Word: brained
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...also found activity in other regions of the reward system, including areas of the septum and a brain region that becomes active when people eat chocolate. Chocolate can be addictive. I maintain that romantic love is addictive...
Another striking result from our FMRI experiment concerned activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a central part of the reward circuitry of the brain. This result was what I was looking for. As you know, I had hypothesized that romantic love is associated with elevated levels of dopamine or norepinephrine. The VTA is a mother lode for dopamine-making cells. With their tentacle-like axons, these nerve cells distribute dopamine to many brain regions, including the caudate nucleus. And as this sprinkler system sends dopamine to various parts of the brain, it produces focused attention as well as fierce...
...night or walk till dawn, write extravagant poetry and self-revealing e-mails, cross continents or oceans to hug for just a weekend, change jobs or lifestyles, even die for one another. Drenched in chemicals that bestow focus, stamina and vigor, and driven by the motivating engine of the brain, lovers succumb to a Herculean courting urge...
...these data had a definite effect on me--they changed my understanding of romantic love. For many years I had regarded this wonderful experience as a constellation of related emotions that ranged from elation to despair. But psychologists distinguish between emotions and motivations--brain systems oriented around planning and pursuit of a specific want or need. And our colleague Art Aron was wedded to the idea that romantic love was not an emotion but a motivation system designed to enable suitors to build and maintain an intimate relationship with a preferred mating partner...
Indeed, because of Aron's dedication to this idea, we had begun our brain-scanning project with two hypotheses: my hypothesis that romantic love is associated with dopamine and other closely related neurotransmitters in the brain, and Aron's theory that romantic love is primarily a motivation system rather than an emotion...