It may be common knowledge that similar pleasure centres in the brain light up when eating chocolate or having sex. But good ol’ MRI can tell us much more.

It seems that patterns of brain activity associated with planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward occur in both activities. Interestingly, these are also the regions of the brain (the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmentum) which “light up” in the early stages of a romantic relationship, when subjects profess strong feelings of romantic love. Did you miss that? Being in love is not an emotion! Romantic love is better characterised as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions such as euphoria or anxiety.

As relationships mature, emotional centres get involved (the insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex). Not surprisingly, this happens sooner in women than in men. Women also activate memory centres, and in the words of one editorial,

“suggesting perhaps that they pay more attention to past experience in this process. Men, by contrast, activate their visual areas early on and in the very diplomatic words of the study’s lead author they activate the “regions associated with penile turgidity”. Another way of describing the different gender responses would be ‘love’ versus ‘lust’. Isn’t science wonderful?”

Other unusual MRI studies include during-coitus imaging (in a 50cm scanner bore!), and even dynamic er… defecography, in which you would be able to clearly see where your chocolate ends up.

Chocolate has been the subject of MRI studies itself. The migration of lipids (fat) in aging chocolate and from chocolate fillings has been investigated using MRI. Chocolate manufacturers can’t have the pleasurable-reward bits of my brain missing out because of their chocolate getting old, now can they?!

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