Love and desire may not be two distinct emotions

Love is in the air! Joydeep Bhattacharya, Professor of Psychology, explains just what happens in our brains when we meet that special someone.

"Love is possibly one of the most complex and intricate emotions we possess. It has different shades, varied intensities, changing facets, ebbs and flows with time.

Desire is one of its closest friends, reason and logic, perhaps not. Love with these complexities, as we all know, is fairly universal. Therefore it must have a biological basis and a biological function. But surprisingly, there is only limited empirical research available.

Out of all the phases of love, personally the most satisfying and exciting is when we fall in love. We feel passionate, the whole world starts revolving around the person we desire, and we get “butterflies in the stomach”.

Neuroimaging studies show that the parts of our brain - the prefrontal cortex and frontal cortex - which are involved with critical thought and cognitive control are suppressed in persons in romantic love. In this state, there is less need to evaluate the character and personality in any critical way.

The fear circuit involving amygdala also shows suppressed activity; there is no fear in love, indeed. The brain is washed with natural stimulants, dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, and no wonder all the important components of the brain’s reward network are working full time.

Researchers equate this phase as an intense motivational state. Sexual desire, “a state of intense longing for physical union with another”, is often considered as a necessary ingredient for intense passionate feelings.

Both romantic love and desire share a common pattern of brain areas within emotional, reward expectation and motivational systems, suggesting that both love and desire engages complex emotions and goal-directed processes.

But they also show clear differences in brain activation patterns, especially within the insula, a key brain region constantly monitoring our body’s internal emotional state, with a posterior-to-anterior pattern progressively tracking sexual desire to love.

This leads to an interesting suggestion that love and sexual desire could be on a continuum, not necessarily two completely distinct emotions."

Find out more about Joydeep's latest research - on how happy music helps us see more brightly - on our news pages, and in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, The Times and Macho Zapp.