If you’ve ever had a crush on  someone or had your heart broken, you know that love can feel physical.

It can ache in your chest,  it can twist in your stomach, and leave your whole body buzzing. But expressions like these aren’t just poetic.

They’re also a bit scientific. Researchers have been able to observe  where we feel love in our bodies, where the brain lights up when we experience it, and even how it manifests between two people. So let’s dig into how science answers  the question: “Where is love?” [♪ INTRO] Let's start with where love  is felt in the physical body.

The expressions that connect  emotions to body parts, like feeling “weak in the knees”,  might seem like modern idioms. Or maybe something that Shakespeare invented. But these kinds of phrases have  been around for a long time.

Maybe as much as 3,000 years! In a paper from 2024, a team of  researchers investigated ancient texts from the region that is now Iraq. They were written in a language called Akkadian, and date back to the Neo-Assyrian  period: around 900 to 600 BCE.

The researchers used an algorithm  to find places in the text where emotions and body parts  were mentioned together. Then, they mapped where those  emotions were described as being felt. Considering how ancient the  culture being studied was, maybe it’s not surprising  that some of the results sound pretty different from what  we’re familiar with today.

Like the fact that the body part most  associated with sexual arousal was the ankle. Unless you’re into that kind of thing. Or that these Neo-Assyrian writers  felt suffering in their armpits.

Love was even associated with the  liver, as were several other emotions, like happiness…and to a  lesser extent, schadenfreude. Meanwhile, the researchers also identified  clusters of roughly similar emotions that reference similar body parts. For example, love formed a  cluster with pride and desire, due to their mutual connection with the liver.

But love also showed up in one body  part the researchers described as, quote, “interesting”: the knees. So who knows, maybe the phrase “weak  in the knees” is 3000 years old… or at least its Akkadian equivalent. If you want to figure out where  people feel emotions today, you can also look through a bunch of texts.

But you can also just, you know, ask them. Several years before the Neo-Assyrian study, a mostly different group of  researchers teamed up to do just that. Their 2018 paper covered a  few different experiments, one of which had more than  400 participants draw on a picture of a human body where  they felt different emotions.

Putting all the data together, love  was felt mostly in the head and torso, which lines up fairly well with  those ancient descriptions. A similar study published in 2020,  which featured thousands of participants in over 100 countries, found  remarkably similar patterns for where emotions are felt across cultures. So no matter where you’re from, love  seems to hit in pretty familiar places.

But in all of this research, love was  treated as one big, feel good emotion. In real life, love isn’t so one-size-fits-all. The love you feel for, say, a  romantic partner is probably different from the love you feel for your pet.

Yet another study, published in  2023, tried to break love down into finer categories, asking participants to map where they felt 27 different types of love. They found all types of love were felt  in the head, but the stronger the love, the more widespread it became. The strongest kinds of  love…“passionate love”, “true love”, and “love for life”... were  felt all over the body.

Less intense love, like love for  strangers, mostly stayed in the head. And types in the middle, like parental love  or love for friends, spread to the heart. Speaking of your head, let’s talk about  where love shows up in your brain.

Scientists have studied romantic and  maternal love in the brain for years. And once again, that research group that worked on our ancient texts and modern body  maps wanted to expand the picture. They investigated six different types this time: love for romantic partners, children,  friends, strangers, pets, and nature.

The study participants were placed  inside functional MRI scanners, which measure brain activity while  you’re performing a specific action. In this case, the participants  simply had to listen to short stories designed to evoke each kind of love. As for the results of all this storytime, the brain patterns changed  based on how close the bond was, and whether the love involved someone else.

Romantic love, parental love, and love of friends activated many of the same regions. Love for strangers was less  widespread than these closer bonds. And while love for pets  activated fewer regions overall, there was a big difference  between the brain patterns of participants who actually  had pets, and those who didn’t.

Meanwhile, love of nature activated  a somewhat different set of regions in the brain, including an area  associated with viewing landscapes… which the participants were  not, in fact, doing at the time. So while spending time in nature  is certainly good for you, it's no replacement for the warm  fuzzies you get from someone you love. Now so far, we’ve looked at where  love exists inside a person, both in the body and in the brain.

But love often happens between people, which can manifest as a  phenomenon called synchrony. As the name suggests, synchrony occurs  when two people’s bodies sync up, like their heart rates and breathing. It’s commonly seen between moms and their babies, but scientists think it may play a  role in romantic relationships, too.

For their paper published in  2022, one research team turned to a 1990s classic for finding  a partner: speed dating. Thirty-two college students went  on a series of 5 minute dates, while the researchers tracked their  movements and electrodermal activity. Basically, how well a patch  of skin conducts electricity.

Electrodermal activity is mostly  influenced by the amount of sweat secreted by your sweat glands, which is controlled  by your autonomic nervous system… the part of your nervous system that controls  things you don't have to think about. So having an emotional response to something, like excitement about a date  you’re really vibing with, can change the amount of sweat, and  therefore change the electrodermal activity. In addition to providing all this  biometric data, at the end of each date, the participants rated how  interested they were in each other.

After crunching the numbers, the  researchers found that when both members of a speed dating pair were interested,  their nervous systems tended to sync up. Their movements were more coordinated, and their skin conductance was more similar. In other words, their bodies were  responding to each other in real time.

Of course, all this was done with a bunch of strangers forming brand-new connections. But other research suggests this  kind of biological synchrony exists in long-term couples, too. So maybe this is the next  evolution of reality dating shows.

Forget dramatic entrances  and first impression roses, just hook everyone up to some  sensors for a few minutes and see whose nervous systems actually sync up. If so, congratulations, you’re compatible! In the end, the answer to  the question “Where is love?” depends on how you look at it.

Love shows up in the body as physical sensations, in the brain as patterns of  activity, and even between people, in the way their nervous systems synchronize. It doesn’t really exist in just one place. Not in a single organ, a single brain region, or even squarely within an individual person.

Instead it permeates our bodies, our brains  and our relationships with one another. It’s less like a specific point on a map, and more like a network of  places that make us human. But none of this is going to  stop me from hearing the question “Where is love?” and answering “Baby  don’t hurt me.

Don’t hurt me. No more.” Funding for this video was provided by UC Berkeley's Greater Good  Science Center, as part of its "Spreading Love Through the Media" initiative, supported by the John Templeton  Foundation and Acton Family Giving. [♪ OUTRO]