We tend to associate love with this heady feeling of permanence and emotional compatibility. But what we often miss is the gorgeous neural mechanisms underlying this murky fog of obsession that infests the mind and breeds the algae of attachment. Helen Fisher, in her study Love on the Brain¹, reveals how the caudate nucleus houses a cocktail of neurotransmitters, triggered by simply a glance at your beloved. The ventral tegmental area plays a cardinal role in the reward-seeking behavior that is associated with obsession and love. Which makes us question, in biological terms, how different are they really? Is there a type of love that can be constrained or does every love story end with the utter ruination of the self. An interesting possibility to consider is the prospect of desire being a motivation network, fueled by dopamine.

There is much that everyone has to say about the nature of love. This extremely paradoxical experience that bereaves the sense of normalcy and embalms the host in a thermae of neuropeptides no other feeling can unravel. It is beautiful and ruinous. A knife dipped in gold, an annihilation of perspicacity, a purple vertigo that permeates your skin and thrums a sort of otherness under your flesh. It is this ever-consuming need for the other that maddens you.

In a world where understanding is the new umbrella term for what encompasses a healthy form of love, and decoding your attachment style is our new favorite type of trivia, there arrives the question- are we pathologizing love? I attempt to answer this question in my essay by pathologizing it even more and rupturing the idea down to the neuromechanics of limerence.

The progression of human romantic love typically begins with idealization, where one individual perceives another as uniquely special. This triggers a cascade of psychological responses: intense focus, amplification of positive traits, and minimization of flaws.

The peripheral sympathetic effects of norepinephrine manifest as increased heart rate, sweating, and trembling - common physical manifestations of romantic attraction⁴.

Attraction functions as a form of efficiency mechanism. Yearning and the inherently instinctual reaction to fixate, to want the limerent object to reciprocate the feelings are typical. I won't break down the anatomy of falling in love because that is an experience subjective to the experimenter and their results are, if not private, wholly and consciously yours. Everybody’s experience and notions of love are different. This invasion of consciousness against our will, as Dorothy Tennov describes it in her book Love and Limerence, is not only prophesied but also helps facilitate social bonding by activating your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis².

Some of the most common neurotransmitters associated with love and attachment are oxytocin (primarily for pair bonding, neuroimages in voles [an inherently monogamous mammal], vasopressin(jealousy) and dopamine operating primarily through the ventral pallium and raphe nucleus³. In addition to the dopaminergic pathway, the activated regions of the hypothalamus, VTA, and caudate nucleus reported in this meta-analysis also suggest the involvement of oxytocinergic and vasopressinergic pathways in attachment behaviors and social interactions⁵.

This deeply webbed connection of neurons and neuropeptides draws us back to the idea that love can be seen as a motivation system when studied biologically and in terms of evolutionary basis.

And when I say that I want to drown in you, transfuse into your blood like an erythrocyte, like Betelgeuse to your Orion, maybe what I mean is that my right ventral tegmental area has forgotten the skin that separates you and me⁶. We are the same creature, a singular hide conning individualism. Neuroimaging shows that early intense romantic love employs the bilateral ventral tegmental areas of our brain, which are associated with reward detection and expectation, the representation of goals and the integration of sensory inputs to prepare for acting.

An intriguing lateralization that has been replicated in six studies is the difference in function of both the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA)—while the left VTA activates upon what our mind perceives to be aesthetics and visual processing of beauty, the right VTA drives want⁷. The neurotic hunger that is the other. Desire, in its rawest form, made of suns and sinew; the right VTA ignites a reward-based motivation system akin to thirst. Akin to anything essential to survival. Love speaks of the tenacity of our terrestrial life, just as much as water. Perhaps that is why Fisher calls love a driven state, as opposed to a feeling. The allostasis, the constant rush, the limbic patterns that bring me to you are all inscribed into the sulcus of my neural architecture.

The right VTA's dopaminergic projections feed forward into the right antero-medial caudate body (a slender, C-curved structure threaded through the basal ganglia) which Aron et al. identify not as a passive recipient of reward signals but as an integrative engine: pulling personal memory, aesthetic judgment, the whole accumulated grammar of what one finds beautiful, and converging it into goal-directed pursuit.

Recruitment of the mesolimbic dopamine system, which mediates reward and motivation, is consistent with notions of romantic love as a 'desire for union with another⁸.

Studying the neurobiology of love reveals activation of many areas of the brain— the antero-medial caudate (responsible for motivation, reinforcement learning and decision making), the neural accumbens, the septum fornix, the bilateral VTAs, the globus pallidus, etc. Yet love, as it is, happens to be a mythos of deactivation as much as activation.

Why is it that when I look at you, all my senses and critical thoughts blur under the murk of obsessive ideation? The ocean caged inside my ribs has broken free, flooding my interiors, drowning my prefrontal cortex. Funny how the salt that remained tastes like you.

The prefrontal cortex, our seat of logical thinking and rational decision making, dims, and the amygdala decreases its activity. The temporo-parietal junction, seat of social cognition and the capacity to critically model another mind, withdraws⁹. What popular media often overlooks and Bartels-Zeki proved is the dissociation (metaphorically of course) of the parts of our brain that process fear and model the other mind, potentially explaining the idealization of romantic partners.

The prefrontal cortex, our platonic academy of rational decision making and logical sequencing of thought deactivates. The lighthouse has shut down, the cerulean of the dark seas beckons me in, light that callous creature betrays the sentient and only the water remains. Your temporo-parietal junction is the seamstress ripping apart the stitches of distinction between you and me. I can't say that I lost my mind, really, because it chose biochemically to fall for you. My inner council has chosen to interdict cognition in favour of your sickening feverdream. Why is the heart called sinner, when the true cannibal is nestled warmly within my gyri? This haze between two lovers is further underlined by the self-expansion theory, in psychology, which states that we start incorporating parts of our partner into our own identity.

Majority of these neuroimaging studies had their participants go through a survey called the PLS to later cross-reference with their fMRI scans. Participants in these studies who also scored higher than others on the PLS showed greater activation in the right antero-medial caudate. This region is rich in limbic-associated protein, calbindin and medial cortical afferents, each of which is associated with higher-order and cognitive-emotional functions¹⁰. An important thing to note about this survey is that, even if it were commonized, most people might not realize how much in love they are or what constitutes that sort of affirmation of a relationship.

Most studies, when they cite Fisher, just say "the caudate." But Aron et al. 2005 specifically localizes it to the antero-medial portion of the caudate body. It is the head-adjacent segment that receives the densest dopaminergic input from the VTA and has the richest connectivity to the orbitofrontal cortex (reward-based learning) and hippocampus. I am a graveyard of memories, my organs are burial sites, I have a coordinate for every second I spent with you on my hippocampus and sometimes I fish those phantasms out of my skin and swallow them whole. They taste of oxidised apples and mint. A type of decomposition spelled with your name.

I have cartographed ancient constellations, primeval ruins, lost cities, infinite firmaments and my septum fornix liked the contours of your skin the best.

Septum Fornix is another part of the brain that showed a positive correlation with the generalized cohort's PLS scores. Aron et al. found that subjects with higher passionate love scores showed greater activation specifically in the septum-fornix region, which Fisher interprets as the neurological substrate of intrusive thinking. Sometimes, the phantoms etched across my being walk out, their phalanges calligraphing my skin with bruises that suspiciously morphed into the word longing. My septal nuclei is to blame.

The hormonal profile of romantic love also includes elevated levels of norepinephrine, leading to increased attention and memory formation, and reduced serotonin levels, similar to patterns observed in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The hippocampus retrieves memories → feeds to the fornix → which further reactivates wanting → more memories.

The SNc compacta (substantia nigra compacta) is the origin point of the nigrostriatal dopaminergic pathway, the same system whose degeneration produces Parkinson's disease. It ensures that the beloved is a deeply encoded neural habit, a motor response, a kind of knowing — the way I know that fire incinerates. The way I know you. The way, I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have. The way I know that I love you.

Those irises stretching out like painted tentacles, tantalizing this lost skin of mine. I believe eyes are the quintessence of one's soul. To see your own intergalactic black holes in another’s. Looking in your lover’s eyes plays a role in neural synchrony. Your brains start moving in sync. In a study, couples looked at each other more during the interaction and among couples, neural synchrony was anchored online in moments of social gaze. Recently, Hirsch and colleagues measured brain-to-brain synchrony using fNIRS signals acquired during eye-to-eye contact between partners (similar to our paradigm) compared to a condition when both partners looked at a picture of a face. Results showed greater neural synchrony in the eye-to-eye condition compared to the joint attention to a picture face in temporal and parietal areas¹¹.

What if I craved in? What if I let go of all my instincts and senses to live? What if I got intoxicated in the rhapsody of all dangers and wrongs?

And meet his eyes

Another interesting part of the brain activated by long-term love is the dorsal raphe (the brain's primary serotonergic hub fires in response to the long-term partner's face in a way it does not fire for close friends or familiar acquaintances). The nuclei receive input from VTA/SN and are involved in the body's response to pain and stress. The raphe is deeply involved in the neural processing of loss. Its projections to the anterior cingulate and the periaqueductal gray (both activated in the Acevedo data) form a circuit known to mediate separation distress across mammalian species. Pain and stress reduction have been shown to be associated with the representation of an attachment figure. The brain, even in the midst of secure attachment, is simultaneously running the circuitry for its own grief. It has already begun, at the level of midbrain serotonin, to model what it would feel like if this person were gone.

Results for long-term romantic love showed recruitment of opioid and serotonin-rich neural regions, not found for those newly in love. These systems have the capacity to modulate anxiety and pain, and are central brain targets for the treatment of anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression¹². Thus, the present research is in line with behavioral observations suggesting that one key distinction between romantic love in its early and later stages is greater calm associated with the latter.

Length of time in love is a major factor for neural activity in the insula and cingulate cortex¹³ (guides attention to lover’s face). The insular cortex, specifically the anterior insula of the brain, is responsible for awareness of your visceral bodily states (like hunger, thirst, and cold). This awareness is called interoception. Love can make you just as aware of yourself as the ‘other’. After all, an injury is when we are most aware of our sensations.

We live in a world that fetishizes and indoctrinates detachment to an almost clinical extent. But the self cannot invoke the rapture of the other. Denying yourself love, the plundering of your consciousness, is not something you can extrapolate from your body matter. Touch is what makes us human. The ambiguity between the touching and the touched is central to the human experience. Romantic love is the only one you can choose. Choose the purple-hazed vertigo, a permitted annihilation. We exist because the touch of the other is what reminds us of our sensations.

Love, after all, is the greatest form of dissociation.