Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroesthetics at University College, London, has studied how our brain reacts to emotional stimulation. Zeki was surprised to discover that love uses less of the brain than he thought.

 

"It is surprising because romantic love really is all engaging in the sense that it, it basically modifies our behaving, our way of behaving. It… We want to get dressed better. We want to look better. We want to… We are concerned about the person we love. So one would have thought that large, very large parts of the brain would be involved, but it turns out that there is a sort of basically four, five areas that are especially active when one is in love."

 

Zeki says love stimulates parts of the brain which suppress our critical faculties. He says romantic attachment activates regions in the brain’s reward system. These coincide with areas rich in oxytocin(催产素) and vasopressin(抗利尿激素) receptors which deactivate faculties associated with negative emotions, social judgment and the assessment of other people’s intentions and emotions. This, Zeki believes, explains the power of love to motivate and exhilarate. So far, Zeki has not found any evidence to distinguish the way men and women are wired for love.

 

"At the level at which we are studying this, you must remember that this is a very, very new kind of study, because before, you could not say it, I mean, love is a subjective state, how could you say? Now we have developed a technology to do that. At the level at which we are talking, there seems to be no difference between male and female brains. I mean, the circuits that are active are very, very similar in both. However, I would be amazed, if with final analysis, one does not find differences, I mean, there are...there are differences in the way that women love and the way that men love too. There is no doubt about that. We’ll find them in time."

 

Psychologist Dr. Linda Papadopoulos warns the scientific studies being done by Zeki might lead to some people feeling that things that belong to the soul have become too mundane. She says love is not all down to chemicals.

 

"All of those things which kind of belong to the soul now seem to belong to the body. The truth is--there is an interaction of both. Yes, those chemicals are involved in making you fall in love, but so is the way your father treated you. So is your beliefs about yourself and how much love you deserve. So are you beliefs about romanticism and what you consider attractive or unattractive. So it’s not as if we were throwing away all the Valentine’s cards and the flowers and say you spray on some pheromones(信息素) and that’s it--you are in love or out of love, as the case may be. But what we are saying is there is a reason that you get that heartbeat, there is a reason that you get that feeling with some people."

 

But if our brain tricks us into thinking the person we love can do no wrong, the poets may well be right to claim that love is blind. What the scientists haven’t quite worked out yet is exactly what makes us lose our senses when we fall in love in the first place.