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Psychology research is starting to back up on what poets have been describing on mind-altering effects of a passionate relationship – “my love’s a noble madness” wrote John Dryden. Cicero said “of all emotions, there is none more violent than love. Love is a madness.”
Recent study revealed that students who are in the early days of a passionate relationship exhibited reduced cognitive control in basic psychological tests. Hiroaki Kawamichi and colleagues, brain researchers in Japan, have started to seek for the neural correlates of such effects. They reported the results of the brain imaging, showing participants who are in the early stages of a romantic relationship had reduced grey matter in a region of the brain involved in processing reward, which might suggest their brains had adjusted to the intensity of their love affair.
56 young men and women who were currently in a romantic relationship of an average of 17 months were recruited and in comparison, 57 age-matched control participants who were not in a relationship were also recruited. The participants completed a happiness survey and underwent a structural brain scan.
Participants in an early-stage passionate relationship were happier than those who were single. Looking across the entire brain, the researchers found one specific area – right-dorsal striatum – that was structurally different in participants who were in love as compared to the singletons, in terms of there being reduced grey matter density in the lovers. This region is involved in reward processing.
Interestingly, researchers found this brain difference without any psychological testing or connectivity-based brain scanning – which could show how brain areas communicate and operate during different mental activities.
Another short-coming is that the scans were taken at just one point in time, so we’ve no way of knowing if being in love shrinks the right-dorsal striatum or if people with less grey matter in this area are more likely to fall in love (I’m also using terms like “in love” liberally because we don’t have any detail on the intensity of the participants’ romances). The only clue we have about cause and effect here is that, across all participants, the researchers found no link between striatal volume and total time in life spent in romantic relationships, suggesting a reversibility to any potential effects of romance on the brain.
Putting important cautions aside, it does seem possible that enjoying a romantic relationship could lead to grey matter reductions in the striatum. This would make sense if you think of being in love as an intensely rewarding time, in which case the brain might “down-regulate” its reward sensitivity, adjusting to a world where joy is found in each touch and embrace with that special other. This also explains why a split can be so painful – the brain spoilt by such constant reward left craving and expectant for a comfort that’s no longer there.
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Source material from British Psychological Society