Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (4 page)

In many ways behavioral changes during romantic love resemble a psychosis, and from a biochemical standpoint, passionate love closely imitates substance abuse. Dr. John Marsden, the head of the British National Addiction Centre, found that love is addictive in similar ways to cocaine and speed. He concluded that romantic love is a “booby trap,” intended to drive partners together long enough to bond. Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, author of
The Anatomy of Love
, described falling in love as “a distinct set of chemical events occurring in the brain that have similarities with mental illness.” According to Dr. Fisher, exactly the same brain circuits that become active when you take cocaine light up when you’re in love, and you experience an intense elation, just like when you’re high on drugs. Researchers have also connected romantic love to the signaling pathways that use the hormone dopamine, a chemical messenger closely tied to the state of euphoria, craving, and addiction.

The chemicals released from the brain during new love result in a variety of physical feelings and reactions that around 90% of new lovers report they have experienced. These include sleeplessness, loss of appetite, flushing, exhilaration, awkwardness, euphoria, butterflies in the stomach, fast breathing, dizziness, weak knees, heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and stuttering. Many of these reactions are linked to the fear of being rejected by the loved one, so it becomes like an evolutionary double whammy of excitement and fear, both at the same time. New lovers not only feel these emotions, they constantly scan the face of the beloved, looking for signs of reciprocation.

Carole King summed up perfectly the chemical reactions we have to falling in love in her 1970 song “I Feel the Earth Move under My Feet.” This song describes how she felt hot and cold, lost emotional control, felt her heart start trembling, and saw
the sky come falling down whenever her beloved was around. These are also common responses to drug addiction.

Love can be a wonderful roller coaster ride, and it happens unexpectedly for most people. They have little warning and no apparent control over it. The feelings come from the primitive part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex, or gray matter, and overpower the rational, thinking part, making lovers behave in irrational ways—in the same way that the fight-or-flight response makes a person run when confronted by a lion, as opposed to calmly thinking about an escape plan.

The euphoria of love has inspired artists to produce haunting love songs and melodies and powerful, touching poetry, but the intensity of love can also drive some of those under its influence to jealousy and paranoia. Recent scientific evidence shows it can even dramatically improve our health, with further studies showing it is capable of curing cancer or other diseases. Love even motivates us to continue to live with people whose behavior is detrimental to our well-being, as in the case of abusive partners.

People in the “falling-in-love” stage are commonly called “lovesick.” They say they can’t eat, don’t sleep properly, and show repetitive, compulsive behaviors, such as calling their beloved twenty to thirty times a day. These behaviors have been linked to the combination of low levels of serotonin and high levels of oxytocin. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that gives us heightened feelings of awareness, sensitivity to our surroundings, and an overall feeling of well-being.

Depression and eating disorders are also associated with low levels of serotonin, and antidepressant medications are used to raise these levels. Women naturally have around 30% more oxytocin than men, and this, combined with lower levels of serotonin, can explain why women are more inclined to become “crazy” about someone and even intensely obsessive.

In 2007, Serge Brand and his colleagues at the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, interviewed 113 subjects, all of whom were aged seventeen. Of those, sixty-five said they had recently fallen in love. Brand found that the love-struck adolescents slept less, acted compulsively more often, and had “lots of crazy ideas and creative energy.” The “in-love” teenagers were more likely to engage in risky behavior, such as reckless driving or bungee jumping. Brand showed that teenagers in the early stages of intense romantic love did not differ from patients having a hypomanic episode. In other words, it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate teenagers in love from people who are commonly thought to be crazy.

Brain-imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalographic scanning (MEG) have opened up a whole new world of possibilities in understanding humans because they enable researchers to study the working human brain without harming the patient.

The study of love and sex in the brain gained momentum in 2002, after English neurobiologists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College London conducted a study of young men and women who said they were in a new relationship and described themselves as “madly in love.” When
shown a picture of their lover, their brain activity pattern was significantly different from the way it was when they looked at a picture of a close friend. The brain scans showed that romantic attraction activated those areas of the brain with a large concentration of receptors for dopamine. Dopamine, you will recall, is the neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation and is often called the “happiness hormone.” High levels of dopamine and norepinephrine are linked to heightened attention, short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, and goal-oriented behavior. When couples are first captivated by each other, they often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention, and exquisite delight in the smallest details of their new relationship. Bartels and Zeki compared the MRI brain-scan images they took of people in the different emotional states of sexual arousal, feeling happy, and cocaine-induced euphoria and found them to be almost the same.

The following brain scans show how being “madly in love” activates the same areas in the brain as addiction to cocaine.

The brain scan on the left shows the region of the brain that is activated in “crazy-in-love” people. The scan on the rightshows the activated regions when using cocaine.

So whether you are in love or high on drugs, you will feel about the same. The scans also revealed that mothers who were looking at their babies had the same brain activity as people who were looking at their lovers. Bartels and Zeki concluded from this that both romantic and maternal love are linked to the perpetuation of the human species, because lovers and babies carry the promise that your DNA will continue.

In 2005, Dr. Lucy Brown, professor of neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, teamed up with one of the world’s most prominent biological anthropologists, Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, and conducted studies with MRI brain scans on seventeen young men and women. These were people in a new relationship, and they described themselves as being “newly and madly in love”—that is, they were in either the lust or early romantic love stage. Their MRI research explained the physiological reasons behind why we feel what we feel when we fall in love—why love is so powerful and why being rejected is so painful and depressing.

They studied an area in the brain associated with cravings, memory, emotion, and attention, called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental—the part of the brain from which dopamine cells are pumped to other areas of the brain. These areas all lit up on the MRI scans as subjects viewed images of their lovers. They also compared the MRI data with the other studies on male penile-erection responses to images of women and analyzed data on both human and animal couples that had been together for a long time. They found that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine, and the more dopamine you get, the higher and happier you will feel. Fisher and Brown also confirmed that “crazy love” causes a sensation similar to a substance-induced high because of the hormone activity.

A cross-section of the human brain

The caudate, they discovered, is the brain area connected with romantic love. They found that long-term attachment is centered in the front and base of the brain in the ventral putamen and the pallidum. Feelings related to lust and sexual arousal occupy different areas, mostly located on the left-hand side of the brain. The important point is that this research removes the mystery of love in the brain and allows us to be more objective about what love really is.

Fisher and Brown, both separately and together, analyzed the brain scans of over 3,000 “madly-in-love” college students taken while they looked at a picture of their lover. They found that the women in the study showed more activity in the caudate nucleus—as mentioned, an area in the brain associated with memory, emotion, and attention—the septum, also called the “pleasure center,” and the posterior parietal cortex, which is involved in the production of mental images and memory recall. The men in the study showed more activity in the visual cortex and visual processing areas, including one area responsible for sexual arousal. Bartels and Zeki came to the same conclusions in their study.

The next brain scans illustrate the research carried out by Dr. Brown and show where love sits in the brain and why men and women think so very differently about it. These are scans of men and women looking at images of someone they are madly in love with.

Images of love. Men and women looking at pictures of their beloved. White areas are active zones.

As you see, men have fewer lit-up areas than women, but when those areas are viewed in color, they show men’s areas to be more intensely active than women’s larger but less active areas. Women
not only have more areas being active, those areas are in completely different locations from men’s. This evidence shows why men and women have very different views of love relationships.

Another study showed erotic photos to people as their brains were scanned, but Brown and Fisher found none of the “in-love” activity areas shown in the above scans. As mentioned earlier, they found activity in the hypothalamus, which controls drives like hunger and thirst, and in the amygdala area, which handles arousal. The bottom line is that brains in love and brains in lust don’t look much alike because they use different systems.