Stop Smoking: Smash Your Brain!
A new report is suggesting that the urge to smoke is the function of a specific area of the brain. Smokers who happen to have injured that portion have found they have suddenly "forgotten" the need to smoke. The potential impact this could have on smoking therapies seems pretty obvious and tremendous, but I love how the NYTimes felt the need to mention, at the beginning...

While no one is suggesting brain injury as a solution for addiction, the finding suggests that therapies might focus on the insula, a prune-size region under the frontal lobes that is thought to register gut feelings and is apparently a critical part of the network that sustains addictive behavior.

Previous research on addicts focused on regions of the cortex involved in thinking and decision making. But while those regions are involved in maintaining habits, the new study suggests that they are not as central as the insula is.

What's the fun in ending the smoking scourge if we can't crack some skulls and injure some brains!?

But seriously, before we all go looking for ways to turn off the "insula" it might be worth finding out just what else we're likely to forget in the process. The article does not address that important detail...