Our conception of romantic love could not be more trite, nor could it be more overflowing with pleonasms and tautologies, and endless inaccuracies, hunches and intuitions that contradict six decades of scientific literature.
However, there are intuitions or simple physical manifestations that have been corroborated. Like the neurophysiological changes that take place in a brain in love.
Neuroimaging
Stephanie Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who has studied the neuroscience of romantic love for the last decade, explains that the process involves several complex changes, particularly in the brain's reward system.
More specifically, in a review from 2012 From the scientific literature on love, Lisa Diamond and Janna Dickenson, psychologists at the University of Utah, found that romantic love is most consistently associated with activity in two brain regions: the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the caudate nucleus.
These areas play an essential role in our reward pathway and regulate the neurotransmitter dopamine. In other words, during the early stages of love we miss your loved one because he or she makes you feel so good.
In fact, simply thinking about your partner not only makes you feel good, but also can buffer pain, stress and other negative feelings. A study, for example, has shown that women in love do better on cognitive tasks after being subliminally told their lover's name.
These neural patterns of romantic love appear to be universal across genders, cultures, and sexual orientations. Romantic and platonic love, for example, may be associated with unique neural signatures. And studies show that the neural processes in charge of sexual attraction and desire can occur alongside and sometimes overlap with those that regulate romantic love, but they are largely different from them.
Be that as it may, it seems that finding someone special in our lives is a safe and stable source of happiness, although we are not very good at choosing a partner, on many occasions. Maybe we need help. Big Data + machine learning algorithms in order to find your perfect match. The one that suits you. And, furthermore, the offer will not be as limited as now (basically the people who live in your neighborhood or just beyond), but total (humanity). You can learn more about it in the following video:
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The news
Thinking about your partner can dull pain, stress and other negative feelings.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.