The latest National Geographic for February 2006 had an interesting article about love, romance, and infatuation. It discussed what occurs in the brain when a person is in love. The research had some interesting findings.
Quote:
She [Professor Donatella Marazziti, University of Pisa in Italy] and her colleagues measured serotonin levels in the blood of 24 subjects who had fallen in love within that past six months... Researchers have long hypothesized that people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have a serotonin "imbalance."... Marazziti compared the lovers' serotonin levels with those of a group of people suffering from OCD and another group who were free from both passion and mental illness. Levels of serotonin in both the obsessives' blood and the lovers' blood were 40 percent lower than those in the normal subjects. Translation: Love and mental illness have a similar chemical profile.
The article also gives a few reasons why passion fades:
Quote:
Helen Fisher [a professor at Rutgers University] has suggested that relationships frequently break up after four years because that's about how long it takes to raise a child through infancy.
Quote:
Biologically speaking, the reasons why romantic love fades away may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pulse of dopamine that accompanies passion and makes us fly. Cocaine users describe the phenomenon of tolerance: The brain adapts to the excessive input of the drug. Perhaps the neurons become desensitized and need more to produce the high...
So if passion fades, why do some relationships last so long? There is also a physiological explanation for that too:
Quote:
[some couples move on] from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment. Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of connection, bonding. It is released when we hug out long-term spouses, or our children. It is released when a mother nurses her infant. Prairie voles, animals with high levels of oxytocin, mate for life. When scientists block oxytocin receptors in these rodents, the animals don't form monogamous bonds and tend to roam.
And finally a possible, physiological reason many people on the spectrum struggle with relationships: Quote:
Some researchers speculate that autism, a disorder marked by a profound inability to forge and maintain social connections, is linked to an oxytocin deficiency. Scientists have been experimenting by treating autistic people with oxytocin, which in some cases has helped alleviate their symptoms.
To read the entire article you will have to get a copy of National Geographic, but you can read a portion of the article here:
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0602/feature2/index.html
21 Jan 2006, 5:44 pm
