Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fMRI studies she's conducting of people who have been rejected by a lover and can't shake the pain. In these subjects, as with all people in love, there is activity in the caudate nucleus, but it's specifically in a part that's adjacent to a brain region associated with addiction. If the two areas indeed overlap, as Fisher suspects, that helps explain why telling a jilted lover that it's time to move on can be fruitless--as fruitless as admonishing a drunk to put a cork in the bottle...
Marriage on the Brain...
Being married somehow helps the body circumvent this mess, either by hushing the hypothalamus or reducing cortisol production. Coan and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which married women underwent brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the scans, the women were told they were going to receive a painful electric shock. The researchers then watched to see how the subjects' brains responded to the threat and found that among happily married women, hypothalamus activity declined sharply if husbands held their wives' hands during the experiment. Women who reported being less satisfied with their marriage--and women whose...
...also found that spousal hand-holding had an effect in an entirely different part of the brain: the right anterior insula, which responds to the threat of pain by calling your attention to the part of your body that's in danger, increasing the amount of discomfort you ultimately feel. In Coan's study, the right anterior insula of happily married women stayed relatively quiet. "This suggests," he says, "that your spouse may function as an analgesic...
...each other have more than a little truth to them. A 2007 British study found that at any given moment, a bereaved spouse has a greater risk of death from just about any cause (except, oddly, lung cancer) than a still married person. "Over time," says Coan, "your brain becomes used to the other person as part of your emotional-regulation strategy. You take that person away, and you become what we dryly call dysregulated--weepy, mournful, stay up half the night. This can come from death, divorce, even a long business trip. When those bonds break, it can cause...