Pretty soon, gone will be the days of showing signs of affection by doing things like buying flowers, writing poems, or even playing John Mayer songs.
Scientists have figured out which parts of the brain are stimulated based on how in love with someone you are. Forget the Valentine’s day cards, just get your brain scanned – PROVE that you love them.
According to the initial results that were published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, there are twelve unique parts of the brain that are affected based on your emotional state in a relationship. So, basically with an MRI, scientist can figure out exactly how in love are you. To me, that makes total sense, because we have all had that friend…The one that falls completely head over heels for someone, and becomes a completely different person. One minute your buddy is partying like Charlie Sheen’s drunken clone, and the next minute they are writing poems and listening to sappy music.
Xiaochu Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China, who led the study, said: “Our study provides the first evidence of love-related alterations in the underlying architecture of the brain and the results shed new light on the mechanisms of romantic love. Based on our results, we guess the love may influence dispersive brain networks during general state, including the reward, emotion regulation, motivation, as well as the social cognition brain networks. It might suggest, when someone fall into the love, their brain works in a different way in many types of behaviors besides the love-related during the daily life.”
Early findings show that the areas of the brain involved with romantic love include those areas already known to be associated with reward, motivation, emotion, and social functioning.
All of which are handy in a relationship, unless you are a robot. Because these different areas of the brain ‘light up’ under the scanner as key hormones – dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin – flow to different parts of the brain at different rates, scientist can actually see what happens to your brain when you are truly in love.
Speaking of the brain “lighting up”, let’s take a minute to watch an MRI of a female brain during orgasm…
Sexy, sexy, science…
Although I like technology as much as the next guy, the implication that this technology could be made portable and used almost instantly kind of scares me. Relationships are complicated enough without worrying about your crazy girlfriend getting ahold of a brain scanner and turning your brain into a baked potato from scanning your head 37 times a day while screaming “DO YOU LOVE ME YET?!?”.
Related: This… This is the Face of True Love.
