In this week’s SCIENCE–researchers at Iowa and USC find that individuals with focal stroke injuries to the insula suddenly lose all interest in their smoking addictions. I haven’t seen the actual article yet, just the news reports (I link to the NY Times article), but I’m always cautious about such discoveries which purport to link a part of the brain to some salient aspect of human mental experience (e.g. the pleasure center). Nora Volkow, director of NIDA at NIH calls the discovery “mind-boggling”.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 