New research revealed that, like excessive gaming or virtual sex, e-mail and text messaging might be part of a compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder and a form of addiction.

Yes, I'm a big believer that a video game, a computer, can act identically as a drug. As our brain imagery technology improves we're going to be able to see that the exact same centers of the brain are lit up for a drug, as a video game, as a computer game.

The causes are really not clear about internet or gaming addictions because, in part, it is a such a new technology. But I think that we're going to find that it essentially holds the same dynamics that cause many other addictions.

We have a new tool in our society that no other society has had and that is a way to change the way we feel via a computer or a game or something mechanical like that.

In the harm reduction model, it is not inappropriate for a pornography addict to look at pornography and spend money on pornography. And the goal would be to spend less and to be involved less.

Pornography addiction is just a variant as I would see it, of sexual addiction, but it's primarily not with a human being. It's with pictures and images and of course the internet plays a big role in the availability of it and it often involves a great expense.

I wouldn't think all sexual interactions online are unhealthy. I would in fact envision that down the road - a decade from now - there would be more normalizing of this sort of interaction.

The mechanisms and the desires of sex and sexual intimacy and sexual contact can be lived out through the Internet in cybersex.

Less than a year after the American Medical Association backed away from labeling video game addiction a mental illness, the debate rages on, particularly for the families of the 10 to 14 percent of avid gamers who have become so obsessed with videogames, Facebook and other computer-based pastimes that their virtual lives are damaging their reality.

As many as one in 30 computer game players have symptoms similar to those of gambling and drug addicts, psychologists say.