Imagine you're strolling through the streets on a lovely Sunday afternoon, minding your business. But then something — or someone — catches your eye.
She is seated at a cafe, wearing a floral sundress with her hair falling around her face in soft waves, and her forehead sports tiny crinkles as her eyes scan the words on the book she's holding in her hands. And in that instant, your brain sends you a message saying you're in love.
But is that love at first sight you’re experiencing or something more along the lines of lust or attraction?
As much as we try to deny it, we're all hopeless romantics disguised as hardened pessimists. And when we see someone in a setting described above, on the bus on our way to work, or at a party, our minds talk us into thinking we're in love. However, the science behind love is slightly more complex.
The 'love' we feel has, in the past, been described as a cocktail of hormones released to give our nervous system feelings of pleasure and security. Some researchers argue that love at first sight is merely lust and that genuine love comes later, once the partner bond has been established.
In a review published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, an Indian scientist talks about love from a neuroendocrinological perspective.
He describes romantic love as a collection of activities associated with acquiring and retaining emotions needed to survive and reproduce. This set of emotions changes the individual's behavioural strategies in a way that will increase the likelihood of achieving these goals.
Going on to call love an emergent property of an ancient cocktail of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, he highlights how it is a collection of different feelings. While lust, attachment and attraction are easily confused with each other, these are vastly distinct processes, each mediated by their own neurotransmitters and circuits that feed on and reinforce each other.
Sexual craving, for instance, is mediated by testosterone and oestrogen and has the amygdala as an important centre.
Attraction, on the other hand, is mediated by hormones of stress and reward, including dopamine, norepinephrine cortisol and the serotonergic system, and has the nucleus accumbens the ventral tegmental area as key mediators.
And oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment.
So before you profess your love to someone this evening, rethink and make sure it's actual love and that you're not confusing it with something more temporary.
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