How humans fall in love — Is it nothing but chemical reactions and hormones talking?

Biological anthropologists reveal the science behind falling in love and its impact on our brains as well as our emotional well-being.

Love is a subject that poets and philosophers have been thinking about from the beginning of time, according to the Telegraph. Shakespeare is renowned for having written, "The course of true love never did run smoothly."

Although love has the power to divert us, what is truly happening in our bodies and minds?

Author of "Anatomy of Love" and biological anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher clarifies:

“When you fall in love, there are a lot of bodily responses,” said Fisher. “The neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which plays a key role in arousal and alertness, causes increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and dilation of pupils. And norepinephrine and adrenaline can cause sweaty palms and butterflies in the stomach.”

According to Fisher, the first thing we must understand is what motivates a passionate love.

The most important thing is dopamine, a neurotransmitter and hormone that functions in the brain to produce motivation, pleasure, and fulfilment.

She and her colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York were the first to explore the neural circuitry of romantic love in 2005 by scanning the brains of persons who were in love.

She said: “We found increased activity in a little factory near the base of the brain that makes dopamine and sends it to many brain regions, giving you the focus and energy, motivation and craving for a particular person, and the belief that this person is totally special."

“You can talk until dawn, you have euphoria when you’re with them and despair when you’re not; you can have insomnia, loss of appetite and a host of other feelings – particularly obsessive thoughts about him or her. It’s this dopamine that drives people to write love letters and poetry and crave a person and do intense things,” she added.

Love is a tremendously complex science, according to evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin, author of Why We Love: The definitive guide to our most basic urge.

She has studied love from a biological and evolutionary standpoint for twenty years, mostly at the University of Oxford.

She said: “Love is where you develop a psychological attachment or someone. It’s a very complicated phenomenon, led by opioids."

“It definitely does not occur when you first set eyes on someone, that’s different chemicals at work, chiefly dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. So, I’m sorry to break it to people, but there is no such thing as love at first sight. It’s lust at first sight.”