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Why does love make rational people obsessive? Meghan Sullivan, PhD, Helen Fisher, PhD, Gail Saltz, PhD, and Ted Fischer, PhD, trace love through the brain systems that shape reward, stress, attachment, and desire. But chemistry is only the beginning. Love may also be a moral practice: a way to pay attention, challenge bias, and ask what it really means to care.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
Love is at the very basis of our moral reasoning. It is central to our lives. We should be grounding our reasoning in interpersonal love and asking what it means to love another person.
So we've really stumbled on not only the brain circuitry of attachment, but how it emerges in a relationship. We know some of the basic brain regions that become activated when you feel that cosmic sense of union with somebody. Dopamine. Serotonin. Oxytocin. There's this whole release in neurotransmitters that make you feel very obsessed, very addicted and vasopressin, which has to do with stress. It is a stressful condition to some degree to be really into your partner.
So that brain system can be triggered instantly. But the feelings of attachment grow. And as you learn more about their sense of humor, their kindness this attachment system grows. It's a very strong, sticky substance, attachment.
We define romantic love as for another, with the expectation that it's going to persist into the future. Often it's characterized by some sort of irrationality: not doing what a rational person would do in those circumstances.
I'll never forget the first moment that I looked at our data. What we saw was activity in a tiny little factory near the base of the brain, called the It's a brain region that actually makes dopamine and gives you that elation of intense romantic love. And I had thought that romantic love was an emotion. But what it really is, is a drive, a basic mating drive that evolved millions of years ago to enable you to drive your DNA into tomorrow.
There are some evolutionary advantages to falling in love, and that's the way we talk about it. We're overwhelmed by love. Crazy in love.
A love ethic or a love based approach to ethics says to love your neighbor with the same intensity with which you love yourself. The people that we actually happen to love, we just love them. You might have people in your life who are very different to you. A big part of exhibiting the love ethic and practicing it means giving yourself a little bit more time to pay attention to other people.
We are talking about a more long-term moral and philosophical program, a way of life that people can adopt where they challenge their biases, and to ask what exactly it means to love the people that are put in their day-to-day life.