Dopamine—a neurotransmitter responsible for influencing motivation, pleasure, mood and learning in the brain—has experienced ...

The brain disease model promised clarity, but reality stayed messy For decades, the dominant scientific story has framed addiction as a chronic brain disease, a view popularized to counter the idea ...

Consider someone addicted to alcohol, drugs, or a behavior like gambling. Why do they continue, even when they say they want to stop? It's a question that highlights a fundamental disconnect: the gap ...

Remarkable scientific progress over the past five decades has helped us develop knowledge of how drugs of abuse induce pleasure, reinforce use, and lead to the compulsive self-administration we call ...

Ramirez is an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University. When philosophers imagined the ship of Theseus, they asked: Can a vessel that has all its planks replaced ...

The new method is designed to focus specifically on pain-related signals, without interfering with normal activity in other parts of the brain. A new preclinical study has identified a gene therapy ap ...

Researchers at the University of Houston and the University of Cincinnati are using machine learning to create a clearer picture of how heroin affects the brain, potentially opening new doors for ...

Is Häagen-Dazs ice cream as addictive as heroin? Or, put another way, is heroin as addictive as Häagen-Dazs? Depending on how you phrase the question, you’re either asking whether heroin addiction is ...