Do we love with our heads or with our hearts?
It is said that love is one of the most intense and powerful emotions that a human being experiences, so much so that it is metaphorically attributed with the ability to move the world. A feeling that is usually associated with the heart, but that Finnish scientists have just located in specific areas of our brain. We love with our heads. The butterflies of love do not arise from the gut but are formed in four brain areas: the basal ganglia, the midline of the forehead, the precuneus (a part of the upper parietal lobe) and the temporoparietal junction on the sides of the neck.
The most novel part of this research, led by Aalto University, is that it not only locates the areas of the brain that are activated when we love, but also reveals what makes those areas activate. According to the researchers in an article recently published in the journal ‘Cerebral Cortex’, published by the prestigious University of Oxford, “it all depends on the type of love in question.”
One of the questions that the researchers had before starting the study, in which they measured the brain activity of 55 people using magnetic resonance imaging while they were invited to meditate on stories related to six types of love (children, partner, friends, strangers, pets and nature), was to know “if our brain behaves neuronally the same regardless of our object of desire. That is, if the same areas are activated when we love a child or if it changes if we feel that love for our dog, for example. Well, the results of the recordings show that, indeed, “love is activated in different brain areas and that, depending on what type of love is experienced, some areas or others are activated and in a more or less profound way.”
And if there is one thing that this research has made clear, it is that the greatest, most intense love that leaves the biggest mark on our minds is the one we feel for our children. “No other type of love activates these four areas of the brain so deeply. In parental love, a deep activation was observed in the brain’s reward system (striatum area) and this was not seen in any other type of love,” explains Pärttyli Rinne, the philosopher and researcher in charge of coordinating the study, in which the participants’ task was to “immerse themselves in the feeling caused by a series of short, spoken narratives” while the MRI was being performed.
The surprise of the pets
In terms of intensity, romantic love, the kind you feel for your partner, is next on the list, followed by love for friends. “The brain areas associated with love between people are very similar. The difference lies, above all, in the intensity of activation.” In other words, compassionate love for strangers, a neighbor you see every day, for example, activates the same areas of the brain as falling in love with people in your inner circle, but the brain activation it triggers is much lower.
The study also found that the four types of interpersonal love (children, partner, friends and strangers) touch the areas of the brain associated with social cognition, while the love we feel for pets or nature “activates the reward system and the visual areas of the brain, but not the social areas.” With one exception that has caught the attention of the researchers at Aalto University: “People who live with an animal also have areas related to sociability activated when they are talked about. You only have to look at the results of the resonance to know whether a participant has a pet or not,” they conclude.
Where do we feel our emotions? Fear in the head and anxiety in the trunk
Feeling butterflies in the stomach or having a lump in the throat are not just clichés. They are real sensations that are unleashed in different parts of our body every time we experience an emotion, whether it is fear, sadness, joy, shame, envy, happiness or surprise. “And they are as real as the pain of pancreatitis,” says psychiatrist and doctor in neuroscience Rosa Molina. A study carried out a few years ago by the same university that has just published the article on love and the brain yielded very interesting data on the close relationship that our body maintains with emotions: almost all the participants in the experiment marked the same areas, which allowed Finnish researchers to draw up a kind of body map of emotions.
The study found that most basic feelings (anger, fear, sadness, surprise) are located in the head and upper body, while happiness and love, for example, are felt throughout the body. Contempt, a much more complex emotion, is felt primarily in the head and hands and leaves the pelvic area and legs with little energy. Something similar happens with anxiety, which is felt very intensely in the trunk, while the arms and legs become deactivated, as if they were losing strength. “That is why it is very common that during an anxiety episode, the person who suffers from it has the sensation of pressure in the chest and at the same time feels weak in the limbs,” says Dr. Molina. In fact, a subsequent study carried out by the same researchers revealed that “the intensity of emotions is directly related to the intensity of mental and physical sensations.” In other words, the stronger the sensation in the body, the stronger the feeling in the mind.
Another of the most striking aspects of the study is that it confirms that the response to emotions is universal. In other words, the feeling of having butterflies in the stomach when we are in love is not something cultural. “It is a sensation that all human beings feel, from the Japanese to the Venezuelans. What does change is the way of expressing those same feelings.”
