you won't believe what I found- what janeane was talking about- i think

[Guest guest]

I wanted to look up news to see if anything about the bush campaign

came over the wires- and when i searched " autism " this came up:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050607031344.htm

Source: American Physiological Society

Date:  2005-06-07

Love May Be A Lateralized Brain Function, Like Speech; Links Seen To

Stalking, Suicide, Clinical Depression, Even Autism

BETHESDA, Md. (May 31, 2005) -- You just can't tell where you might find

love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a

social psychologist found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a

magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love

responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described

themselves as being newly and madly in love.

The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense romantic love may have

more to do with motivation, reward and " drive " aspects of human behavior

than with the emotions or sex drive. Brain systems were activated that

humans share with other mammals. So the researchers think " early-stage

romantic love is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue

preferred mates, and that it has an important influence on social behaviors

that have reproductive and genetic consequences. "

Diverse emotions occur, but reward response primary

" It's a stark reminder that the mind truly is in the brain, " noted Lucy L.

Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. " We humans are built to

experience magical feelings like love, but our findings don't diminish the

magic in any way. In fact, for some, it enhances the experience. Our

research also helps to explain why a person in love feels 'driven' to win

their beloved, amidst a whole constellation of other feelings. "

The study, entitled " Reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with

early-stage intense romantic love, " is available online and will be in the

July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, published by the American

Physiological Society. The research was conducted by Arthur Aron, Helen E.

Fisher, Debra J. Mashek, Greg Strong, Hai-Fang Li and Lucy L. Brown. Aron,

Fisher and Brown contributed equally.

" Most of the participants in our study clearly showed emotional responses, "

noted Arthur Aron of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, " but we

found no consistent emotional pattern. Instead, all of our subjects showed

activity in reward and motivation regions. To emotion researchers like me,

this is pretty exciting because it's the first physiological data to confirm

a connection between romantic love and motivation networks in the brain.

" As it turns out, romantic love is probably best characterized as a

motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions,

such as euphoria or anxiety, " Aron noted. " With this view, it becomes

clearer why the lover expresses such an imperative to pursue his or her

beloved and protect the relationship. "

Sexual arousal 'very different'; confirmation of questionnaire methods

Aron added: " Our participants who measured very high on a self report

questionnaire of romantic love also showed strong activity in a particular

brain region -- results that dramatically increase our confidence that

self-report questionnaires can actually measure brain activity. "

Aron also noted that the research answered the " historic question of whether

love and sex are the same, or different, or whether romantic passion is just

warmed over sexual arousal. " He said, " Our findings show that the brain

areas activated when someone looks at a photo of their beloved only

partially overlap with the brain regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex

and romantic love involve quite different brain systems. "

fMRI confirms major predictions, yields " remarkable implications " ; autism

link

Aron reported that, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and

other measurements, he and his colleagues found support for their two major

predictions: (1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with

subcortical reward regions rich with dopamine; and (2) romantic love engages

brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.

Brown explains some of these findings, commenting that " when our

participants looked at a photo of his/her beloved, specific activation

occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal caudate body.

These regions were significant compared to two control conditions, providing

strong evidence that these brain areas, which are associated with the

motivation to win rewards, are central to the experience of being in love. "

Brown noted that " an important concept is that the caudate probably

integrates huge amounts of information, everything from early personal

memories to one's personal notions of beauty. Then, this brain region (and

related regions of the basal ganglia) helps to direct one's actions toward

attaining one's goals. For neuroscientists, " she said, " these findings about

the diverse regional functions of the basal ganglia in humans have

remarkable implications. "

********* this is the part about autism**********

" Our data even may be relevant to some forms of autism, " Brown added. " Some

people with autism don't understand or experience any sort of emotional

attachment or romantic love. I would speculate that autism involves an

atypical development of the midbrain and basal ganglia reward systems. This

makes sense, too, because other symptoms of autism include repetitive

thoughts and movements, characteristics of basal ganglia function. "

Surprise discovery: romance is on the right, 'attractiveness' to the left

Another important discovery, Brown said, was that " to our surprise, the

activation regions associated with intense romantic love were mostly on the

right side of the brain, while the activation regions associated with facial

attractiveness were mostly on the left.

" We didn't predict such a striking lateralization, " Brown reported. " It is

well known that speech is largely a left-sided cortical function. But our

data indicate that lateralization also occurs in lower parts of the brain.

Moreover, different kinds of rewards (in this case, the " rush " of romantic

love, compared with the pleasing experience of looking at a pretty or

handsome face) is also lateralized. These results give us a lot to think

about how the normal human brain learns and remembers and functions in

general, " Brown added.

Love physiology changes over time; 'Romantic love more powerful than sex'

Another breakthrough, Brown noted, was that " we found several brain areas

where the strength of neural activity changed with the length of the

romance. Everyone knows that relationships are dynamic over time, but we are

beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love relationship

matures. "

Helen E. Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, New

Jersey, noted that not only did the brain change as romantic love endured,

but that some of these changes were in regions associated with pair-bonding

in prairie voles. The fMRI images showed more activity in the ventral

pallidum portion of the basal ganglia in people with longer romantic

relationships. It's in this region where receptors for the hormone

vasopressin are critical for vole pair-bonding, or attachment.

" Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated brain systems for

mating and reproduction -- the sex drive, romantic love, and attachment to a

long term partner, " Fisher said, " and our results suggest how feelings of

romantic love might change into feelings of attachment. Our results support

what people have always assumed -- that romantic love is one of the most

powerful of all human experiences. It is definitely more powerful than the

sex drive. "

Depression, murder/suicide, demonstrate strength of romantic drive

For instance, Fisher point out, " If someone rejects your sexual overtures,

you don't harm yourself or the other person. But rejected men and women in

societies around the world sometimes kill themselves or someone else. In

fact, studies indicate that some 40% of people who are rejected in love slip

into clinical depression. Our study may also suggest some of the underlying

physiology of stalking behavior, " she added.

Fisher noted that their study, which took barely an hour for each

participant but many years for the researchers to process and interpret the

data, also found a " fascinating continuity between human romantic love and

the physiological expressions of attraction in other animals. Other

scientists, " she said, " have reported that expressions of attraction in a

female prairie vole are associated with a 50% increase in dopamine activity

in a brain region related to regions where we found activity. These and

other data indicate that all mammals may feel attraction to specific

partners, and that some of the same brain systems are involved. "

Study explains second half of Darwin's puzzle, sexual selection & 'eyes of

the beholder'

" Darwin and many of his intellectual descendants have studied the myriad

physiological ornaments that one sex of a species have evolved to attract

members of the opposite sex, like the peacock's fancy tail feathers that

attract the peahen, " Fisher noted. " But no one has studied what happened in

the brain of the viewer, the individual that becomes attracted to these

traits. Our study indicates what happens in the brain of the viewer as he or

she becomes physiologically attracted to these traits. "

She added, " This brain system probably evolved for an important reason -- to

drive our forebears to focus their courtship energy on specific individuals,

thereby conserving precious mating time and energy. Perhaps, " she

hypothesized, " even love-at-first-sight is a basic mammalian response that

developed in other animals and our ancestors inherited in order to speed up

the mating process. "

Einstein's Brown concluded, " Our results suggest that romantic love does not

use a functionally specialized brain system. It may be produced, instead, by

a constellation of neural systems that converge onto widespread regions of

the caudate where there is a flexible combinatorial map representing and

integrating many motivating stimuli.

" This passion may be an excellent example of how a complex human behavioral

state is processed. Moreover, taken together, our results and those of

s Bartels and Semir Zeki, who studied men and women in longer love

relationships, show similar cortical, VTA and caudate activation patterns,

suggesting that these regions are consistently and critically involved in

this aspect of human reproduction and social behavior, romantic love. "

 

###

Source and funding

The study, " Reward, motivation and emotion systems associated with

early-stage intense romantic love, " is available online and will be in the

July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, published by the American

Physiological Society.

Research was conducted by Arthur Aron, Debra J. Mashek and Greg Strong,

Dept. of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Helen E.

Fisher, Dept. of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New

Jersey; Hai-Fang Li, SUNY Stony Brook Dept. of Radiology; and Lucy L. Brown,

Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of

Medicine, Yeshiva University, Bronx, New York.

Aron, Fisher and Brown contributed equally. Mashek is now at the Dept. of

Psychology, Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science

Foundation (Aron).