The brain & not the heart, Drives you to fall in love
It’s Valentine’s Day, a new study has claimed that intense romantic feelings actually come from your brain, not from the heart.
Researchers at the State University of New York found that it is the brain, not the heart, which plays a major role in falling in love.
In one small study, the researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of 10 women and seven men who claimed to be deeply in love.
The length of their relationships ranged from one month to less than two years. Participants were shown photographs of their beloved, and photos of a similar-looking person.
The brains of the smitten participants reacted to photos of their sweethearts, producing emotional responses in the same parts of the brain normally involved with motivation and reward.
“Intense passionate love uses the same system in the brain that gets activated when a person is addicted to drugs,” said study co-author Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
In other words, you start to crave the person you’re in love with like a drug, the researchers said.
Experts have said that romantic love is one of the most powerful emotions a person can have. Humans’ brains have been wired to choose a mate, and we humans become motivated to win over that mate, sometimes going to extremes to get their attention and affection.
“You can feel happy when you’re in love, but you can also feel anxious,” said co-author, Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “The other person becomes a goal in life,” essentially, a prize.
Brown said that the reward part of the brain, also dubbed the pleasure center, is an essential part of the brain needed to survive. “It helps us recognise when something feels good,” she added.
A Valentine’s day hope for mending injured hearts
Doctors are helping to heal injured hearts by using a patient’s own stem cells to grow new healthy heart muscle after a heart attack.
The experimental technique involves creating a supply of heart stem cells from a tiny piece of the patient’s living heart muscle, and then injecting it back into the person’s damaged heart to regenerate the dead tissue.
Damage to the heart muscle from a heart attack heals by forming scar tissue but this new scar tissue does not contract so the heart’s pumping ability is weakened and may eventually lead to heart failure.
However, doctors at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in the US are excited by results from a study that showed a decrease of about 50% in the amount of scar tissue in their patients who had the stem cell infusion – from 24% to 12%.
There was no reduction in scar tissue in heart attack patients who received standard treatment.
The phase-one study involved 25 patients, who had suffered a heart attack. Eight of these patients received standard care while 17 received the special infusion of “cardiosphere-derived stem cells” or CDCs (special cardiac stem cells created using the patient’s own heart tissue).
Heart surgeons removed tiny pieces of living heart muscle – half the size of a raisin – using minimally invasive techniques under local anaesthetic. This tissue was used to create the special CDCs, which were then implanted back into the patient’s heart. Extensive imaging was used in order to identify exactly the location and amount of damaged heart tissue.
“These findings suggest that this therapeutic approach is feasible and has the potential to provide a treatment strategy for cardiac regeneration after myocardial infarction,” said the researchers.
It was noted that four patients (24%) in the stem cell group had serious adverse events compared with one patient from the standard treatment group (13%), although of the four events in the stem cell group, only one was regarded as possibly related to the treatment.
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