Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Donatella Marazziti, investigated the hormonal changes connected to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with a focus on serotonin, the chemical that has a calming effect on the brain. Too little serotonin has been linked to aggression, obsession, depression and anxiety. Marazziti was intrigued by how both the people with OCD and love-struck individuals can spend hours fixating on a certain object or that certain someone, and how both groups often know their obsession is irrational but they seem to have no control over it. She measured the serotonin levels of 20 OCD sufferers against 20 ‘madly-in-love’ people. She then compared the results against another 20 people not affected by OCD and who were not in love. While the ‘normal’ subjects had the normal level of serotonin, both the OCD and in-love participants had about 40% less of the chemical. This experiment can explain how early romantic love can often turn into obsession. Re-testing the same subjects 12–24 months later, Marazziti found that the hormonal differences of lust had disappeared entirely, and their serotonin levels were back to normal, even if the couples were still together. Lovers will swear to each other that they will always ‘feel’ this way, but their hormones clearly tell a different story. Mother Nature is very clever: she adjusts our hormone levels for just long enough to drive us to achieve her evolutionary goal – to produce offspring. Interestingly, a study released in 2008 by a team from Stony Brook University in New York, headed by Dr Arthur Aron, scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new romantic lovers. They found that about 10% of the mature couples demonstrated the same brain activation and chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as the ‘new’ lovers did. So there is hope for some of us. Meanwhile, in Cardiff, Wales, biochemist Abdulla Badawy has shown that alcohol also runs down serotonin in the brain. Low levels of serotonin dissolve inhibitions and create an illusion that the ordinary-looking person at the other end of the bar is unbelievably attractive.