The Science of Love

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MP3. Track 30. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming to this talk about the science of love. My name is Ruby Niverton, and I’m a neuroscientist.

That means I study what goes on in people’s brains. It wasn’t my original career plan. That was to be a biologist. But I later discovered that for me, the brain is a lot more interesting than the body. And the fact is that there is so much that we still don’t understand about the workings of the mind.

Something that neuroscientists have been taking an interest in recently is the nature of love. Experts from all over the world have been doing research into this fascinating aspect of human behaviour. Here in the UK, but also in China, where the most important recent research has been done, those studies show that the feeling we call love is actually a chemical reaction in the brain, and they have done tests to show this. It appears that the powerful feeling of loving someone has similar roots in the brain to the reasons we become hungry or thirsty. It’s a very strong chemical need.

In other words, it’s like a drug. And as with a drug, this need builds up, or rather it develops. First, you’re attracted to another person, then you start going out with them, and you really fall for them. You start to think about them all the time, and then you realise that you are madly in love. What has really happened is that you’ve developed an addiction.

You can’t live without the reaction you get from being with or thinking about this person. The evidence for this has come from different types of tests. One was filming the reactions of people when they were put in different situations, asked questions or shown photos of people they loved. What the Chinese scientists also did was to put people in brain scanners to look at their brain activity when they looked at the photos. They then compared the results with the brain activity when the people were shown photos of people they had no feelings for.

The results were pretty dramatic. It seems that deep in the centre of the brain, there is a very primitive part that developed a long time ago, about 65 million years in fact. Long, long before the time, about 4 million years ago, when man is thought to have stood on two legs for the first time. Scientists believe that this is linked to very basic needs related to survival. It makes us want the things we need to live, like food, water and love, because love leads to a continuation of our species, not just having babies but bringing them up in secure family units until they are grown.

Strangely, scientists have also found that this area of the brain related to addiction is also active when we eat chocolate. And as with other things that we can be obsessed with, it’s hard to cut off that obsession when we want to. Just as it’s hard to stop eating chocolate, it’s also very hard to stop loving someone, even if you split up with that person. However, scientists are working on a cure for love. Who knows, maybe in a few years, a tablet will be on sale that can stop us hurting so much when the love of our life leaves us.

Now, would that be a good or a bad thing? Let’s have some questions, I think.