Does Love Make You Stupid?

How love and happiness work in your favor

The claim that love is addictive is just one among several of the noxious effects attributed to romantic love. In fact, romantic love has garnered as much condemnation as praise in works of art, fiction and non-fiction books, philosophy and religion. This is to be expected, since love can bring about as much profound joy as extreme misery.

One of the things love is blamed for is making you stupid, as shown by popular expressions like being “a fool in love” or “drunk with love.” The euphoric, giddy feeling of being in love are taken as being similar to being drunk or under the effect of drugs. This may also have let to the idea that love is addictive, like alcohol or opiates.

Love is blamed for having bad judgement about the beloved and the world, which are seen in an overly optimistic, positive light.

“Distortions in critical faculties about the beloved? These might result from a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, a judgement center, as well as deactivation of the temporal poles and pariotemporal junction, cortical regions involved in social cognition.” David Linden in The Compass of Pleasure (Linden, 2012).

Loves decreases unhappiness

This claim is based on the first fMRI study of people in love (Bartels and Zeki, 2000). It found that, when people newly in love viewed pictures of their beloved, there was a decrease in the activity of the right prefrontal cortex (superior, medial and middle gyrus), the right parietal cortex, the right temporal cortex and the right posterior cingulate cortex. Note that all these deactivations were in the right hemisphere, which produces an integrated view of the world associated with emotions, while the left hemisphere is the one involved in judgment and behavior control. Indeed, this is how the authors interpreted their results:

“Happiness correlates with deactivations in the right prefrontal and bilateral parietal and temporal cortices. Conversely, it is striking to note that sadness and depression correlate with activation in some of the cortical regions deactivated in our study, especially the right prefrontal cortex, whose artificial inactivation by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation has proven to result in successful treatment against depression.” (Bartels and Zeki, 2000).

So, there you have it: the deactivation of the right prefrontal cortex by romantic love is related more with the happy feeling of being in love than with deficits in judgment.

Loves increases social intelligence

Another study (Song et al., 2015) used fMRI to compare the brains of people in love, in the forlorn state after a breakup, and single persons who had never been in love. Instead of showing pictures to them, they investigated the basal state of their brain in the absence of stimulus (resting state fMRI). Instead of measuring the activity of a particular brain region, the studied changes in how different brain regions talk to each other (functional connectivity).

They found that being in love engaged the social cognition network: temporal-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and inferior parietal lobe. This network mediates theory-of-mind (knowing what other people feel and think), and social and ethical decisions. Therefore, love seems to increase emotional intelligence. This makes sense, since being in love prompt us to communicate better with our beloved and keep track of whether they love us back.

Surprisingly, a romantic break-up also activates the social cognition network, but its activity decreases over time, instead of increasing like it happens while falling in love. This indicates that the increase in social intelligence produced by being in love continue after the break-up, but gradually decline towards the levels found in single people.

Loves releases dopamine in the orbitofrontal cortex

Takahashi el al. (2015) studied the brain of people in love using another brain imaging technique, positron emission tomography (PET) after injecting [¹¹C]raclopride, an antagonist of D2/D3 dopamine receptors, to measure dopamine release.

They found that the excitement they feel when viewing a picture of their beloved correlated with dopamine release in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in sensing beauty, aesthetic judgement and maternal love. This is consistent with the idea that being in love increases positive feelings and social intelligence.

Love does not affect focus but increases resilience after making an error

However, the activation and deactivation of brain regions only provides indirect evidence of changes in intelligence.

To address this problem, a study (Langeslag and van Steenbergen, 2020) measured the cognitive effects of infatuation (being in love, polyamory’s NRE) and attachment (sustained love, polyamory’s ERE), which were measured by specific tests. The sample was 83 young adults (75 hetero-romantic, 8 homo-romantic). They used the Stroop task and the flanker task, which are cognitive test that measure the ability for focusing one’s attention (cognitive control) and how cautious one becomes after an error in the task (conflict adaptation).

Neither infatuation nor attachment had any effect on the ability to focus attention. Infatuation also did not affect conflict adaptation or the slowing after making an error. However, attachment decreased the slowing after an error, indicating that making a mistake has less of an emotional effect in people who love. The authors concluded that love serves as an emotional buffer against adversity.

Conclusions

Taken together, all these studies shows that love does not decrease intelligence. It even increases social intelligence. It also gives us more emotional resilience when we do intellectual work.

References

• Bartels A, Zeki S (2000) The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport 11:3829–3834.

• Langeslag SJE, van Steenbergen H (2020) Cognitive control in romantic love: the roles of infatuation and attachment in interference and adaptive cognitive control. Cognition and Emotion 34:596–603.

• Linden DJ (2012) The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasms, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good: Penguin Books.

• Song H, Zou Z, Kou J, Liu Y, Yang L, Zilverstand A, d'Oleire Uquillas F, Zhang X (2015) Love-related changes in the brain: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Frontiers in human neuroscience 9:71.

• Takahashi K, Mizuno K, Sasaki AT, Wada Y, Tanaka M, Ishii A, Tajima K, Tsuyuguchi N, Watanabe K, Zeki S, Watanabe Y (2015) Imaging the passionate stage of romantic love by dopamine dynamics. Frontiers in human neuroscience 9:191.