This article is a sample from DISCOVER's special Brain issue, available only on newsstands through December 28.

Love is celebrated as a many-splendored thing, while lust is commonly regarded as downright primitive. Leave it to a Frenchwoman to discover that sexual desire is actually quite brainy. Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, uses brain scans to examine the divine madness of love and the blinding imperative of lust. Her goal: illuminating how these two forms of attraction work by mapping out which brain regions are active when we experience them. Her findings counter the assumption that desire is a simple animal urge motivated primarily by biochemistry and evolutionary directives.

Working with her frequent collaborator, psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, Ortigue has found that lust involves complicated cognitive processing. Love, too, is not quite what we thought. Both romance and desire, she says, may be expressions of a “top-down” process in which intellect rules over instinct, not the other way around. Love may even make you smarter, by helping your brain process information more quickly.


Why do you study the neuroscience of love and sex?
I’ve always been interested in the big questions of science, and love is one of the biggest questions in the world. Everyone feels it, knows what it is, but we can’t really define it. I like challenges, and I like to bring some rationality to things that seem irrational. Also, I’ve always been interested in the unconscious and consciousness and how the two interact in our daily life. We’ve found that a lot of unconscious processes are involved in love and desire.

What did you expect to find, and what has surprised you?
We all know that love and sex activate the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. But I wondered if we could find more beyond that. Our results suggest that love and sex are not just animal processes; they are much more sophisticated and intellectual than we thought. In brain scans of people feeling sexual desire, we did find that visual areas and emotional areas were activated. What was surprising was the activation we saw in another brain region, one involved in complex cognitive processes.

How do you study the way people respond to desire?
We put pictures of good-looking people on a computer and asked participants to press a button every time they were attracted by a picture. We recorded their reaction times and found that responses were much faster when the participant was not attracted to someone. It’s very easy to say, “Oh, no, he doesn’t turn me on.” But it took much longer for people to determine if they were attracted to someone, if they were feeling desire.