People say that love makes you do crazy things, that’s because it is our minds, not our hearts that are calling the shots.
To find out how our brains influence love, sex and relationships, senior managing health editor of FoxNews.com, Dr. Manny Alvarez, spoke with the author of “Dirty Minds” Kayt Sukel.
Sukel said she started writing the book after going through a divorce and wanted to find out more about what love was. Instead of running to the self-help section at the bookstore, she decided to take a look at neuroscience.
In one of her more significant studies, Sukel participated in experiments using scans at Rutgers University to see what kind of activity happens in the brain when someone experiences an orgasm. Doctors and radiologists collected data from the reactions in Sukel’s brain while brought herself to climax in the MRI machine.
The result?
“The brain lights up like a Christmas tree,” she said.
In fact, Sukel compared what goes on in the brain during sex to an epileptic seizure.
But it isn’t just orgasms that cause a unique activity in the brain—love also showed distinct results on scans.
“The same areas of the brain that are involved in drug addiction, and also risk and reward processing are the ones that are influenced by love,” Sukel said.
Scientists who have conducted other research on the topic of love have found that for our brains, love isn’t just a want, there is an actual chemical drive for it in the body.
Most importantly, Sukel said people looking for love should recognize that everyone is different—there is not just one answer on how to find love.
“Did I find ten easy rules to find and keep love? No. But I found out a lot about why there will never be those ten easy rules,” she said.
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