How addicted are you?

Love creates activity in a very small part close to the brain base, as well as in some other cells. These specific ones generate dopamine (a natural stimulant), which is sprayed all over the brain. The small section of the brain where activity is found when someone is in love, is part of the brain’s reward system. It is in a lower position than the process of mental thinking and below emotions. Therefore, it relates to desires, motives, focus and lust.

Activity in the same part of the brain is also found when someone is using cocaine, but the effect of romantic love is even stronger than the one caused by the known drug. When you are in love you become obsessed with a person, you always think of them and that’s how you become addicted. This obsession can become even worse when you get rejected.

Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on earth.

Helen Fisher

Anthropologist Helen Fisher (http://www.helenfisher.com/) and her team studied the brains of recently rejected people, with the help of an MRI scanner. They found activity in three segments of the brain and more specific places that present activity when someone is in love. The reward system of the brain, the one that presents activity when we have strong desires, motives, lust and when we focus on something, becomes more active when you cannot have what you want.

The second part of the brain in which activity was observed is the one linked to profit and loss calculation. Lastly, activity was also observed in the part of the brain connected to the strong bonds that develop towards another person.

In that way, when you lose a person you love, these three parts of the brain are activated and romantic feelings are generated as you are ready to take big risks to win a very important prize for you, the person you love.

Romantic love, the need to create a couple with a person, exists and creates a homeostatic imbalance. It’s an addiction that includes every symptom of any other. You think of the other one all the time, you crave them, you distort reality, you want to do things you have never done before. This addiction of love has the three main characteristics that consist a situation to be addictive; addiction, introversion and relapse.

Anthropologists have found proof of love in 170 communities. So, everything done and written in the name of love is not accidental. Songs, love crimes, words of great poets and philosophers and so much more. For this reason, you should love but also you should try to comprehend people who declare themselves in love.

 

Review: Niki Saridaki

 

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