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with the wrong person, you know it to be true. Zeki argues that the lack of blood flow to these areas suggests reduced function in judgment, decision making, and the assessment of social situations.
    You Were Always on My Mind
    A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you do not need explicit visual stimuli to activate the brain’s romantic love system. Stephanie Ortigue, a neuroscientist at Syracuse University, noticed that people in love are very quick to make associations between the object of their affection and certain words and concepts. If a place, word, situation, or song has the slightest thing to do with their sweetheart, they will make all kinds of interesting connections. People in love cannot stop thinking or talking about their boo. This priming effect, the strength of connections between your beloved and everything related to him or her, may facilitate that kind of quick recall. Ortigue decided to take a look.
    Ortigue and her colleagues scanned the brains of thirty-six women who were passionately in love while they were subliminally presented with the name of their significant other.It would seem that, even implicitly, love really has a strong hold on the passionately in love individual. Even when words were used instead of photos, many of the same subcortical reward-related brain areas fired up in this study, as in previous neuroimaging studies: the caudate nucleus, insula, and VTA. But these researchers also documented activation in higher-order brain areas, parts of the cortex involved in attention, social cognition, and self-representation: the angular gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. 7

Stephanie Ortigue’s study using names instead of photos found activations similar to those in the Zeki and Fisher studies. She also found higher-level activation in the angular gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and middle frontal gyrus. Illustration by Dorling Kindersley.
    “Our findings suggest not only that these reward systems are important in love but also more cognitive areas related to decision-making and the representation of self and body image,” said Ortigue. “It’s quite interesting—it suggests that love may be an extension of oneself. Or rather, people in love really put themselves into others. It changes the way we conceptualize passionate love.” If my love object can change the way I internally view myself, what else might change? This research brings a whole new meaning to the line “As your lover sees you, so you are.”
    Putting the Pieces Together
    Though Fisher postulates that romanticlove is a drive—one that has been evolutionarily selected in order to motivate us to have babies and raise them as pair-bonded couples—Ortigue cautions that it is dangerous to simply classify love as a basic instinct. There are too many different brain areas implicated.
    She has a point. No part of the brain area is an island; all of these regions are interconnected and send signals to and from one another. What’s more, one area is not limited to a single function. One of my neuroscience professors once joked that the brain is the “ultimate recycler” because it has evolved over the past hundred million years to be superefficient. After all, it takes a lot of blood and energy to run a brain. It would be a serious waste of resources if single regions couldn’t help facilitate a variety of tasks. The brain frowns on redundancies—and with good reason.
    In an analysis of all neuroimaging studies done on love (a whopping six in the past ten years), Ortigue identified twelve distinct regions that were activated across different types of tasks, such as viewing photos or watching videos of a loved one or being subliminally presented with a lover’s name. 8 Given current limitations in neuroimaging technology, including measurement timing, which may not be able to keep up with the lightning speed of neural signaling, it is unclear which of these areas lights up first in romantic