Hark! What light through yonder neuron breaks

An unintentionally funny first line from a new study on the neuroscience of love.

The lifetime prevalence of romantic love is extremely high, as romantic love strikes nearly 100% of the people at one or more times during their life. As a comparison, the lifetime prevalence of experiencing any mental disorder is “only” 46.4% (National Institute of Mental Health, US).

The paper also has the oddly Shakespearean sounding line

By virtue of using a cognitive task with a full factorial design, we show that the dorsal striatum is not activated by beloved-related information per se, but only by beloved-related information that is attended

In fact, when Shakespeare wrote “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” he was probably thinking of the role of attentional modulation in the neural response to images of your lover based on the finding that activity in the dorsal striatum is only increased when the participants have to notice rather than ignore pictures of their beloved in an fMRI-based oddball task.

Angels! I think I hear the sound of angels!

 

Link to locked study.