We have all heard of the expression “love at first sight” too many times to count. And even if you have never experienced falling in love before, one watch of the The Notebook gives you a pretty clear picture of it. But have you ever wondered how it actually works? Despite what many think that love only has to do with your heart, your brain and other parts of your body have just as much to do with it. So the real question is: Is there scientific logic behind how we fall in and experience love?
According to a science-based study by Arthur Arun, on average, the mind of a person takes between 90 seconds to 4 minutes to determine whether it is struck by love or not. He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married. Does this prove that love is based on science? No, however it does show a strong possibility that there is a certain methodology to how we fall in love, to which we have little control over.
My concern with the study is that he doesn’t provide any information on his subjects such as their age, their gender, or other factors. This flaw makes his claim questionable because he doesn’t give us specifics. In addition, attraction is a very relative term and not entirely easy to measure so it would be important to know how Arun is measuring attraction in his study. It could be their personality, what the person is wearing, or an appealing body feature.
Some of the highlighted points of the study are as follows:
• 55% of the role is played by body language; this means a brain detects the activities of body movement and decides whether it has received the signals of love or not
• 38% of the decision to be in love is contributed by the voice—its tone and change in frequency
• 7% is the reaction to a lover’s statement or choice of words
Another recent study based on the topic “science behind the love” was conducted at Rutgers University by Helen Fisher, which revealed there are 3 stages involved with falling in love—namely lust, attraction, and attachment. Each stage involves different types of chemical reactions within the body (specifically the brain). Along with that, there are different hormones present in the body helping to excite all these three stages (lust, attraction, and attachment) separately as well as collectively.
Stage 1: Lust
Lust is said to be the initial stage of getting involved with love. The feel of lust is basically backed up or instigated by the sexual hormones within the body. Oestrogen and Testosterone are the two basic types of hormones present equally in men and women’s body that excites the feeling of lust within the brain.
Stage 2: Attraction
Second stage of acquiring love is attraction. This is the phase when a person actually starts to feel the love. His or her impatience for attracting somebody leads to excitement, and the individual is left with no other option but to only think about that specific person.
Stage 3: Attachment
When a couple passes through the above two stages of love successfully, the time of bonding with each other becomes powerful. Attachment is a bond helping the couple to take their relationship to advanced levels. It instigates the feeling of bearing children and falling in love with them wholeheartedly.
By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: W
hy love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful. In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.
While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain — which is involved in cravings — became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation. Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine. “The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel,” Dr. Brown says.
Although this study shows some scientific evidence of love, I think that a stronger study would be to take people of all different ages, both genders, and see if either factors are impacted on the results. For example, it could be possible that a female’s brain is more consumed by love than a male’s. Or that a teenager reacts differently than a parent. This would change the evidence dramatically.
In the end, Drs. Fisher and Brown say what they learned from lovers’ brains is that romantic love isn’t really an emotion — it’s a drive that’s based deep within our brains, right alongside our urges to find food and water.
So what does this mean?
Whether you realize it or not, significant number of chemical reactions are involved in instigating lust, attraction, attachment, and love between couples. Science has yet discovered the exact bodily reactions behind the complexity of love. However, based upon the above studies it is clearly said that falling in love involves many mechanisms and chemicals within the brain . You simply cannot avoid the sensual reaction of love because it is scientifically wired in our bodies.
Your blog post was very interesting, and I was particularly curious about how certain senses play a key role in our attraction to someone . An article posted on CNN entitled “The laws of sexual attraction” explains the research of Karl Grammer and Elizabeth Oberzaucher, two scientists exploring how human scent has an influence on attraction (CNN). When on their period and ovulating, women produce couplins, which produce a scent that is attractive to men because it causes “his testosterone levels rise…[and let the man know that] a woman is fertile” (CNN). In a study preformed recently, women were told to smell men’s t-shirts and set aside the one with the scent that was most appealing to them. Upon further analysis of the results, the conclusion was made that chemistry plays a huge role in the scents that we find attractive because “women were most attracted to the shirts of men with a different major histocompatability complex (MHC) from them. MHC is a collection of genes that are related to immune systems” (CNN). It is an “unconscious” desire for a woman to want to mate with someone that has a different immune system because it increases their offspring’s chance of survival (CNN).
Secondly, in terms of what one visually views as attractive, there is a large importance of how face symmetry and one’s perception of what is attractive are related. “Kendra Schmid, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, says there is a formula for the “perfect” face. She uses 29 different measurements to determine someone’s appeal on a scale of 1 to 10″ (CNN). The scale is measured on the height, width, and proportionality of one’s face. For example, when measuring Brad Pitt’s face it was stated that he rated a “9.3…which is the highest”(CNN) that Schmid had ever seen.
Citation:
“The Laws of Sexual Attraction.” CNN. Cable News Network, 13 Apr. 2009. Web. 3 Dec. 2015. .
This post is quite thought-provoking. Your extensive research seems to point in the direction of love being more of a series of chemical reactions in the brain versus the typical stereotype of love being a “feeling of the heart,” which makes complete sense. There is no reason why love is associated with an organ that is there to pump blood throughout our bodies! After reading your source that cites Arthur Arun, it is quite unclear what his experimental design was. How was he able to know that it only took 90 seconds to 4 minutes to recognize love? How was it determined whether or not the subjects had been struck by love? Was that subjective or objective? Did he actually measure anything in the subjects’ brains? Also, was he measuring those who already claimed to be in love, or was he introducing new people to the subjects to measure their reactions? Finally, what was the sample size? All of these questions leave me a bit concerned about trusting the results Arun obtained. The more I thought about these two studies, the more I wondered whether they can help explain why some people have an inability to fall in love. I found another paper written by Helen Fisher that explained how serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can negatively affect neural mechanisms associated with love. It shows individual case studies instead of a group of individuals, so the sample size is small. However, her findings still help prove that love happens in the brain, not the heart.