Valentine's Day: "It's the brain not the heart"; How MRI's are showing couples how to get along

Recent studies of brain scans show that being in love causes changes in the brain that are strikingly similar to serious health problems like drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In other words, you can think of love as a form of mental illness and the brain scans can help explain the somewhat bizarre behavior sometimes exhibited by people in love. More importantly, understanding the brain patterns can show couples how to rekindle romance and boost the health of long-term relationships:

Studies show that trying something new with a spouse can go a long way toward reigniting love. In one study, couples were assigned a weekly activity they both found new and exciting -- such as sailing or taking an art class. Another group did pleasant but familiar activities, such as dinner with friends. Based on answers to relationship tests, the couples doing new things showed far more improvement in the quality of their marriage after 10 weeks than couples who did the same things every week. The lesson is that sharing new experiences with your spouse appears to trigger changes in the brain that mimic the early days of being in love.

"We know that novelty and new experiences engage the dopamine system, and when it's associated with your partner it creates a link with the partner," says Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at New York's Stony Brook University who conducted the study. "It creates a dramatic increase in the sense of passion and romance.''

The most fascinating aspect of this is that the above advice has been given to couples in marriage therapy for years but only now, armed with brain scans, are researchers able to see that this advice was leading to physiological changes and not just emotional changes.