The phrase “blinded by love” from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is supported by modern brain science. MRIs and fMRIs can visualize how falling in love activates certain parts of the brain and clouds our judgment. This is an example of a literary insight being confirmed by science.
The line “Love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that they commit themselves.” from Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 6, describes falling in love as if a man and woman were blind. When we’re in love, we’re said to be “blinded by love” and unable to see the other person for who they really are. Our emotions and behaviors come from the workings of our brains. The brain’s reactions, which were described by artists before the concept of “brain science” existed, as a result of their close insight into human beings, were later confirmed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an advanced form of MRI, which is the culmination of modern medical imaging technology.
To understand fMRI, it’s important to understand how MRI works and how it came to be. Starting with the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen in 1895, the 20th century saw the emergence of various medical imaging technologies such as CT, MRI, ultrasound, and others, but MRI in particular has seen rapid development since the late 1970s due to several unique advantages, including the fact that it does not use radiation and is therefore harmless to the human body. MRI uses hydrogen atoms inside the human body to acquire images, rather than radiation. It is a well-known fact that the largest percentage of the human body is made up of water. Water (H2O) is a molecule made up of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. Therefore, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the human body, and all body tissues contain hydrogen atoms, albeit in different numbers. Normally, all the water molecules are randomly arranged in different directions, but in a magnetic field of a certain level, they are arranged in a certain direction. Therefore, the principle of MRI is to place the human body in a large magnetic vat and measure the signal from the hydrogen atoms arranged in the vat to obtain an image. This is similar to the principle that when you count people, you can count them more accurately if they are arranged in a regular pattern than if they are randomly scattered.
MRI is often compared to an X-ray or CT because of their similarities in imaging the inside of the human body. X-rays and CT are imaging techniques that use X-rays, and while X-rays can be used to show bone because of their ability to bounce off solid objects, they cannot be used to see through human tissue or organs. X-rays cannot penetrate the skull, which is surrounded by thick, hard bone, and therefore cannot be used to see the brain, but MRI makes it possible to obtain images of the brain within the skull. Another advantage of MRI is that it can produce a wide variety of images, depending on how the images are acquired. One of the most revolutionary methods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), was introduced in 1990, combining the best of both worlds: the ability to image the brain inside the skull and the versatility of imaging modalities. Seiji Ogawa’s group at Bell Labs in the United States discovered that MRI produces different images depending on the degree of oxidation of hemoglobin in the blood. When a part of the brain is activated, there is a temporary increase in blood flow to that part. But it’s not just the blood flow that increases, it’s also the oxygen supply, which requires the action of a molecule called hemoglobin to get oxygen to the brain cells. This means that more blood contains more oxidized hemoglobin. From the above facts, we can derive the following conclusions By capturing the momentary increase in hemoglobin in the blood vessels that pass around active brain tissue, we can visualize a “map” of what parts of the brain are busy.
The proliferation of fMRI has led to an explosion of experiments using fMRI to study the brain and the mechanisms of cognitive processes. These experiments have different themes but follow the same process: comparing brain images with and without stimulation to determine the mechanisms of brain behavior. Swami’s group looked at how the brains of men and women in love and men and women who were not in love were activated when they were shown a series of pictures of beautiful men and women, mixed with pictures of normal-looking men and women. While the brain images of the lovers showed no difference between the beautiful and plain pictures, the brains of the unrequited men and women became more activated in visual response to the pictures of the beautiful men and women. The results scientifically demonstrate that when we become “blinded” by love, we don’t see anyone but our partner. Later, Professor Zeki of University College London announced that falling in love reduces the function of the frontal lobe, which governs judgment, causing judgment to become clouded and so-called “blind”.
The descriptions of love in literature elaborate on brain science theories, even though they were written before the brain science was built. And now we live in a time when we can see love in action. The secrets of the brain still await future generations of scientists, but the most important machine to unlock them, the MRI, also has its work cut out for it. In fact, MRI machines are expensive and mostly used for medical purposes, so they are not freely available for research. They’re also nearly impossible for children and claustrophobic people to use, as even the slightest movement in the machine creates a lot of noise in the images. However, the potential of MRI and the imagination of many researchers is limitless and amazing.
