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Getting rejected is a bit like going through withdrawal

Fisher has also scanned the brains of people who said they were in love with people who'd
rejected them. Given that love shares some characteristics with addiction, it might not be a
surprise that when they looked at photos of their beloveds, their brains looked like addicts going
through withdrawal.

"When you're rejected in love, we still find activity in the VTA — you're still madly in love with that
person, after all," she says. "But we also find elevated activity in other brain regions linked with
craving, and in a part of the brain associated with the distress that goes along with physical
pain."

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Rejected lovers, in other words, appear to retain the same obsessive focus on their object of
desire, but are unable to have it fulfilled. One positive aspect of the study, though, was that the
more time that had passed since the participants' rejection, the lower activity was in another
brain region associated with attachment.

We found activity in three brain regions, in exactly the same brain region associated with intense
romantic love. What a bad deal. You know, when you've been dumped, the one thing you love
to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life - but no, you just love
them harder. As the poet Terence, the Roman poet once said, he said, "The less my hope, the
hotter my love." And indeed, we now know why. Two thousand years later, we can explain this
in the brain. That brain system - the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for fo-
cus -- becomes more active when you can't get what you want. In this case, life's greatest prize:
an appropriate mating partner.

We found activity in other brain regions also -- in a brain region associated with calculating
gains and losses. You're lying there, you're looking at the picture, and you're in this machine, and
you're calculating what went wrong. What have I lost? It's this part of the brain, the core of the
nucleus accumbens, that is becoming active as you're measuring your gains and losses. It's also
the brain region that becomes active when you're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains
and huge losses.