Love is really a biological Urge

New love can look for all the world like mental illness-- cutting people off from friends and family and prompting compulsive phone calling, serenades and yelling from rooftops, which can almost be mistaken for psychosis.
Now, for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity.
In an analysis of the images appearing recently in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.
It is closer in its neural profile to drives such as hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states such as excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity assoiciated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.
The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn.
" When you are in the throes of romatic love, it is overwhelming and you are out of control. "
" And when rejected , some people comtemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."
In the study, Dr Fisher, Dr Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analysed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college studcents who were in the first weeks or months of new love.
They loved at a picture of their beloved while a MRI machine scanned their brains. The researchers then comapred the images with others taken while the students looked at a picture of an acquaintance.
Functional MRI technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.
The researchers found that one particular spot in the MRI images was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.
This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel towards specific others.
This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of the most basic functions, such as eating, drinking, eye movements. I don't think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialised", said Dr Brown.