Why Love Feels Like Addiction: The Neuroscience Behind Our Strongest Emotions

A new study suggests that love, in all its forms, stimulates the reward and addiction systems of the brain-those same parts of the brain that are involved in behaviours like drug use and video game addiction. The current research outcomes further make it more clear why breakups and losses tend to be marked by a depth of emotional anguish and sharp physical pain.

This research published in Cerebral Cortex explores how different forms of love-romantic, familial, friendly, and even love for pets or for nature-affect the brain. Researchers from Aalto University in Finland, under Parttyli Rinne, mapped out brain activity that had links to various kinds of love and discovered each activates different regions of the brain related to social understanding. However, common to all the varieties of love was the stimulating of the brain's reward system, also implicated in the perception of addictive behaviours.

Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said this study confirms that romantic love and long-term attachments utilise the brain's reward and addiction circuits. She added that the research is slowly painting a clearer picture of what the brain looks like when somebody is in love.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a brain scanning technique, to analyse the brain activity of 55 people.

"Our results demonstrate that love in closer interpersonal relationships - like for one's child, romantic partner, and friend - is associated with significantly stronger activation in the brain's reward system than love for strangers, pets, or nature," Rinne told Deutsche Welle.

Love of people also activates brain areas associated with thinking, feeling, and understanding - also known as social cognition. Differences in brain activity in social cognition regions revealed whether participants had a pet or not.

"In pet owners, love for pets activates these same social brain regions significantly more than in participants without pets," said Rinne.

Love of nature or art are also strong types of love, but we tend to feel it differently than a romantic or familial love of people. Indeed, love of nature lit up the brain's reward system and visual areas associated with viewing landscapes, but not the areas associated with social cognition.

"This provides evidence that different types of love draw on partly distinct and partly overlapping brain regions," said Roland Zahn, a psychiatrist and expert in mood disorders at King's College London, UK, who was not involved in the study.

This study provides new insight into the powerful influence love has on the brain and how it may impact both emotional states as well as physical ones.