Why We Love (9 page)

The subject’s job was to respond to each task by twisting the love-o-meter dial to reflect the intensity of his/her feelings of romantic passion. Eleven women and three men participated; their average age was eighteen and a half. When their responses were recorded and statistically analyzed, the results were revealing: feelings of intense romantic love were triggered almost equally by photographs, songs, and memories of the beloved.
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Photographs Stimulate Love

I was not surprised that photographs elicit romantic passion. After all, most of us keep a picture of our true love on our desk. Moreover, as you recall, this visceral reaction to visual images has an anthropological explanation. Humans evolved from tree-living ancestors who needed exceptional vision to survive high above the ground. Those with bad eyesight must have misjudged where fruit and blossoms hung, then missed their mark as they leapt from one branch to another and fell and broke their necks. As a result, all higher primates have large brain regions devoted to the perception and integration of visual stimuli. In fact, for decades psychologists have emphasized the important role of visual appearances in stimulating feelings of romantic attraction.
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This experiment confirmed for us that photographs of the beloved actually do elicit romantic bliss. Our experimental design was sound. We could begin to put lovers into the brain scanner and search for the circuitry of romantic ecstasy.

The Experiment

“Have you just fallen madly in love?” We used this line again when we placed a new advertisement on the psychology bulletin board on the SUNY Stony Brook campus. But this time we called for men and women who were willing to recline in a long, dark, cramped, noisy machine while we scanned their brains. Once again, we sought only those who had fallen crazily in love within the last few weeks or months, people whose romantic feelings were fresh, vivid, uncontrollable, and passionate.

They were not difficult to find. In John Donne’s words, “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”
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Love springs up everywhere, at any time. Students immediately began to call Art’s psychology lab to volunteer. Deb weeded out those who had metal in their heads (such as lip, tongue, nose, or face jewelry, or braces on their teeth) that would affect the magnet in the fMRI machine. She also excluded those who were claustrophobic, those taking any kind of antidepressant medication that could affect brain physiology, and men and women who were left-handed. Brain organization can vary with “handedness” and we needed to standardize our sample as much as possible.

At this point, I interviewed each candidate, sometimes for as long as two hours. My first question was always the same: “How long have you been in love?” My second question was the most important: “What percentage of the day and night do you think about your sweetheart?” Because obsessive thinking is a central ingredient of romantic passion, I sought only participants who thought about their beloved almost all of their waking hours. I also looked for men and women who laughed and sighed more than usual during the interview, those who could recall tiny details about their sweethearts, and those who honestly appeared to be yearning for, indeed craving, their beloved.

If a potential subject showed these and other signs of romantic passion, I invited him or her to participate. We acquired two photographs from the subject: one of the beloved and one of an emotionally neutral individual. Generally the latter was someone they had known casually in high school or college. Then we set a date to put each into the brain scanner.

The Brain Scanning Procedure

Not, of course, without a great deal of discussion about what would happen to them while in the fMRI brain scanning machine. I started by telling each participant that I had gone through the experiment myself three times, which I had. I explained that I was somewhat claustrophobic but felt I needed to experience this process before I ushered others through it. I described what would happen in the machine, minute by minute. And I assured each of them there would be no surprises. I needed these men and women to trust me; without this trust, we might end up measuring feelings of suspicion or panic rather than romantic love.

When all seemed ready, we set a time for the scanning. What joy, what anxiety, what curiosity I felt as we made that date.

The procedure was simple, but not easy. First Deb and I made the participant as comfortable as possible in the scanner—a large, horizontal, cylindrical, cream-colored plastic tube that is open at both ends and extends from above the head to about the waist. The subject reclined on a stretcher in this tubular machine in the semidark with one to two feet of space above and alongside them, depending on their size. We put pillows under their knees to relax the back, warmed them with a blanket, nestled their head in a stiff pillow to help them remain motionless during the experiment, and suspended a slanted mirror over their eyes. This way the subject could look out of the scanner to see a screen on which we would show successively each photo, as well as the large number—the distraction task.

After taking preliminary scans to establish basic brain anatomy, the twelve-minute experiment started. First, the subject looked at the photograph of the beloved on the screen for thirty seconds as the scanner recorded blood flow in various brain regions.

Next, the subject viewed a large number, such as 4,673. These numbers changed with each new viewing but each was the same distraction task. For forty seconds the subject was required to mentally count backward from this number in increments of seven.

The participant then looked at the neutral photograph for thirty seconds while the brain was scanned again.

Finally, the subject viewed another large number, this time for twenty seconds, and mentally counted backward from this number in increments of seven.

This cycle (or its reverse) was repeated six times—enabling us to collect some one hundred forty-four scans or pictures of different brain regions across these four conditions for each participant. After the experiment was over, I interviewed each subject again, asking how they felt and what they were thinking about during all parts of the test. And to express our gratitude, we gave each participant $50.00 and a picture of their brain.

We scanned twenty men and women who were deeply and happily in love. Then we scanned twenty more, of a different type—individuals who had recently been jilted, those suffering from rejection in romance. By studying romantic rejection, a devastating aspect of love that happens to just about everybody at one time or another,
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we hoped to identify the full range of brain regions associated with romantic passion. (My discussion of unrequited love appears in chapter seven.)

The Passionate Love Scale

There was one more part to this experiment. Before our subjects entered the brain scanner, we asked each to fill out several questionnaires, including the one my other colleagues and I had given to 839 Americans and Japanese and a similar survey designed by psychologists Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher called the Passionate Love Scale.
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The Passionate Love Scale had fifteen questions about romantic love. Most were very similar to those on my questionnaire. Among them were: “I would feel deep despair if ___ left me.” And “Sometimes I feel I can’t control my thoughts; they are obsessively on ___.” The subject was asked to respond to each statement, noting his/her reaction on a nine-point scale from “not at all true” to “definitely true.”

We wanted to compare the brain activity of each subject to what each subject reported on these questionnaires, to see if those who scored high on these love surveys also had more activity in the brain. This way we hoped to answer a question that survey-makers have long puzzled over: Does what a person reports on a questionnaire accurately reflect what is going on in their brain?

We didn’t know it at the time, but the Passionate Love Scale would prove remarkably informative about the brain in love.

Happily in Love

I remember distinctly all of the men and women who were scanned, each for some special reason.
*

One was Bjorn, a young man from a Scandinavian country who was studying in New York. He was in love with Isabel, a woman originally from Brazil who was currently working in London. They talked every day on the phone, he told me, and saw each other on vacations. They had been “dating” for a little less than a year and planned to marry. I mention Bjorn because I learned something valuable from him. This was a blond, bushy-haired, self-contained man with a warm smile, a quiet charm, a sharp intelligence, and a flashing sense of humor. I liked him immediately. But when I first asked him to describe his beloved, he fell silent, utterly mute. For a moment I thought I had lost the phone connection. I recall rather frantically saying to him, “Well, you must like something about Isabel.” His reply: “Yawwww.”

I had to cajole Bjorn into saying anything whatsoever about his beloved! Eventually he shyly revealed that he daydreamed about Isabel constantly, loved her passionately, and thought about her as much as 95 percent of the day and evening. But Bjorn never expressed that urgent excitement so characteristic of the love-possessed. So I was later astonished when I saw the results of his brain scanning session. When this reserved young man looked at the picture of his sweetheart, his brain “lit up” like a fireworks display. Do still waters run deep?

Bjorn rattled me. His dour countenance masked his inner passion. I didn’t think he was consciously trying to deceive me. Instead, he expressed himself in a way that was molded by his biology, his upbringing, and his culture. Yet his outward expressions did not reflect his inner world. This raised a serious question in my mind: How was I to choose appropriate candidates?

I thought about this a lot. Finally, I got a penetrating glimpse of the obvious: I had no choice. I simply had to ask potential participants as many questions as possible, listen carefully to their words, and note any physical signs of elation, energy, focussed attention, possessiveness, and obsessive thinking. And I had to pray that my social skills were good enough to pick people who were genuinely in love.

Our most dramatic subject was Barbara, a tall, fair, red-headed, handsome, and extremely verbal woman in her early twenties. She had met Michael on the beach in New Jersey five months earlier. She was so in love that she was having trouble sleeping. Her mind raced. She felt shy in his company. At times her heart pounded when they spoke on the phone. She obsessively replayed in her mind their times together. She spoke of the “electricity” she felt. She reported that she would “go crazy” when he didn’t call. She was wildly jealous, too. Apparently he had lots of women friends and she didn’t even like him to talk with one on the phone. When I asked her if she would consider having a second romantic relationship “on the side,” she was dumbfounded. Characteristic of almost all lovers, Barbara couldn’t conceive of spending time with anyone but Michael. And when I asked her what she liked most about him, she replied, “Chemistry.” It was the first time Barbara had been in love. She glowed.

The most arresting response of our happy lovers was that of William. William was quick to understand, intensely smart, amiable, eager to participate, curious about the machine, and interested in my theories about romantic love. We talked easily together before the experiment. But he missed his girlfriend terribly. She had moved to Oregon. And although they were very much in love and in frequent contact, he was suffering from her absence. This was a good sign; I suspected that this adversity had increased his passion. But it was something William said during the post-scanning interview that impressed me most. When he emerged from the machine, I asked him how he felt. William said he felt “incomplete.”

Incomplete. To me, no single word better describes love-smitten men and women. Although Aristophanes was joking, he hit upon this fundamental truth about lovers some twenty-five hundred years ago. In Plato’s
Symposium,
the Athenian dramatist maintained that originally every human being was a rounded hermaphroditic whole, with four hands and four legs, two faces on one head, four ears, and both sets of genitals. These primal human beings “were terrible in their strength and vigour.”
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One day these monsters tried to outdo the gods. So Zeus sliced each human into two—man and woman. “That’s how, long ago, the innate desire of human beings for each other started,” Aristophanes explained. “Each one of us is looking for his own matching half.”
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Like William, most lovers feel incomplete until they have achieved emotional union with a beloved.

Bjorn, Barbara, William, and all of our other participants told me a great deal about their personal lives; to all of them I am very grateful. But their brains told us much more about this primordial passion, romantic love.

The Brain in Love

“In the composition of the human frame there is a great deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time, and … when the torch is put to it, that which is within you must burst into a blaze.”
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In 1795, President George Washington wrote these lines of advice in a letter to his young step-granddaughter. We have begun to understand that blaze.

Before we could comprehend the results of our scanning, however, we had to make an in-depth analysis of the brain pictures. Here my colleagues did a yeoman’s job. There were literally hundreds of intricate steps in this process. And because the technology of brain scanning is so new and so complex, things constantly went wrong—and the analysis had to be redone. But with time, Greg Strong, another talented psychology graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook who had joined our team, was able to put the data in the proper order; Lucy studied the brain scans and determined which areas became active; Art did many statistical analyses. And Art and Lucy did ingenious comparisons between various sectors of the material. All this took enormous time, dedication, knowledge, creativity, insight, and skill.