Jack & Diane & Your Brain

Valentine's Day is tomorrow, y'all. For those of you with significant others, spending exorbitant amounts of money on a mediocre steak and boxed red wine may be in your near future. The rest of us [myself included], however, have slaps in the face from every Hallmark-worthy couple and vomit-inducing bouquet of roses to endure.

Perhaps I'm a little cynical, but can you blame me? Love, a concept so abstract, so complicated, so devoid of scientific foundations, is hard to understand, let alone appreciate as a single college student majoring in neuroscience.

But wait! There's hope.

Acevedo, Aron, Fisher et al. recently published an article in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience titled 'Neural Correlates of Long-term Intense Romantic Love' that investigates where and how love is expressed in the brain.

[Note: the image above is a painting by Greg Dunn titled "Hippocampus" and can be found on his website, here.]

They studied married subjects using fMRI experiments to determine where the brain is activated while the subjects were thinking about their spouses. To control for confounding variables, subjects were also exposed to a long-term acquaintance, a close friend and a stranger while undergoing the fMRI procedures.

The authors observed that areas of the dopamine reward and basal ganglia systems were activated during the subjects' exposure to their spouses. Additionally, the hypothalamus and posterior hippocampus were found to be associated with sexual frequency. Lastly, the study discovered that the caudate, the septum/fornix, the posterior cingulate and the posterior hippocampus were correlated with obsession [creepy].

Alright, so you probably don't have a spare fMRI laying around your house to analyze your girlfriend or boyfriend while he/she watches you. However, these findings add to the growing resources citing that love does, in fact, have a biological basis.

So in the end, I guess love is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna' get [unless you apply and receive funding from the NIH, perform extensive neuroimaging experiments, analyze the data and most likely lose your significant other in the process]. Happy Valentine's Day!