Love is born in brain's addiction center

In love songs, passion lifts you up or cuts you like a knife, wreaking havoc with your emotions as it tosses logic out the window.

But what if love isn't about emotion at all? What if it isn't even about sex?

That's exactly what a team of scientists is discovering as they watch new love literally blaze its trail across the living brain. Using real-time MRI brain images of people in the initial throes of passion, they're finding that love originates far from the brain's logic center, its emotional nexus and, perhaps most surprisingly, its centers of sexual desire.

In fact, love may vie for the same real estate in the brain as drug addiction.

"There's this general craving-and-desire system that's engaged, only in this case the desire isn't for money or a drug or power or freedom. The desire is for merging with another person," explained co-researcher Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

"Furthermore, the neural systems engaged by sex and love are really quite distinct," he added. "This is really the first unambiguous evidence that they really are separate systems."

According to Aron, the findings help explain instances where people fall in love with people they aren't even sexually attracted to; or why others can feel equally strong, sudden emotion for a newborn child or even God.

Nice to see science catching up to what we've always known.