The neuroscience of love

Today we find a well written article on research into the conflict between the front and middle brain:

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.

• This is your brain on love, by Susan Brink (July 30, 2007) LA Times.

A story mixing science with passion is popular in the press, so here are a few more which track the release of research results over the past 7 years:

• Loving with all your … brain, by Elizabeth Cohen (2007) CNN.
• Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain, by Benedict Carey (May 31, 2005) NY Times.
• Looking for That Brain Wave Called Love; Humanities Experts Use M.R.I.’s to Scan the Mind for the Locus of the Finer Feelings, by Emily Eakin (October 28, 2000) NY Times.

All of these news items quote Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. In addition to  self-archiving her articles, she has given a presentation to TED|Talks. (Co-author Lucy Brown has a presentation at the NY Times.)

Where’s the neurolaw? Well, family lawyers might take an interest in this…

• Fisher, H and JA Thomson Jr. Lust, Romance, Attraction, Attachment: Do the side-effects of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants jeopardize romantic love, marriage and fertility? In  SM Platek, JP Keenan and TK Shakelford (eds.) Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) 245-283.

And criminal lawyers might like this…

• J Reid Meloy & H Fisher. Some Thoughts on the Neurobiology of Stalking. 50:6 (2005) Journal  of  Forensic Sciences, 1472-1480.

Of course, it’s not all happening in the brain, which led to this unusual MRI study:

• Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, Ida Sabelis, Eduard Mooyaart. Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal. BMJ 319 (18 December 1999) 1596.