Addiction is commonly identified with habitual nonmedical self-administration of drugs. It is
usually defined by characteristics of intoxication or by characteristics of withdrawal …

Addictive drugs are habit-forming. Addiction is a learned behavior; repeated exposure to
addictive drugs can stamp in learning. Dopamine-depleted or dopamine-deleted animals …

This article reviews current research and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the
neuroscience of food reward in animals and humans, examines the scientific hypothesis of …

Mesolimbic dopamine (DA) is phasically released during appetitive behaviors, though there
is substantive disagreement about the specific purpose of these DA signals. For example …

The growing rates of obesity have prompted comparisons between the uncontrolled intake
of food and drugs; however, an evaluation of the equivalence of food-and drug-related …

Research involving animal models of drug addiction can be viewed as a sort of reverse
psychiatry. Contrary to clinicians who seek to treat addicted people to become and remain …

Learned associations between drugs and environment play an important role in addiction
and are thought to be encoded within specific patterns of sparsely distributed neurons called …

Although fear directs adaptive behavioral responses, how aversive cues recruit motivational
neural circuitry is poorly understood. Specifically, while it is known that dopamine (DA) …

Phasic changes in dopamine activity play a critical role in learning and goal‐directed
behavior. Unpredicted reward and reward‐predictive cues evoke phasic increases in the …

Midbrain dopamine neurons fire irregularly, with interspersed clusters of high-frequency
spikes, commonly called 'bursts'. In this review we examine such heterogeneity in activity …