Helen Fisher spent decades asking a question most scientists avoided: what is love, exactly, and what is it doing to your brain? By the time she died in August 2024 at 79, she had an answer, and it turns out heartbreak makes a lot more sense once you understand it.
Fisher was a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, best known for pioneering the use of brain imaging to study romantic love. She noted early in her research that love appears in every human society ever studied, and across 170 cultures, there is no example of a society without it. What varies is the expression. What doesn’t vary is the experience.
To understand what love actually does to the brain, Fisher and her colleagues scanned 17 people who described themselves as newly and madly in love. When shown photographs of their partners, a specific region deep at the base of the brain lit up: the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. This is the area that produces dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with wanting, motivation, focus, and craving. It is, Fisher noted, the same region that activates during the rush from cocaine.
Romantic love, she concluded, is not an emotion. It is a drive — a chemical push toward another person that functions like an addiction when it’s working, and like withdrawal when it isn’t.
Then she scanned the people who had been dumped.
All 15 showed activity in the same VTA. The drive, the craving, the wanting was all still there. But two additional regions also lit up. One was associated with calculating gains and losses, the part of the brain that runs obsessive post-mortems, asking what went wrong and whether it could be fixed. The other was associated with deep attachment. In the recently published obituary in The Telegraph, Fisher’s research was described as showing activity also in areas linked to physical pain, risk-taking, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and anger. All of this, running simultaneously, in someone who just wants to stop thinking about a person they no longer have.
“Romantic love is an addiction,” Fisher said. “A perfectly wonderful addiction when it’s going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it’s going badly.”
One person who found Fisher’s framing genuinely useful was Dessa, a Minneapolis-based rapper. She had tried and failed to get over an ex-boyfriend and was frustrated by her own inability to move on despite wanting to. “It really bothered me that, no matter how much effort I tried to expend in trying to solve this problem, I was stuck,” she told NPR. Fisher’s explanation of the VTA gave her a new angle. “That you could objectively measure and observe ‘love,’ that had never occurred to me before.”
Dessa went on to try neurofeedback, a technique in which participants learn to consciously alter their own brain wave activity. A study published in Neuron found that participants trained to modulate their VTA activity were eventually able to do so without any external stimulus, effectively learning to turn down the volume on the craving.
It isn’t a cure. Fisher was careful about what she claimed. But understanding that the pain of heartbreak is neurologically structured, that it has a physical location in the brain and follows identifiable patterns, at least makes it feel less like a personal failing and more like a process that, with time, tends to resolve.
Fisher finished the manuscript for her final book five days before she died.
