Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy! Does all this romantic mumbo-jumbo make you feel a little queasy? I have good news: a recent study showed that listening [...]

1. Junk Food and Addiction – How Cheesecake and Bacon are Like Heroin and Cocaine
2. Your Brain in Love: Part 1 – When Love is a Many-Splendored Thing
3. Your Brain in Love: Part 2 – Love and Marriage

Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy! Lots of relationship experts suggest that couples who have been together through the ages can keep the romance alive with regular [...]

1. Your Brain in Love: Part 2 – Love and Marriage
2. Your Brain in Love: Part 5 – No Room for Romance? Try Music Instead… but not Junk Food
3. Your Brain in Love: Part 4 – Oxytocin, the Love/Hate Hormone

Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy! Ever fallen madly in love? Researcher Helen Fisher has spent her academic life trying to figure out what’s going on in [...]

1. Your Brain in Love: Part 2 – Love and Marriage
2. Your Brain in Love: Part 3 – The Neuroscience of Date Night
3. Your Brain in Love: Part 5 – No Room for Romance? Try Music Instead… but not Junk Food

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps produce a reward response in the brain. This response kicks into action when we do something pleasurable- like eating highly palatable food. It is known that there is a reduction in this reward response in obese people. However, it is unclear whether the reduction in reward precedes obesity and [...]

1. Your Brain in Love: Part 5 – No Room for Romance? Try Music Instead… but not Junk Food
2. Weight Gain Can Lead to Fewer Food-Related Brain Rewards
3. Is Milk the Newest Brain Food?

Last week, David Rock wrote a fantastic article called “(Not So Great) Expectations: Use Them or Be Used By Them”. The article cites research from Wolfram Schultz (who serves as a science advisor to Posit Science) on how expectations affect dopamine levels in the brain, which in turn affects happiness. The gist of it goes [...]

1. Junk Food and Addiction – How Cheesecake and Bacon are Like Heroin and Cocaine
2. Your Brain in Love: Part 3 – The Neuroscience of Date Night
3. Your Brain in Love: Part 5 – No Room for Romance? Try Music Instead… but not Junk Food