A Cure For Smoking??
Somewhere I remember one of those old, nasty sayings that was something like, "Cancer Cures Smoking." Well, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw the following headline from news@nature.com:

Stroke makes smokers forget their addiction
Wiping out one part of the brain can break the thrall of smoking.

Now, in reality I am not quoting that to be smart or snide. It is actually an interesting bit of news for those of us who work in the addiction field. It is one more bit of information that supports a great deal of what many of us have been saying for years. Addiction is not a will-power issue. It is deeply rooted in some very primitive parts of the brain that manage to chemically hijack the rest of the brain. Here's some more from the nature.com article:

Antoine Bechera, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has identified 14 patients who all stopped smoking immediately after having a stroke that damaged their insular cortex. "One or two had even forgotten that they used to smoke," says Bechera.

The insular cortex is a relatively primitive part of the brain whose functions include providing an emotional context for experiences, such as drug taking, along with some higher-level, decision-making functions involved, for example, in forming memories.

The seemingly huge impact of switching off this area could have implications for addiction research in general, according to Bechera. Throwing off an addiction for good is tough because cues in the environment — a whiff of tobacco smoke, or the room where you used to shoot up — automatically invokes the emotion associated with the last fix.

But such triggers don't seem to trouble the patients with a damaged insula. "We could do everything we wanted to reawaken craving in these patients," says Bechera. "We could even light up in front of them but it had no effect at all."

The good news, by the way, is that through abstinence and new thinking and behavioral techniques, the brain can be rewired or perhaps reprogrammed to take back the higher thinking skills from the hijacker.

In any case, I am glad to see another bit of news that supports these newer ideas that can help more people continue to grow in their sobriety. And, yes, the 12-Steps of AA work on this same idea. It's just that they were developed before the science could explain it.