Taking leave of our senses
When in love, we suspend rational judgement of the person, and this
helps ensure that love is sustained through the years and guarantees a
lasting relationship.
A recent story in The Daily Mail explained how, when in the
presence of or shown a picture of someone they were passionately in love
with, most people have a fairly characteristic response. An important
part of their brain – the frontal lobe – that governs their capacity to
make rational judgements, seems to shut down. Since its publication the
story, though it has not exactly gone viral, has been echoed by a large
number of news sources all over the world, both online and in print. The
ironical thing is that the research study on which this story is based
was first published in September 2000, by Andreas Bartels and Semir
Zeki. Obviously, it was not considered hot enough then to be reported,
but with the increasing interest on the part of the general public in
the findings of scientific research concerning love, sex and
relationships, it’s evidently more saleable now.
The leader of this and several other such neurobiological studies, Prof
Semir Zeki, is the author of several scholarly books on the visual brain
(the most recent being The Splendours and Miseries of The Brain),
a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Professor of Neuroaesthetics (a
discipline connecting science and art, that he pioneered) at the
University College, London. He has done much path-breaking research on
the relationship between the human brain on the one hand and beauty, art
and love on the other. I understand he is scheduled to speak tomorrow
on Neurobiology of Love and Beauty at the 25th Foundation Day
Celebrations of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at
Hyderabad, and am sorry that I won’t be able to hear him there. But
hopefully the Internet will make available the text of this talk soon
enough.
Let’s try to understand what precisely Prof Zeki’s research threw up. By
using the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technique,
researchers can see which specific part of the brain is activated when
we perform certain tasks, by assessing the oxygen flow to its component
parts. Zeki and his co-workers studied the fMRI responses of 17 healthy
male and female volunteers when they were shown pictures of their
romantic partners compared to pictures of their friends. They found a
distinctive difference between the way people responded to friends and
to romantic partners. While both activated the expected areas in the
brain that are associated with positive emotions, certain portions of
the brain were significantly deactivated when pictures of the romantic
partners were presented. Portions of the prefrontal cortex (which
governs judgement and social behaviour) and middle temporal cortex
(which regulates negative emotions) were deactivated, as is usually the
case when we are happy. But, the more interesting finding was the
deactivation of the amygdala which controls fear, sadness and
aggression. Friends activated this part of the brain, but lovers
deactivated it.
Other research has also established that people in love have some
chemical changes in their brains as well. There is a surge of a
neurotransmitter (chemical messenger in the brain) called Dopamine which
gives us a feeling of euphoria. But there's also a depletion of another
neurotransmitter called Serotonin, which is why we tend to feel easily
anxious, jittery and depressed. There is also a deluge of adrenaline
making our heart beat faster, our palms sweaty, and our mouths go dry in
the presence of the one we love.
So, putting this all together, when in love, we temporarily take leave
of our senses. We suspend rational judgement, we are fearless and we
think only positive thoughts. We can swing between euphoria, anxiety and
depression, within minutes. It’s almost like we’ve consumed a narcotic
drug. And here’s the rub. Another interesting finding of the study was
that the same portions of the brain that get activated by the narcotic
drug cocaine are also activated by romantic love.
The biological explanation of all of this is that a temporary suspension
of their judgement of each other is desirable to increase the
likelihood of two human beings to reproduce. But in our country, we seem
to be doing rather nicely without this. Which is probably the basis for
the derogatory conclusion that love is blind. Or worse, that falling in
love is the dumbest thing one can do. However, I suspect that this
suspension of judgement is a very useful mechanism to ensure that love
can sustain through the years and make for a lasting relationship. For
most relationships break because we judge each other too harshly, based
on our expectation that our partner should be perfect in order to cater
to all our needs throughout our lives. I also suspect that if fMRIs were
done on Indian mothers when it comes to their sons or Indian fathers
when it comes to their daughters, a fair number of them might well show
significantly deactivated prefrontal lobes.
As I write this, my wife and I have just completed 25 years of being
married to each other, during which period we have kept our prefrontal
cortices pretty busy – activating and deactivating them on a regular
basis – to the point that they have pretty much given up now, and remain
in a state of irreparable deactivation, thereby increasing the
likelihood that we’re going to remain in a state of mutual happiness
till death do us part.
Love may be blind. It may be dumb. But whatever anyone else says, there’s nothing quite like it.
