The ways your brain shapes who you love and how deeply you feel it

The brain is an extremely powerful organ because it almost never stops working while you are alive, and while it is working it has a huge impact on how you experience love. When people talk about the brain and the heart, they often contrast them.

The brain is considered a logical organ, while the heart is associated with emotions and love.

"Love is a higher-order function that requires the brain's prefrontal cortex to send signals to the amygdala strong enough to override the automatic 'fight or flight' response," explained neuroscientist Lucy Brown.

It turns out that the brain contains many of your emotions in ways you may not be aware of, and that it profoundly shapes who you are attracted to and how strongly you feel that attraction.

The thin line between love and hate is in the brain

The famous saying has a scientific basis: a study by University College London showed that the "circuits" in the brain for love and hate have an identical structure.

"Hate is often considered an evil passion that in a better world should be tamed, controlled and eradicated. Yet, for a biologist, hate is a passion just as interesting as love," said Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist who conducted the brain scan research. "Like love, it is often seemingly irrational and can lead people to heroic as well as evil acts. How can two opposite feelings lead to the same behavior?"

Both emotions involve regions like the putamen and insula, which are associated with aggression and anxiety. So when you're in a fight with your partner, keep in mind that love and hate "live" in the same place in the brain.

Love hurts physically thanks to the brain

The phrase "love hurts" isn't just a line - it's reality. There's also a reason why some elderly couples die within months of each other.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the parts of the brain that process physical pain are also linked to emotional suffering. When you go through a breakup or the loss of a loved one, your brain processes that experience through the same neural pathways as when you feel physical pain.

Researchers call the phenomenon of widows and widowers dying soon after their partners “broken heart syndrome.” It's an actual medical condition in which a sudden emotional shock causes the heart to malfunction.

The brain also uses love as a painkiller

Research from Stanford University School of Medicine has shown that strong feelings of love can relieve pain, just as effectively as certain drugs.

In other words, everything you feel is amplified by the brain.

"When people are in that passionate, all-encompassing phase of love, there are significant mood changes that affect their experience of pain," said Sean McKay, head of the Pain Management Department and author of the study.

"We're starting to dissect some of these reward systems in the brain and how they affect pain. These are very deep, ancient systems that involve dopamine – a key neurotransmitter that affects mood, reward and motivation."

Love is connected to the same neurotransmitters that control pain, reward, and survival, which is why it can be so intense. Brown describes the brain in love as having a "safety mechanism" that allows us to take the risk of getting close to another person.

The overlap of love, hate, pain, and pleasure actually means that your brain is functioning exactly as it should.