Truly Madly in Love
Apparently, being in love really is like being crazy.
One of Fisher’s central pursuits in the past decade has been looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine. Fisher and her colleagues Arthur Aron and Lucy Brown recruited subjects who had been “madly in love” for an average of seven months. Once inside the MRI machine, subjects were shown two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one.
What Fisher saw fascinated her. When each subject looked at his or her loved one, the parts of the brain linked to reward and pleasure—the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus—lit up. What excited Fisher most was not so much finding a location, an address, for love as tracing its specific chemical pathways. Love lights up the caudate nucleus because it is home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which Fisher came to think of as part of our own endogenous love potion. In the right proportions, dopamine creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. It is why, when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don’t.
Mari thinks the quoted article is the one that Maria was talking about in the comments on the first post this month. Too bad National Geographic thinks pay walls are cute.
Back to the topic, isn’t that funny? The happy chemical1 causes us to do things that are actually very dangerous to ourselves. So, in effect, that cliché phrase “madly in love” is pretty true.
Have you ever known someone or been that someone who was completely head over heels and acting quite the fool?
If so, has the person in question done dangerously reckless things?
Would you agree that the phrase “madly in love” isn’t just cliché?
- Dopamine. [↩]
Question for You, Science 
9 February 2008, 08:57
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Hah. Madly in love is certainly more than a cliche, cause people do retarded things to try to “impress” the ones they “love” or whatever. It makes people not be able to think straight or focus on their normal tasks. It can be quite dangerous.
I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s been that crazy before, or at least not completely crazy to my eyes, but I can where that may happen. Sometimes, when you think you love someone, the crazy thing that you do is to get comfortable and to look past the things that would normally disgust you because you accept that those things are parts of the reasons as to why you love him. Maybe that’s crazy? Or what’s crazy is that when you think you’re in love with someone, you justify or rationalize why they’re abusing you and you don’t realize that it’s abuse until it’s too late or it’s past the relevant point.
Now those things, I have seen and if that makes you “madly in love” (but in a self-destructive way), then so be it.
I’ve always thought people went a bit crazy when they were in love. People always seem to do more odd things when they’ve got someone who like/love alot. That was a really cool article