What happensin your brainwhen you’re in love?

You can’t eat .you can’t sleep.your stomach qnd heart flutter when this person contact you or suggests spendig time together.sounds like all the telltale signs you may be falling in love.But what love does to the brain according to neuroscience?qnand what happens in your brain when you begin to feel lovestruck?and how does the brain change over time when it comes to love?

Requirements:

What happensin your brainwhen you’re in love?Which parts of thbrain are highly stimulated when we fallin love?

whathappensin your brain when you’re in love?•Brown and her lab partners used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 10 women and seven men who were intensely “in love,” based on their scores on thepassionate love scale, a 14-item questionnaire designed to assess the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of passionate love that relationship researchers have widely used for decades.•9/27/20232

What happens in your brain when you’re in love?People who score in the highest range of this assessment are deemed as being wildly, even recklessly, in love. Those who score in the lowest range have admittedly lost their thrill for their partner.Participants in Brown’s study alternately viewed a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of a familiar person. When viewing the photo of their romantic partner, participants experiencedbrain activation in the midbrain’s ventral tegmental area(VTA), which is the part of the brain connected to meeting basic needs such as drinking when we’re thirsty and eating when we’re hungry.9/27/20233

What happens in your brain when you’re in love?•“It’s the area of the brain that controls things like swallowing and other basic reflexes,” Brown said. “While we often think about romantic love as this euphoric, amorphous thing and as a complex emotion, the activation we see in this very basic part of the brain is telling us that romantic love is actually a drive to fulfill a basic need.”•Additional fMRI studiesconducted by Cacioppo shed more light on how love affects your brain. Her team found 12 areas of the brain work together to release chemicals such as the “feel-good” hormone dopamine, the “cuddle hormone” oxytocin, and adrenaline, which induces a euphoric sense of purpose. Her findings also indicated that the brain’s reward circuit—the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex—which is very sensitive to behaviors that induce pleasure, lit up on brain scans when talking about a loved one because of increased blood flow in these areas.9/27/20234

What happens in your brain when you’re in love?•While all of this is happening, Cacioppo noted, our levels of serotonin—a key hormone in regulating appetite and intrusive anxious thoughts, drop. Low levels of serotonin are common among those with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.•9/27/20235