Ricky Durham created the site in 2004 in honor of his brother, Keith. The site is geared to match people with special health needs to others with similar conditions. Whether this search is for friendship or something more is entirely up to the user.

Ricky’s brother Keith had Crohn’s Disease, a form of irritable bowel disorder. It could make meeting people for the first time awkward. That’s when Ricky came up with the idea for Prescription 4 Love.

“Deciding when to tell someone you have a colostomy bag is incredibly difficult,” Durham explains. “I thought if Keith had a chance to meet someone with a similar condition, there would be no need to have to disclose anything.”

Prescription 4 Love is set up like most other online dating sites. Users can create their own profiles, browse through the forums, and chat with each other in an open environment without a hidden medical history. Durham’s recently added instant messaging, blogging and virtual gifts to the mix.

Durham’s site began with a focus on just 11 chronic illnesses, but has expanded to include more than 30. Prescription4Love welcomes anyone from amputees to recovering alcoholics, people with diabetes or heart disease, people who have or have had cancer to little people. Durham has even added STDs to the list. In fact, HIV and herpes are among his most popular groups.

“One lady in particular called me who had cancer said that whenever she told the person she was dating she had cancer they stopped dating her within a matter of days,” he says. Now she can find acceptance in a community where everyone can relate in one way or another.

As of now more than 8,000 people have used the site, and although Keith passed away before the site was fully developed, he is still very much the driving force behind Ricky’s work.

“Keith is the inspiration behind everything that I do for Prescription4Love,” he says. “I have had phone calls and emails from different people thanking me for stating such a web site…the response has been great.”

Fourteen men and women were asked to describe their social roles and support levels. Each was injected with a small amount of radiotracer, used to show how different tissues function in PET scans. Researchers, meanwhile, monitored dopamine activity in the brain.

"Low levels of dopamine receptors were associated with low social status and that high levels of dopamine receptors were associated with higher social status,” study leader Dr. Diana Martinez of the New York Psychiatric Institute said in a press release. “The same type of association was seen with the volunteer's reports of social support they experience from their friends, family or significant other."

Although human testing is still in its early stages, a similar correlation between dopamine receptors and social status has been identified in primates. This link may have something to do with the perks of being higher up on the social ladder.

“In monkeys, dominant and subordinate social rank are determined by physical and social triumph and defeat,” authors explain. Dopamine is partly responsible for motivation and reward. It is also thought to be a precursor to the release of adrenaline.

“In humans, social hierarchy is a more subtle phenomenon that can be approximated by measuring social status and social support,” they write.

While high social status was correlated with a higher number of dopamine receptors, healthy participants with social phobias had fewer receptors. This information could explain why some people are more anxious or socially detached than others. It could also pave the way toward a greater understanding of conditions such as social anxiety disorder.

While this study is merely suggestive, results support the idea that social status and encouragement from peers and loved ones may be related to dopamine receptors. Further research could provide insight to the complexity of dopamine’s role in social structure.

Read more on the study in February’s issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Information comes from a study by NYU assistant professor of psychology Lila Davachi and doctoral candidate Arielle Tambini. The study’s purpose was to examine the relationship between two parts of the brain related to memory—the hippocampus and neocortex—and the long-term storage of memory following rest.

Resting after gaining new information allows the mind to process that information, and store it into long-term episodic memory. While former studies have shown that this process is highly effective in sleep, this experiment tested the effects of “awake rest”--rest without sleeping.

The hippocampus is responsible for regulating emotion and memory; the neocortex for language, conscious thought and emotional response. Researchers used object-face and scene-face encoding, the brain’s process of changing information from one form to another, to determine how these two areas of the brain reacted to form memories.

Participants were shown images of people coupled with either objects or scenery (called encoding tasks), and asked how likely these images were to go together. Testing began 40–50 minutes after the first encoding task and 70–80 minutes after the second.

According to Davachi, brain regions remained active during rest, which suggests that memories were being replayed and reinforced. Participants with stronger relationships between the hippocampus and neocortex had better memory, especially of the face-object pairing.

“It will be essential for future studies to assess how connectivity during post-task offline periods (rest) relates to more extended measures of long-term memory consolidation,” authors wrote. “It will be interesting to explore the relationship between longitudinal measurements of enhanced connectivity and behavioral measures of memory consolidation.”

Take a short-term memory test or read the full study in the January issue of Neuron.