Trying to Map Love and Hate in the Brain
A Study Trying to Map Hatred in the Brain Found Similarities to Love
Parsing Words, Thoughts and Brain Scans
"Some regions may do computations related to a topic, like faces or words," Huettel said. "Others may do computations related to functions," such as starting, stopping, relating, etc.
When more than one area lights up, as happened with the "hate circuit," trying to parse what each area is doing is like trying to solve an equation with multiple unknowns, he said.
"Each person hated only one other person, so there are probably a lot of other things that are wrapped into the expressions of hatred here," Huettel said. These could be thoughts of other people related to their enemy, or a reaction to an image.
"We have to look at other studies to separate what they're doing," he said.
However, Huettel said he thinks the initial study of the "hate circuit" could be a great start for more research.
"Does this go broader than just looking at the photo of someone you hate?" he asked.
Dr. Cameron Carter, professor of psychiatry and director of the imaging resource center University of California at Davis, agrees.
"I think that it's interesting and it's a very preliminary study," Carter said. "They saw different activities in different areas and then they speculate as to what that activity may have meant."
In those speculations, Zeki noted that an image of an enemy lit up areas of the cerebral cortex part of the brain, which is associated with judgment and reasoning, while an image of a loved one didn't activate those areas.
"I was surprised by the level of deactivation in the case of love, than in the case of hate," said Zeki. "But if you see a person and if you love them, and you trust them, you don't have to watch every step."
By Zeki's estimation, his experiment implies that hate is much more calculating, while love is much more trusting.
"It's interesting," Carter said. "But the study seems to be more of an exploratory kind."
The U.K. study may be one of a kind, too. Zeki could not find many studies on pure love and hate.
"This is the first study to look at brain activity that underlies the emotional response of hatred to the picture of a face," said Kevin S. LaBar, associate professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University.
"It would be really interesting to know if the brain activity reported here in response to an individual face generalizes to hatred of groups, which can motivate prejudice," he said.
