Where Does New Love Dwell? A Scientific Map

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine- and-roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing Tuesday in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal. It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection.

As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. “When you’re in the throes of this romantic love, it’s overwhelming you’re out of control, you’re irrational, you’re going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day Why? Because she’s there,” said Helen Fisher, co-author of the analysis.

“And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide,” said Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live.”

Brain imaging technology cannot read people’s minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many-sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.

Still, said Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, “I would give this study an ‘A.’ It really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love.”

He added, “The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs.”

In the study, Fisher, Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at pictures of their beloveds while an MRI machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at pictures of acquaintances.

Functional MRI technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity. In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit. These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates when people desire or anticipate a reward. Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the MRI images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored high on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, “is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don’t think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized,” Brown said. The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Fisher said.

In a follow-up experiment, Fisher, Aron and Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women recently dumped by their lovers.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love.

“It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration- attraction,” Fisher said in an e-mail message.

But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say intact and capable in time of flaring to life in the presence of someone new.