Love Really is Blind
Neuroscience can at last explain why we can't see faults in our
lovers or children. Raj Persaud reports.

Can science help us to understand love? Many argue that a
Shakespearean sonnet, Rachmaninov piano sonata or Jane Austen novel
is much better at communicating insights into why we become
irresistibly drawn to one person. But now neuroscience promises to
offer revealing new insights that could solve some of the mysteries
at the heart of love.

A study of whether there are different forms of love has been
launched by Dr Andreas Bartels and Professor Semir Zeki from the
Wellcome department of neuroimaging at University College London.
They have attempted to unravel for the first time whether the love
between a parent and a child is the same as the emotion shared by
lovers.

Scientists have a cold-eyed view of the purpose of love. The tender
intimacy and selflessness of a mother's love might be celebrated by
inspiring music, literature and art. Many great artists have been
profoundly affected by the relationship between mother and child, as
depicted by da Vinci's Virgin and Child, Van Gogh's First Steps and
so on.

But the evolutionary biologist has a more prosaic formulation — the
lifelong commitment serves to help a parents' genetic material
survive through to future generations. The passion shared by two
lovers serves a surprisingly similar function — it facilitates mating
and parenting — and hence again is merely the selfish gene in action.

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If we didn't love, then the species would simply never get
perpetuated, so maybe that is love's actual function. But if all love
boils down to, according to science, a genetic prerogative being
pursued through hard wiring in our brains, then the neurological
basis of love, like the brain activity and hormonal responses which
underpin love, should theoretically share similar biological
underpinnings.

To investigate this question, Bartels and Zeki, measured brain
activity in 22 mothers who viewed pictures of their own infants and
compared this with activity evoked by viewing pictures of other
infants with whom they were acquainted for the same period.

In addition, they compared this activity to that when other
volunteers viewed their partner, a best friend and an adult
acquaintance to further control for familiarity and friendly
feelings.

The design of the experiment, using functional magnetic resonance
imaging, and just published in the journal Neuroimage, allowed the
scientists to determine the brain activation related to maternal and
romantic love while at the same time controlling for the effects of
familiarity and merely friendly feelings.

The first intriguing finding is that there is a lot of overlap
between the brain areas activated during feelings of romantic love
for a partner and those involved in maternal love for own children.
The brain cells implicated are the same as those we know become
active whenever an extremely rewarding activity is being undertaken.

These are precisely the same neurological locations which are
implicated when we consume food we like, take drugs and when we are
given monetary rewards. So love is indeed like a drug.

However, the key result was that it's not just that certain shared
areas of the brain are reliably activated in both romantic and
maternal love, but also particular locations are deactivated and it's
the deactivation which is perhaps most revealing about love.

Among other areas, parts of the pre-frontal cortex — a bit of the
brain towards the front and implicated in social judgement — seems to
get switched off when we are in love and when we love our children,
as do areas linked with the experience of negative emotions such as
aggression and fear as well as planning.

The parts of the brain deactivated form a network which are
implicated in the evaluation of trustworthiness of others and
basically critical social assessment.

In other words, strong emotional ties to another person inhibit not
only negative emotions but also affect the brain circuits involved in
making social judgements about that person.

The results, conclude Bartels and Zeki, suggest that attachment
involves a push and a pull mechanism — you are pulled along by the
strong sense of reward you feel when you love.

But you are also pushed by a tendency not to objectively see faults
in the other person which might threaten love, because circuits
responsible for critical social assessment and negative emotions are
literally switched off.

So love really is blind and there is a biological basis for the
blindness.

This is a profound finding in the history of our attempts to
understand this most profound and powerful human emotion.

It means neuroscience finally explains why we can't see the faults in
our partners or children which others can clearly perceive and as a
result find our affection mysterious.

It also explains why we take so long to finally see the flaws in
those we idealise because of our love, and which means we can end up
choosing the wrong person to commit to.

The flaws only become apparent after our initial ardour has cooled,
allowing previously suppressed brain areas to awaken to the reality
of who we find ourselves with the morning after.

But another key finding from the Bartels and Zeki study is that there
are important differences in the brain areas involved in parental as
opposed to romantic love — so the two are not exactly the same.

For example, in romantic love a part of the brain towards the base,
called the hypothalamus, is specifically activated and this area is
implicated in pushing out chemicals which mediate sexual arousal like
testosterone and other sex hormones. The hypothalamus does not
activate when we love our children.

Another difference was the part of the brain involved in face
processing and recognition appeared to be more active in maternal
compared with romantic love and the authors of the study speculate
that the rapid rates with which the facial features of babies and
young children change and the importance of reading children's facial
expressions require a constant updating of the face-recognition
machinery, leading to heightened activity in this part of the brain.

The fact that this face recognition area is not so active in romantic
love suggests our lovers are meant to not change so rapidly in
appearance, indicating perhaps a neurological basis for suggesting we
were meant to be monogamous, or at least not sleep around so much
that our brains might find it difficult to recognise whom we were
waking up with the next morning.

Also, in romantic love, some parts of the brain possibly implicated
in what is termed "theory of mind" seem to be more active compared
with maternal love.

"Theory of mind" is about the notion that for us to communicate
effectively we have to develop a good insight into what is going on
in other people's minds so we don't offend, and can work out how to
please, others.

This finding suggests that an important part of the reward we
experience when we are romantically in love comes from understanding
that another is in love with us.

It is intriguing that this brain area doesn't seem to be so important
in parental love as it means that knowing our children don't
reciprocate our feelings for them doesn't stop us loving them.

Now neuroscience is telling us that our brains dumb down and rule our
hearts so we rush into sex, then produce children whom we also
continue to care for no matter how little they reciprocate.

It would seem that one of love's mysteries has at last been cracked
by science — if we used our brains to their full capacity all the
time and didn't deactivate clear thinking and critical judgement, the
species would never have got off the ground.

- Telegraph

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/04/1088879368529.html