The neuroscience of love carries a range of connotations—love is often perceived as perfect, calming, or even scary, evoking feelings like jealousy. While decoding the essence of love is challenging, it is easier to describe what happens when one is in love. You feel warm and flushed; your cold cheeks turn red. You struggle to find the right words, your mouth becomes dry, and it feels akin to answering questions in a viva. Nervousness sets in—your mouth may go dry, and you struggle to find the right words, much like the pressure of answering during a viva. These responses are driven by adrenaline and dopamine, heightening excitement and anxiety simultaneously. It’s your body’s way of amplifying emotions, leaving you feeling both exhilarated and vulnerable. Interestingly, these are also symptoms of a panic attack.
We experience repeated thoughts, even when we are not actively working. We make personal sacrifices and are ready to integrate someone into our dream reality. We would do anything for them, and whatever they say or do feels acceptable as long as they validate us. Interestingly, these behaviors are also symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Love is not a disorder, but it affects all of us. In short, we have built a herd immunity to love. Love, despite its challenges, serves an evolutionary purpose. It promotes pair bonding and cooperation, which are vital for raising offspring and ensuring survival. Love is indeed a haseen dard (beautiful pain).
Every animal has two options: survival or death. Our brain also has these instincts by nature. In survival, there are two options: food and procreation. Fundamentally, when we seek sex, we are seeking a partner. At its core, the desire for sex is often tied to the instinct to procreate, which drives the search for a partner.
Broadly speaking, there are three stages: looking for love, falling in love, and keeping love. The journey of love can be broken into these stages. Looking for love involves searching for a connection, driven by the desire for companionship, intimacy, or emotional fulfillment. Falling in love is the intense emotional experience that comes with forming a deep bond, driven by both chemistry and emotional attraction. Keeping love involves sustaining the relationship, maintaining trust, and overcoming challenges together.
When we are not actively looking for love, the brain establishes a baseline focused on the instinct to procreate. Once the brain ensures the procreation instinct is sorted, evolution decides we should mate with specific individuals to gain certain advantages. Thus, the process of selecting love came into place. Instead of mating with just anyone, humans choose partners who may benefit future generations. Evolution also encouraged staying together and forming a family.
Every animal has unique traits to attract a mate. For example, a peacock spreads its feathers as a signaling method. Similarly, humans also use signals, such as showcasing their body or status, to attract mates. Signaling is highly time-relevant. Signals used today might not have been effective thousands of years ago. In modern times, wealth, social status, education, or digital presence often play that role. These signals keep evolving.
How does the brain manage these things? Humans have evolved a third aspect—keeping love. The first two aspects (finding and falling in love) are common to most animals. However, the third aspect is unique to humans, thanks to advanced evolution and the development of the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex, the brain area responsible for reasoning, planning, and emotional regulation, helps humans build connections, understand long-term benefits, and prioritize family stability. How does the brain do this? Testosterone and estrogen are the primary sex hormones forming the foundation for finding someone. In children, these processes don’t occur before puberty because sex hormones are inactive. After puberty, these hormones activate and drive the search for a partner. These hormones initiate the first stage: finding love. This process begins in the brainstem, and further developments occur in areas above it.
The brainstem, which controls basic survival functions, plays a role in the initial biological drive to seek a mate, influenced by hormones like testosterone and estrogen. As this instinctual drive activates, higher brain regions like the limbic system (responsible for emotions) and the prefrontal cortex (handling decision-making and planning) come into play.
Now, let’s discuss how we fall in love. Among 100 people, they send impulses to you—through sound, movement, or their signaling. Your brain processes these as patterns, categorizing them into boxes: "this is this" and "this is that." As your sex drive increases, the brain evaluates stored patterns to determine if someone could be a potential partner.
All these signals—sight, sound, smell (including pheromones), and even actions like cooking—are processed to assess compatibility. Specifically, the sense of smell plays an important role. Among our five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste), only smell bypasses the thalamus, a part of the brain that acts as a gatekeeper for sensory information. The thalamus filters which signals pass through to the brain, but smell connects directly to the olfactory bulb. This explains why smells, especially pheromones, evoke strong emotional responses and influence attraction and mating behavior more immediately than other senses.
Pheromones were among the earliest signals to evolve, which now explains the emphasis in deodorant advertisements. Falling in love is like a click—a trigger that starts an entire chain reaction. Just like the coronavirus, you might feel its effects later, but you were affected the moment it happened, eventually leading to stronger consequences, such as developing a deep attachment. And if you remain socially distant, you might save yourself from falling in love altogether.
As soon as there is a click, your brain successfully identifies a pattern, and the consequences are significant. For evolution, this is one of the most important actions you can take. So, how does your brain reward you? It’s with dopamine. That’s why Instagram models are addictive—they trigger dopamine release in your brain. While beauty is subjective, when the brain identifies certain patterns it finds attractive, dopamine is released.
You identify a pattern and receive a reward, making you subconsciously think, "If I got a reward this time, I might get more." Then, you start looking for more patterns you like, leading to more rewards. Each time you receive a reward, you become more certain you’ll get more in the future. It’s like exponential growth. Two things happen: as your dopamine feedback increases, your brain starts to think, "I don’t need to pay attention to anything else because all the dopamine I need comes from this." As a result, all your attention focuses entirely on that one person.
Neuroscience of Love