When a relationship ends but love remains, it can be both frustrating and embarrassing.

Dessa, a well-known rapper, singer and writer from Minneapolis, knows the feeling well. She’d spent years trying to get over an ex-boyfriend, but she was still stuck on him.

“You’re not only suffering,” she says, “you’re just sort of ridiculous. Discipline and dedication are my strong suits — it really bothered me that, no matter how much effort I tried to expend in trying to solve this problem, I was stuck.”

But things changed when Dessa turned to the frontiers of neuroscience for help. She came across a TED Talk by Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and visiting research associate at Rutgers University. Using a type of brain scan called functional MRI, or fMRI, Fisher had looked into the brains of love-struck people and noticed that certain parts of their brains were unusually active.

“That you could objectively measure and observe ‘love’ — that had never occurred to me before,” Dessa says.

She wondered: If science could map the sources of love in her brain, could it somehow make that love go away?

The question led her to a controversial therapy technique called neurofeedback.

The idea is simple: If you want to learn to lower your heart rate, it helps to be able to hear your pulse. And if you want to change patterns of brain activity, it might be helpful to be able to see what your brain is up to. To read more from Adam Cole & Ryan Kellman, click here.