realizing they may be suppressing these other systems."

Would you suppress this system, medicate *this madness away?  And do you think science has anything on art?  [follow link and free register to hear the whole song]

[HE] There I go, there I go, there I go, there I go
Pretty baby you are the soul that snaps my control
Such a funny thing but every time I'm near you
I never can behave
You give me a smile and then I'm wrapped up in your magic
Music all around me, crazy music, music that keeps
calling me so very close to you,
turns me your slave
Come and do with me any little thing that you want to
Anything, baby just let me get next to you
Am I insane or do I really see heaven in your eyes
Bright as stars that shine up above you
In the clear blue sky
How I worry bout you
Just can't live my life without you
Baby come here, don't have no fear
Oh, is there wonder why
I'm really feeling in the mood for love
So tell me why stop to think about this weather, my dear
This little dream might fade away
There I go talking out of my head again so baby won't you
Come and put our two hearts together
That would make me strong and brave
Oh, when we are one, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid
If there's a cloud up above us
Go on and let it rain
I'm sure our love together would endure a hurricane
Oh my baby
Won't you please let me love you and get a release from this awful misery

[SHE] What is all this talk about loving me, my sweet
I am not afraid, not anymore, not like before
Don't you understand me, come on and please
Pull yourself together, got to do it very soon
My heart's on fire, come on and take me
I'll be what you make me, my darling, my sweet

[HE] Oh, pretty baby, you make me feel so good
Let me take you by the hand
Come let us visit out there
In that new promised land

Maybe there we can find
A good place to keep a lovin' state of mind
I'm so crazy 'bout love
Never knowin' what love's all about
James, will you come on in, man, you can blow now if you want to, we're through

~ "Moody's Mood for Love," lyrics by Eddie Jefferson

Comments

[Meade]

When I come across pithy or insightful comments to blog posts, I often clip and save them in a file. Here are three that I particularly liked. Unfortunately, I don't always remember to save the source. The first one, I believe, came from Ruth Anne. The second may have also been written by Ruth Anne. The last one came from Sippican:

1. "If you can support yourself, you only have to stay with a man for the right reasons: you love him, you promised you would stay before GOd, you love the children you brought into the world together and don't want to traumatize them by getting a divorce, he makes you laugh, he doesn't yell at you when you buy another computer or nullify his vote in every single election."

2. "This trend will probably exhaust itself, perhaps is in its death throes already, when in desperate loneliness and despair, men and women return to the timeless truths of honor, duty, commitment, companionship that make for a deep and lasting relationship that transcends mere 'love' which is just a another word for what is in reality simply shallow sexual gratification."

3. "-Very hot pan or wok
-1/2 stick butter
-same amount olive oil
-haze forms
-thin sliced onion 2 min
-tbspn minced garlic minimum 2 min
-1.5 lb shrimp
-med heat 2-3 min
-juice 2 lemons into pan
-2tbspn basil
-another minute, a little pepper
-dump on 1 pound linguine"

I could be wrong; the first two may have been written by Karen.

[amba (Annie Gottlieb)]

The first one must have been written by Ruth Anne -- it doesn't have Karen's idiosyncratic, Emily Dickinson-like punctuation. The second doesn't sound like one of "us," but like a formal quote from some print source -- famous person or current pundit. The third . . . mmmmmmmm . . . way to a woman's heart . . .

Very clearly, a large segment of society is addicted to the drug-like first stage of love, which, to be fair, is not just a sexual but an emotional and even (in a shallow old-hippie sense) "spiritual" rush. Nature designed this only as a mechanism to get two individuals past their respective immune-system-like rejection of an "other" so that they can form a companionate bond and get some history and habit with each other (and if the sexual-romantic aspect is intense, it can be turned up again periodically to spot-weld the old bond). Once the bond is formed, the initial rush has served its purpose and can subside. But at that point, many of us pick up and go chasing after it again.

There is a whole range of other pleasures, far more subtle to savor and nonaddictive but habit-forming in the good sense, beyond the "withdrawal symptoms" of the ebbing of infatuation, when the other person's otherness begins to rub and irritate you. Actually the otherness, the irritant, is also a polishing agent and a close-up lesson in how no two beings are alike.

[Meade]

So well put, Annie... I am clipping, filing, AND saving the source.

Romantic love is what brought me together with my (now former) wife 26 years ago. It also led to the birth of our daughter several years later. From Dr. Helen Fisher, whom you quote above:

You see someone, you click, and you're euphoric. And in response, your ventral tegmental area uses chemical messengers such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin to send signals racing to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens with the good news, telling it to start craving.

Wow. Describes the state of my ventral tegmental area at that time to a "T."

But it was at the moment of our daughter's birth that, for me, the second phenomenon Fisher describes really kicked in, although, in my case, "the other person" wasn't the Oh Baby, Baby. It was the baby:

"The other person becomes a goal in your life," Brown says. He or she becomes a goal you might die without and would pack up and move across the country for. That one person begins to stand out as the one and only.

The baby has grown up and thrives. The Oh Baby, Baby left to be with her next Baby Baby. And a pair of Carolina wrens (who mate for life I'm told) 4 weeks ago built their nest on the back porch of my empty nest. (Two hatchlings so far.)

No craving in my nucleus accumbens. Just profound contentment.

[amba (Annie Gottlieb)]

It's so funny to be talking (as you do in jest, but some people probably do in all seriousness) about "my nucleus accumbens" or "my serotonin level" the way maybe people used to talk about "my ego," "my subconscious," "my id." None of us have ever seen any of these things, so for all practical purposes they're as mythic as humours, or centaurs. Only now the myth has scientific prestige and juju.

[amba (Annie Gottlieb)]

That's a lovely post, Meade. We're on that back porch with you, rocking, sipping, laughing, being quiet. You convey the sense that, as fast as time goes, there's all the time in the world.

[Meade]

Wren babies update:

Two more hatched over night to complete the clutch of four.

I'm off to work, leaving Huck, the 80 year-old (in people years) yellow Lab to nap on the porch and guard our new friends from menacing cats and coons.

Annie, with you and J rocking with me (in spirit) on the back porch, and all these new guests, H's and my empty nest has turned into one happenin' B&B. Thanks.

[Dan]

If one views love as nothing more than chemicals firing in the brain is it any wonder that the love disappears? I don't know which is the greater enemy of romantic love: the "sexual revolution" or the reductive view of Man as machine. (The two phenomena are in fact inter-related.)

"'It's temporary insanity,' says Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University."

Like so much else, the modern understanding of romantic love and courtship (what's left of that understanding, anyway) took form during the Middle Ages. It was then when the Provencal and dolce stil nuovo poets first gave expression to many of the forms that we now call "love." Then also romantic love was seen as mental illness -- lovers were seen as having literally gone mad. This is no doubt the origin of the phrase "madly in love." (In the Middle Ages Chretien de Troyes wrote a fascinating story that depicts Lancelot as literally insane because he had fallen in love with Guinevere.)

The pre-eminent dolce stil nuovo poet, Dante, wrote about romantic love -- of Beatrice in particular -- to express the love of God. He does so in one of the greatest poems of all time:

"Tanto gentil e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia quand'ella altrui saluta,
ch'ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l'ardiscon di guardare.

Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d'umilta' vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.

Mostrasi si' piacente a chi la mira,
che da' per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che 'ntender non la puo' chi no la prova;

e par che de la sua labbia si mova
uno spirito soave pien d'amore,
che va dicendo a l'anima: Sospira."

(Sorry for not providing a translation -- I spent a minute poking around for one on the Internet but didn't turn up anything decent; but a little more looking probably would.)

[Ruth Anne]

Meade:
I didn't write either of those quotes. I'm 98% certain of that.

Love is not chemicals. Love is a choice. A self-donating, soul-completing, life-affirming, sacrifical-satisfactional choice.

[Meade]

Begging your pardon for the misattributions, Ruth Anne.

I see now I'm going to have to do a better job of filing and labeling the pithy insightful quotes I snag. Like your last three sentences above: beautifully concisely pro-life, pro-love, and truly pro-choice... on a lofty digital pedestal labeled "Profound - RAA," right next to "Hard-won Wisdom - AG," over by "Recipes Not by Martha Stewart - SPPCN."

[Ruth Anne]

Meade:
I'll say it again. If I weren't so married, you would be sooooo my type.

[Meade]

Dang! 5 "o's!" This pedestal approach just might be working!