Shakespeare's Helena said in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind." Neuroscientists couldn’t agree more.
When do you know you started to fall head over heels for someone? What does love do to your brain chemicals, and is falling in love just nature's way to keep our species alive?
In 2005, an anthropologist named Helen Fisher led a research team that published a pioneered study that included the first functional MRI (fMRI) images of the brains of individuals in the throes of romantic love. 2,500 college students were chosen as their test subjects. Her team analysed brain scans of students who viewed pictures of someone special to them and compared the scans to ones taken when the students looked at pictures of acquaintances. Photos of people they romantically-linked caused the participants’ brains where the regions rich with dopamine, the “so-called feel-good neurotransmitter” became active. Caudate nucleus and ventral tegmentum showed activity in the fMRI.
Caudate nucleus is a region associated with reward detection and expectation and the integration of sensory experiences into social behaviour.1 Meanwhile the ventral tegmental area is related to pleasure, focused attention as well as the motivation to pursue and acquire rewards. Reward circuit is counted as…show more content… It is key in making judgment, recognizing fearful situations, and can even decipher when someone is lying to us.2 However, when people are in love, the amygdala decides to sleep which overshadows judgment and causes the enamoured to see his or her beloved through rose-coloured