Anthropologist Helen Fisher, Professor at Rutgers University and her colleagues Arthur Aron and Lucy rown recruited subjects who had been " madly in love" for an average of seven months.
Once inside the MRI machine, subjects were shown two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one.
When each subject looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure - the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus - lit up.
Love lights up the caudate nucleus becuse it is the home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine which is our endogenous love potion.
In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focussed attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race... Love makes you bold, makes you bright.
Donatella Marazziti, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pisa in Italy studied the biochemistry of lovesickness. She and her colleagues measured the serotonin levels in the blood of 24 sujects who had fallen in love within the past six months and obsessed about this love object for atleast four hours a day.
Marazziti compared the lovers' serotonin levels with those of a group of people suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and another group who were free from both passion and mental illness.
Levels of serotonin in both the obsessives' blood and the lovers' blood were 40 percent lower than those in her normal subjects.
Translation: Love and obsessive compulsive disorder could have a similar chemical profile.
Translation: Love and Mental Illness may be difficult to tell apart.
Translation: Don't be a fool. Stay Away.
Psychoanalysts have concocted countless theories about why we fall in love with whom we do.
Freud would have said your choice is influenced by the unrequired wish to bed your mother, if you're a boy, or your father, if you're a girl.
Jung believed that passion is driven by some kind of collective unconscious.
Today psychatrist such as Thomas Lewis from the University of California at San Francisco's School of Medicine hypothesize that romantic love is rooted in our earliest infantile experiences with intimacy, how we felt at the breast, our mother's face, these things of pure unconflicted comfort that get engraved in our brain and that we ceaselessly try to recapture as adults.
According to this theory, we love whom we love not so much because of the future we hope to build but because of the past we hope to reclaim.
Love is reactive, not proactive, it arches us backward, which may be why a certain person just "feels right." or "feels familiar." He or she is familiar. He or she has a certain look or smell or sound or touch that activates buried memories.
Evolutionary Psychology hypothesizes that we tend to see as attractive, and therby choose as mates, people who look healthy. Health is manifested in a woman with a 70 percent waist-to- hip ratio and men with rugged features that suggest a strong supply of testosterone in their blood.
Waist-to-hip ratio is important for the successful birth of a baby, and studies have shown this precise ratio signifies higher fertility.As for the rugged look, well , a man with a good dose of testosterone probably also has a strong immune system and so is more likely to give his partner healthy children.
Does Culture has a role in romance?
Anthropologists used to think that romance was a western construct, a bourgeois by product of the middle ages. Romance was for the sophosticated , took place in cafes, with coffees and cabernets, or on silk sheets, or in rooms with a flickering fire. It was assumed that non westerners, with their broad familial and social obligations, were spread too thin for particular passions.
Scientists now believe that romance is panhuman, embedded in our brains since pleistocene times.
In a study of 166 cultures, anthropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer observed evidence of passionate love in 147 of them. In another study, men and women from Europe, Japan and the philipines were asked to fill out a survey to measure their experiences of passionate love. All three groups professed feeling passion with the same searing intensity.
But though romantic love may be universal, its cultural expression is not.
