Valerie Day Sings

Creating the Brain Chemistry For Lovers show continued….

So….where to begin? I had the idea for the show, now I needed to get busy and do some research. I began by going back to the National Geographic article that started it all to see if it would give me some leads.

The author, Lauren Slater, had interviewed an anthropologist named Helen Fisher. The “doyenne of desire” as Lauren calls her, has spent a great deal of her career studying and writing books about Romantic Love. In Dr. Fisher’s most recent book “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love”, she writes about an experiment that she and her colleagues performed using an fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging machine – the same type of machine that doctors use to look inside the brain to diagnose disease) to take a look at the brain in love.

In the study, she looked at the fMRI scans from people who had been in love for around seven months. These subjects were shown two photographs, one of a person they had never seen, the other of their beloved. When shown the photo of their beloved, the areas of the brain that are linked to reward and pleasure, the Ventral Tegmental area and the Caudate Nucleus – lit up. That’s because the Caudate Nucleus is the home of the neurotransmitter Dopamine – a monoamine that, according to Dr. Fisher, “creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards.”

“It became apparent to me that romantic love was a drive — a drive as strong as thirst, as hunger. People live for love, they kill for love, they die for love, they sing about love,” Fisher said.

A drive to win rewards? What kind of rewards could she be talking about? It turns out that dopamine is also activated by nicotine, cocaine, amphetamines….some seriously addictive substances! No wonder we feel overwhelmed by our desire for another person when we are in the first stage of romantic love. This is love as a drug territory! Or as Dennis Caiazza, my friend and colleague in the NU SHOOZ Orchestra said “No wonder they call it Dope”!

For more on Helen Fisher, check out this TED talk:
Helen Fisher: The Science of Love