As Valentine's day fast approaches, we thought we'd take a look at the 'science' behind the feelings felt on this day. Some researchers say that the biological basis of love stems from four tiny areas of the brain that form a "circuit of love".

Bianca Acevedo, a researcher with Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team who have isolated what they believe to be the major players in the love game:  the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.

Turns out the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, is a key reward system in the brain - making dopamine and sending it out to different regions. When new 'lovebirds' were placed in an MRI machine and showed pictures of their significant other, the VTA region lit up like a bug zapper.

As Rutgers University professor Helen Fisher puts it, "this part of the system becomes activated because you're trying to win life's greatest prize - a mating partner."

Chemically speaking, love affects the brain of those in love very similarly to a drug addition. "Romantic love is an addiction; a wonderful addiction when it is going well, a horrible one when it is going poorly," Fisher said. "People kill for love. They die for love."

The connection to addiction "sounds terrible," Acevedo acknowledged. "Love is supposed to be something wonderful and grand, but it has its reasons. The reason I think is to keep us together."

Sometimes - love isn't enough to keep us together. To look at the affects of love lost, the scientists scanned the brains of the recently heartbroken. They discovered additional activity in the nucleus accumbens, which is strongly associated with addiction. "The brokenhearted show more evidence of what I'll call craving," said Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist also at Einstein medical college. "Similar to craving the drug cocaine."

The next group of people the researchers focussed on were couples that had been married 20 years - but still showed the love signs of newlyweds. In these men and women, the MRI's revealed two additional areas of activity - the ventral pallidum and the raphe nucleus.

The ventral pallidum is associated with attachment and hormones that decrease stress; the raphe nucleus pumps out serotonin, which "gives you a sense of calm," Fisher said.

Those areas produce "a feeling of nothing wrong. It's a lower-level happiness and it's certainly rewarding," Brown said.

The scientists figure they now know a little more about the brains involvement in love. But as Larry Young of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta says "while romantic love theoretically can be simulated with chemicals, if you really want, you know, to get the relationship spark back, then engage in the behavior that stimulates the release of these molecules and allow them to stimulate the emotions - hugging, kissing, intimate contact."

"My wife tells me that flowers work as well. I don't know for sure," Young said. "As a scientist it's hard to see how it stimulates the circuits, but I do know they seem to have an effect. And the absence of them seems to have an effect as well."

Note to self ... go buy flowers.

Source:  The Science of Romance: Brains Have a Love Circuit