Partners often compare their love to abstract things because there is no instrument available to measure it but the findings of a recent study claims to have paved way for testing romantic love.
A recent study claims to find emotional effects on an individual's brain when he or she is in love.
Researchers first scanned the brains of men and women who said they were in love and compared them with people who had fallen out of love or never been in love. Study has paved way for the love test. Researchers claim they have succeeded in piecing together the first map of the changes that occur in the brain.
Pictures of the partners were shown to the romantic lovers during the scan in the study which has demonstrated the "possibility of applying a resting-state fMRI approach" for testing for romantic love, opening the way for fMRI tests to diagnose love.
The use of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, showed love involving a dozen areas of the brain.
The one such area in brain - the caudate nucleus - deals with the ending of a love affair. A cocktail of chemicals were also found to carry messages from one region to another.
The test was conducted on 100 men and women, who either said they were deeply in love, or had recently ended a romantic affair or had never had a romance. They were told to think of nothing during the scans in order to observe the changes occurring in the brains of people in love and how the areas work together.
"Our study provides the first evidence of love-related alterations in the underlying architecture of the brain and the results shed new light on the mechanisms of romantic love," said Professor Xiaochu Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, who led the study, which is published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
