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I was just doing some research for the 22 Ways 2 Love You film project and came across this inspiring article published last year in Science News. The Helen Fisher group is the only one I know of getting public attention for the brain imaging studies conducted on romantic love. What a great journey & great training ground to explore and essentially study Love on every level from my own personal experiences to my coaching clients’ experience to what people share on the street in random interviews, to what scientists have to share from their findings.

Enjoy! And stay tuned for more postings…

Source: Science News/ Home / News / December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 / News item

Still crazy (in love) after all these years
A brain imaging study reveals that some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage
By Laura Sanders

December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 (p. 17)

WASHINGTON — New research on brain activity confirms that people can be madly in love with each other long after the honeymoon is over.

Researchers led by Bianca Acevedo at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York wanted to know if romantic love — or at least the brain activity it triggers — could last in a long-term relationship. To everyone’s relief, the answer is yes. The group presented its results November 16 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

The new data suggest that people who have been madly in love for an average of 21 years maintain activation in a brain region associated with early-stage love. “We now have physiological evidence that romantic love can last,” says coauthor Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Most couples who have been together for many years experience a change from a frenetic, obsessive love to something more subdued and comfortable, says study coauthor Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. But the researchers noticed a small group of outliers who had been with the same person many years and claimed to be as much in love as they were during the exciting early days of their relationship.

Since that earlier study in 2005 using functional MRI brain imaging, the researchers knew that a certain part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area was activated when people who had been in love for relatively short times — an average of seven months — saw pictures of their sweethearts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the ventral tegmental area is also activated by the rush of cocaine, and is the region that controls production of the natural stimulant dopamine. The researchers concluded that this area was associated with the intense, burning stages of early love. It was unclear whether this region would still be active after 20 years of being in a relationship.

Long-term lovers who had been married for an average of 21 years viewed a picture of their partner while the scientists monitored the subjects’ brain activity using fMRI. People who claimed to be madly in love for 20 years and people who had been in love only for months showed similar activation in the ventral tegmental area of the brain.

At the same time, key differences between the early- and late-stage lovers emerged that suggest potential benefits to staying together for 20 years. People in long-term relationships who were madly in love showed higher levels of activity in a part of the brain associated with calmness and pain suppression, whereas people in love for shorter periods of time had higher activity in a region of the brain associated with obsession and anxiety. “The difference is that in long term love, the obsession the mania, the anxiety has been replaced with calm,” Fisher said in a news conference.

“There is an evolutionary advantage to being paired,” says researcher J. Thomas Curtis, who studies pair-bonding in prairie voles, small animals that are well-known for forming life-long monogamous pairs. Much of the research on voles, including Curtis’ work at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, Okla., supports these new findings on long-term pairing in humans, he says. In fact, when researchers get rid of the ventral tegmental area of a vole brain, the same region activated in human couples who are in love, the animal no longer forms pair bonds.

To understand the complicated subject of human love, the scientists plan to conduct more brain imaging studies. The next step will be to periodically monitor the brains of newlyweds as the couples slowly enter long-term relationships. The researchers hope to understand how brain activity may correlate with life events, like the birth of a child or relationship troubles, Acevedo says.

According to the results of several studies, remote prayer or mental intention certainly can and does have a physical effect on physiological systems.

One laboratory (Bengston and Krinsley, 2000) has published findings in the Journal of Scientific Exploration demonstrating the curing of cancer in mice by such methods. In a controlled experiment, these scientists employed a noncontact form of “laying on of hands” in an attempt to cure mice of transplanted mammary adenocarcinoma. There were three groups such that one had a group of healers place their hands just above the mice with healing intention and no contact. The other two groups were control groups (one in the same room and one in a separate room from the experimental group) that were treated exactly the same except they were not given mental intention with hands.  Following three replications, 87.9 percent (29 out of 33 mice) were cured of the cancer in the experimental group compared to 69.2 percent (18 out of 26 mice) being cured on site. None of the control mice off site were cured. Furthermore, when the scientists re-introduced tumor cells to the treated, cured mice, the cells were rejected, suggesting a long-term physiological effect.

Scientific reports of this type of mental phenomena date back to the 1960s. A study published in the Journal of Parapsychology shows these effects can occur from a distance on fungus cultures in a laboratory (Barry, 1968). In this study, ten subjects were told to use conscious intent to suppress the growth of fungus. Each subject concentrated on the cultures for fifteen minutes from a distance of approximately 1.5 yards. The cultures were then incubated for several more hours. An impressive 151 out of a total of 194 culture dishes demonstrated retarded growth.

More recently, remote prayer has been shown to have significant beneficial effect on hospital patients. Harris et al. (1999) published significant results in the Archives of Internal Medicine for a double-blind experiment involving 990 consecutive patients admitted to a coronary care unit (CCU). Patients were randomized to either receive or not receive remote, intercessory prayer. The team of outside intercessors prayed for patients in the prayer group daily for four weeks. Patients were made aware that they were being prayed for, and the intercessors never met the patients and were given only the patients’ first names. The medical course from hospital admission to discharge was summarized in a CCU course score derived from blinded, retrospective chart review. The results showed that the prayed-for group had about a 10 percent advantage compared to the usual-care group and this difference proved to be significant (P = .04).

What does all this mean? Perhaps it means nothing at all. Or maybe, it means we could benefit greatly from re-conceptualizing what is possible and practical in placing health and well-being into our own hands. If nothing else, let it be a reminder that there is still an enormous amount to learn about our minds and there is so much potential in the power of our thoughts. In line with these findings, the former editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, stated, “The catalogue of our ignorance must…include the understanding of the human brain…. What consciousness consists of…is…a puzzle. Despite the marvelous success of neuroscience in the past century…, we seem as far away from understanding…as we were a century ago….The most important discoveries of the next 50 years are likely to be ones of which we cannot now even conceive” (Maddox, 1999).

Barry J. 1968. General and comparative study of the psychokinetic effect on a fungus culture. Journal of Parapsychology. 32: 237-43.

Bengston WF, Krinsley D. The effect of the “laying on of hands” on transplanted breast cancer in mice. Journal of Scientific Exploration. 2000;14(3):353-364.

Harris W, Gowda M, Kolb JW, Strychacz CP, Vacek JL, Jones PG, Forker A, O’Keefe JH, McCallister BD. 1999. A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit. Archives of Internal Medicine. 159(19):2273-2278.

Maddox J. 1999. The unexpected science to come. Scientific American. 281(6):62-67.