When people think of addiction, they think of drugs and alcohol. Can you be addicted to love? Is that even possible? Apparently, it is possible. Researchers have found that addiction to love uses the same parts of the brain as addiction to drugs.

How do they know? Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York and colleagues use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to figure this out. They recorded the brain activity of 15 college age adults who have been recently rejected by their love. The researchers had the participants view pictures of their former partners. When the researchers view their brain activity, what they found was that parts of their brain that were involved in motivation, reward and love were activated.

What this means is that despite the rejection, the participants were still in love. That may explain why rejection is so painful and hard to get over.

Although rejection is part of life, Brown said that romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology.

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