“Di mo pa nga ako binabato, tinamaan na ‘ko sa yo.”
Love is in the air!
Secret love, unrequited love, first love, greatest love!
Pick-up lines are being warmed up, Moira’s songs cut anew and if you walk through any Philippine mall you’d be festooned with hearts and cupids hanging from the ceiling. Display windows overflow with flowers, chocolate, and hearts.
Here in Pinas, Valentine’s is not a day, but a month. It’s the month of hearts!
But strictly speaking, “falling in love” has a lot to do with the brain, not the heart.
(But brains hanging from the ceiling wouldn’t make a pretty picture, would it?)
As the old warning goes, the brain is the most powerful collection of cells in the known Universe. It is capable of amazing feats and wondrous deeds. With unimaginable speed, it can analyze, calculate, create, and articulate…up until the moment it falls in love.
So what exactly happens in the biology of the brain when we fall in love?
LOVE: In 3 Acts
You see your crush walk by like a scene from a movie and you get struck by a potent rush of excitement and happiness.
Your heart races, palms sweat, cheeks flush and butterflies come alive in your stomach—all signs that the “reward circuit” of the brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree. It’s a specific mesolimbic pathway that floods the brain with happy chemicals, making the individual float on Cloud 9.
This reward circuit includes the amygdala, ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus, among others.
This circuit of good feeling is self-propagating in that it leads the brain to think “Hey, that felt great! Let’s have more of that!” Then boom! Another release of chemicals. The happy juice becomes like a drug people crave and obsess about.
(This same mechanism is activated when we feel the pleasures of food, sex, and drugs.)
Act 1: “Kilig”
The happy chemical we are referring to here is dopamine. It’s produced in different areas of the brain and one of them is the ventral tegmental area or VTA.
Dopamine gives a sense of pleasure, happiness, and well-being. That’s why it’s been called the “happy hormone.”
You just came home from a romantic date with your new lover, and you replay the happy things that transpired over dinner—the laughs you shared, his or her smile, the teasing, the corny jokes, the stories told, etc. Everything flowed and it was perfect. You feel like nothing in the world could go wrong. World peace!
All that good feeling—of being “in love,” of feeling so lucky that you met this perfect boy or girl among billions on earth and wanting to spend all your days with this perfect specimen of a human being… is dopamine.
It’s because your brain is bathing in the effects of dopamine. That’s it.
(Bitter souls often describe being in love as a “neurochemical con job,” pointing out that it’s all in your head.)
But that’s not the full story. Then comes another neurochemical…
Act 2: “Kirot”
There’s another set of things that happens when you’re “in love.”
It has something to do about being emotionally unstable. You’re worried because that’s so not you! You become anxious when not with your lover. You wonder if he or she loves you as much, or if he or she fancies somebody else.
You overthink and overanalyze a comma, an exclamation point—every word, every twinkle of the eye. You become insecure and imagine all sorts of scenarios. You have trouble sleeping. You obsess over a “Like” and want to triangulate your lover’s whereabouts and activities 24-7.
“Who’s this girl always liking your photos?”
“You’re just friends, right? Look at me.”
“Shows here that your account is still active. I thought you were already sleeping.”
These kinds of behaviors are manifestations of another hormone or neurochemical: serotonin. Low levels of it.
As the brain bathes in dopamine, the brain is also depleting itself of serotonin.
Serotonin is another happy chemical, and it’s important because it regulates anxiety and helps to keep you emotionally stable, happy, and calm. Low levels of it result in the mood changes that accompany people who are in love: happy and miserable at the same time.
Serotonin helps you sleep, eat well and think straight.
Without it in your brain, you are just a mess—that’s why you can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t think straight when you’re in love.
Act 3: “Kalma”
One cannot realistically maintain high dopamine levels because it can literally damage the brain’s neurons and can lead to addiction. Low levels of serotonin can make a person dysfunctional and harm him or her in the long run.
So over time, after the frenzy of the first few weeks or months, hormone levels start to level out. Dopamine spikes begin to flatten. Serotonin levels climb back up.
You can eat and sleep now. Unlike those hazy days. You can also think straight.
The highs of being “in love” has calmed down. The rollercoaster ride has turned into a merry-go-round.
But it doesn’t mean the party’s over.
The hormone oxytocin, produced in the hypothalamus, promotes social bonding and sexual behavior among couples. Despite the “kilig” being lower, the couple still stays together. They still look for each other in a crowded public place. They still hold hands when they walk. They still miss each other’s company and hug when meeting after an absence.
Oxytocin has actually been referred to as the “love hormone” because it increases the feelings of trust, empathy, and attachment between individuals.
This is a more settled, calmer form of couple we have at this point.
It will be up to them to navigate the coming months, years, and decades. Will they go on and marry? Or will they break up and find others?
And that, folks, in 3 Acts, is the theater of falling in love.
But this Valentine's post about love wouldn’t be complete without us briefly answering to 2 very important Filipino questions:
Is love blind?
May forever ba?
What does Science have to say?
Is “Love” Blind?
“Why him?”
“Why her?”
Ever asked this in exasperated silence? Wondering why your best friend has fallen head-over-heels over someone who you know is nothing but bad news? But your friend keeps putting him or her on a pedestal, and for the life of you, you just can’t find the recipe for the drugs your friend is on.
Is “love” really blind?
As it turns out, there might have been a biological reason for your friend’s actions. Because those regions of the brain responsible for the “negativity bias” takes a backseat when a person falls in love.
Under normal conditions, the brain is especially sensitive to negative, harmful, and painful, persons, events, and conditions. It stores them in memory and sticks them with bright “red flags” so that the individual can avoid similar situations.
In love, these regular mechanisms take a back seat to the emotional torrent of euphoria where the world is seen through rose-colored glasses.
“He’s perfect!”
“I love everything about her!”
The logical, critical, rational decision-making portions of the brain get hijacked. The prefrontal cortex, which performs executive functions, impulse control, and long-term thinking begins to shut down.
In the flush of emotions, your friend is functionally blind to what seems obvious enough. She doesn’t see or observe the things you’re seeing. And if she does notice them, they don’t bother or matter to her as much.
(Just you wait until you fall in love.)
May Forever Ba?
The common view of long-term relationships is that eventually, the romance dies down. The couple settles into a boring routine and stays together only for the sake of the kids. And all the smiles and sweetness plastered on social media do not reflect what is the true state of things.
In short, walang forever.
But in 2011, a study by Stony Brook University in New York, (which included Dr. Helen Fisher the foremost expert on the subject), performed MRI scans on couples who claim they are still madly in love with each other after decades of marriage. What the MRI scan showed holds clues to answer the age-old question: “May Forever ba?”
And that answer seems to be “Yes.”
The brain scans of these couples reflected the same intensity of activity as those couples who are new and “in love.” The same dopamine-rich areas light up for romantic love. This means that the couples were not lying when they said that they are still madly in love with their partners.
While more study is needed on the subject, this could point to the possibility of a “forever.”
Just needed the right partner.
Happy Valentine’s Month from us here at BloodWorks Lab!
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