“Lonely hearts have spent millennia trying to capture the pain of rejection in painting, poetry and song. Now neuroscientists have seen it flickering in some remarkable brain images from college students suffering a social snub.

The brain scans reveal that two of the same brain regions that are activated by physical pain are also activated by social exclusion.

‘This doesn’t mean a broken arm hurts exactly the same way that a broken heart does,’ says Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research. ‘But it shows that the human brain sounds the same alarm system for emotional and physical distress.'” New Scientist If it is so —that social disconnection is as ‘painful’ as physical injury — we have been so heavily selected to avoid it that it would not be too much of an extrapolation to call the need for connectedness a basic or instinctual ‘drive’. New Scientist