Why True Love Turns Our Heads!

The mystery of love has inspired prim poesy, purple prose and now the research of a pair of methodical British neurologists who believe the lovey-dovey instinct is all in the brain -- the medial insula, the anterior cingulate, the striarum and the prefrontal cortex, to be exact.

Semir Zeki and Andreas Bartels of University College London managed to get 17 love-struck volunteers to sit still long enough for a brain scan under decidedly unromantic circumstances. Each volunteer was hooked up to a lie detector, then shown a photograph of his or her beloved. The aforementioned regions of the brain lit up on the scans of each giddy subject.

The four regions are associated with gut feelings, a sense of reward, euphoria and depression -- certainly the hallmarks of love, if song and story are to be believed. "We were really struck by how clear-cut the activity was," notes Bartels. "It's not surprising that we got a response in those particular parts of the brain."

There were no significant differences between men and women in the experiment, though the ladies were far more eager to participate than the gents. The two doctors placed ads and distributed posters to recruit their volunteers, who were required to be "head over heels in love."

Love has fascinated other academics over the years. More than 20 years ago, psychologist Elaine Hatfield queried the young and restless at three universities to discover that most fretted their "real" love might be mere infatuation. Yale University researcher Robert Sternberg probed the very "psychology of love" and came up with a half-dozen varieties of the experience. Clinical psychologists Carl Hundy and Susan Vonderheide have identified all sorts of alarming lovelorn states, including "romantic anxiety," "insecure love" and "jealous obsession."

In addition, love is a veritable cottage industry in the pop-psychology world, which revolves around permutations of those who pursue -- or are pursued. The new English study, though, is the first to objectively chart the real effects of romance on the brain, through magnetic resonance imaging in this case.

"These parts of the brain are also the parts which are active in euphoric states generated by exogenous substances such as cocaine," says coresearcher Zeki. "Romantic love is to many people, at any rate, intoxicating."

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