The Brain In Love Summary

The video “The brain in love” addresses the biological dimension of human sexuality. Helen Fisher and her colleagues put people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner to assess love on the brain. Robert Weiss (2015) explains fMRI scans track both the location and the degree of activity when any part of the brain is activated, triggered by thought, emotion, and activities, blood flow to that area increases.

When scanning people that were happily in love Helen Fisher (2008) had found activity in a little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, part of the brain’s reward system. There was also activity in some cells known as the A10 cells that produce dopamine and spray it to many brain regions.

The ventral tegmental area is also part of the reptilian core of the brain associated with wanting, motivation, focus, and with craving. The same brain region where activity becomes active when feeling the rush of cocaine.
When Fisher and Lucy Brown look at data from the people put into the fMRI after being dumped there were activity in three brain regions.

One region of activity was in the same brain region associated with “intense romantic love,” the ventral tegmental area. The VTA becomes more active when you can’t get what you want, which would be an appropriate mating partner. Another part of the brain, the core of nucleus accumbens, becomes active when measuring your gains and losses. According to Fisher (2008) it’s also the brain region that becomes active when you’re willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses. The last region found with activity was the brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. From the experiment we can think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive, stronger than the sex drive, and that romantic love is an addiction.

Like Fisher has stated, I believe that “love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other.” I agree that love is embedded in our brain and that everyone has the capacity and ability for love. Humans and animals both possess love and the ability to love. I can understand how falling in love releases the same hormones as eating chocolate or do cocaine, the brain is drenched and exposed to the same hormones which explains the feeling of “addiction” when seeing the

beloved.
In the video I was surprised to find out that even after being dumped the ventral tegmental area is still active and that your love for that person is even stronger. I was not aware of all the other regions of the brain that become active as well, which is interesting to see how someone and the concept of love can affect the activity of your brain.
I believe that the implications of sex, gender, and society in the video is that the chemical reactions in your brain is about the same for everyone, not specifically towards any group of people. We all should possess the same regions in our brain that functions the same as others.