(classical music)
- Nicotine, cocaine, alcohol, heroine,
work, gambling, sex, food.
Life is basically a gauntlet
of substances and behaviors
humans can become obsessed
with and dependent on.
But what about love?
Not just sex,
but the deep interpersonal
attachment we call love.
Can it be addictive?
The notion of obsessive, all-consuming,
even addictive love
goes back literally thousands of years.
The ancient Greek poet Sappho
wrote about watching her
lover marry someone else,
and she describes being
seized with trembling,
drenched in cold sweat
and feeling nearly dead.
She might as well have been
describing opium withdrawals
or an Alanis Morissette song.
Romantic love does have a
lot of external features
in common with drug addiction.
Initial feelings of bliss and euphoria.
Obsessive, fixated behavior.
Often leading to poor,
potentially life-ruining decisions.
A 2010 paper from the New
York Academy of Sciences
points out that common criteria
for diagnosing drug dependence include
life interference,
tolerance,
withdrawal,
and repeated attempts to quit.
Sound anything like your
relationship with your ex?
But is there any more measurable basis
for thinking love can be
considered an addiction
in the brain?
Actually, yeah.
Let's talk brain imaging.
One way addiction hijacks the human brain
is by taking advantage of mammalian reward
and motivation systems,
like the mesolimbic dopamine system,
which includes the ventral tegmental area
and the nucleus accumbens.
This is a part of the
nervous system that gives us
internal rewards when we do something
with an evolutionary benefit,
like eating or having sex
or unfortunately, snorting cocaine.
Back in 2005, a study in the
Journal of Neurophysiology
used FMRI to look at the
brains of test subjects
who self-reported that they were
intensely in love with someone else.
When these lovebirds were shown pictures
of the people they adored,
there was activation in sections of that
same mammalian reward
and motivation system.
For example, the right
ventral tegmental area.
But it gets worse.
A follow-up study in 2010
looked at what happened to
the brains of men and women
who had been rejected,
but reported that they
were still deeply in love.
And it wasn't pretty.
When heartbroken lovers were forced
to look at pictures of their exes,
there was elevated activity
in our old friends,
the ventral tegmental area
and the nucleus accumbens.
Researchers pointed out
that the rejected lovers
showed several neural correlates
in common with the brain activity
of cocaine addicts craving their drug.
So at the level of brain chemistry,
romantic love can be kind
of like substance addiction.
But there are reasons you
might not want to refer
to your latest crush as a
full-on addiction just yet.
The "Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders"
doesn't officially
recognize love addiction.
And while cravings for
love can be devastating,
when they're unrequited
of self-destructive,
they can also be deeply fulfilling
in a way that no drug
habit every could be.
So what do you think?
Would you consider true love
as potentially addictive
as gambling, cigarettes, or morphine?
Tell us your most horrible
breakup stories in the comments.
And to find out the answers
to more strange questions
about the brain,
subscribe to our channel.
