Unhappy love really hurts the heart
Unhappy love really hurts the heart

Video: Unhappy love really hurts the heart

Video: Unhappy love really hurts the heart
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Is it possible for unhappy love to break your heart? Alas, perhaps. Moreover, the pain in most cases will be akin to physical pain. As American scientists have found out, our brain perceives the departure or loss of a loved one as a real physical trauma, activating the same departments.

Researchers at the University of Michigan assembled a group of 40 volunteers (21 of them women) on a peculiar basis: they all suffered from the consequences of a breakdown in the past six months. Each subject was asked to go through two experiments. The first was aimed at initiating psychological pain, while the second was aimed at physical pain.

First, study participants were asked to look at a photo of their ex-partner and think about the most positive moments of their life together. Then the scientists used a special heating device, applying it to the left forearm of each participant. As a result, the subjects felt either slight warmth or burning pain.

“It might seem that the sensations of burn and rejection are different types of pain. It turns out that this is not the case. Both physical pain and pain from a break with a loved one provoke activation in the secondary somatosensory and insular cortex of the brain,”said the head of the research group, psychologist Ethan Cross.

In parallel, the scientists recorded the brain activity of the volunteers using functional MRI. The experts were interested in both the activity of the brain as a whole and the work of individual zones that had previously been associated with physical pain. The data obtained were compared with information about 500 previous tests of response to pain, emotions, memory work, attention switching.

As a result, the experts concluded that the feeling of rejection actually activates the regions of the brain that are involved in the sensation of physical pain. Experts believe that they have managed to understand how mental anguish can cause real physical illness.

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