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A new university study has explained how love has the power to light up your brain.
This experiment suggests the human brain has an inherent mechanism that protects us from endless unrequited love.
Love has the power to light up our brains in many ways that we may not fully understand. Meeting your lover for the simplest of activities such as dinner can result in a flood of dopamine which motivates you to keep that bond alive. On the other hand, meeting an acquaintance for work purposes will likely not have the same impact on your dopamine flow. To explain why this happens, a study was conducted by the University of Colorado Boulder earlier this year in January. Senior author and CU Boulder’s Associate Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience Zoe Donaldson provided us an insight into what they discovered.
As per the official CU Boulder website, Zoe Donaldson said, “What we have found, essentially, is a biological signature of desire that helps us explain why we want to be with some people more than other people.” This study was published in the journal Current Biology on January 12. It is centred around prairie voles. These rodents have the distinction of being among the three per cent to five per cent of mammals that are known to form monogamous pair bonds.
These wide-eyed rodents are quite similar to human beings. They tend to couple up long-term, share a shelter and raise offspring together. They may also exhibit grief upon losing their partner. Zoe Donaldson aimed to gain new insight into what happens inside the human brain that leads human beings to form intimate relationships by studying these rodents.
Neuroimaging technology was used for the study. It was observed that holding the hands of the partner or trying to reach them resulted in a rush of dopamine. To track this activity a tiny fibre-optic sensor was used. Every time the sensor detected a spurt of dopamine it lit up. Whereas, when the rodent was separated from the partner, the sensor produced a dim light.
In another experiment, the rodent couple was kept apart for four weeks which was long enough for them to find new partners. When these rodents were reunited they remembered one another but the signature dopamine surge had nearly vanished. This made it difficult for them to distinguish their partner from any other rodent. This experiment suggests the human brain has an inherent mechanism that protects us from endless unrequited love. It means that the human heart heals with time and searches for someone new to start over once again.
