Neuroplasticity and Love

Love is inevitable. With all the distinction, variation, and opposing ideologies in the societies of the world one similarity we all contain is our passion for love. Love is an interesting drive, it can lead us an extreme spectrum of emotions which can be explained through chemical processes in the brain.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, conducted brain scans on a number of students to physiologically explain what love looks like in the brain. She found that when shown a picture of a romantic partner the brain scan looked different than when shown a picture of a close friend. Romantic love is activated by dopamine receptors in the brain, the chemical that is tied to pleasure, euphoria, craving, and addiction. The first biological attraction, "love at first sight", and the bond between partners is explained by surging dopamine receptors which in turn leads to the behavior of heightened attention, short term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, goal oriented behavior, and pleasure in small details of each respective relationship.

A pattern is shown here. One who is in love is constantly around their significant other to feel this release of dopamine therefore becoming dependent on them for pleasure. The power of this dependence to the dopamine pleasure system is shown with this following experiment. It asked a number of people to list all the people they love, all of their friends, everyone they thought was attractive, and who they ultimately love. The last list(person they romantically loved) which was one person was on all the other lists.

Neuroplasticity is our brain's ability to adapt to replicate a lost function of a region of our brain. For example if we lose our hearing ability, which we are so dependent on, our brain with enough practice and time will eventually adapt to not being able to hear and daily tasks will become normal without sound. This is so because our brain's neurons adapt and our other senses like sight and smell become strengthened to compensate for our loss of hearing. This feeling of normality after the loss of hearing only happens through heavy training to strengthen your other senses.

As previously explained, losing a significant other (one you are actually in love with) would then in turn result in losing your uncanny ability to release dopamine when around this person. The fear of losing this person who gives one pleasure ultimately finalizes in the realization of dependence. This dependence runs parallel to a drug addiction, or loss of a motor function such as one's hearing.

How an individual deals with the loss of a partner is similar to how an individual deals with the loss of a function like hearing. As human beings we are dependent on our brain's functions which consist of hearing, smelling, etc , and eventually loving someone special. To end this post with a question...Can heartbroken individuals who cannot overcome their depression about losing their significant other be given treatment through neuroplastic exercises instead of antidepressants to get rid of their dependence? If so, neuroplasticity would open up a whole new entire field of treatment just for sake of love.