Nicotine addiction remains one of the most persistent public health challenges worldwide, driven by changes in the brain that reinforce repeated use and make quitting extremely difficult. For decades, ...

Addiction often isn’t about chasing pleasure—it’s about escaping pain. Researchers at Scripps Research have discovered that a tiny brain region called the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT) ...

Researchers explored the links between the adolescent dopamine system and cannabis use frequency, amount and addiction ...

While most prior studies have focused on brain-centric models of reward, some work has shown that gut-vagal signals have an effect on food-driven dopamine activity and eating behaviors. Yet it was ...

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 ...