The hidden island of addiction: the insula

By Nasir H. Naqvi, Antoine Bechara. Trends in Neurosciences, 2008

830 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most prior research on the neurobiology of addiction has focused on the role of subcortical systems, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum and mesolimbic dopamine system, in promoting the motivation to seek drugs. Recent evidence indicates that a largely overlooked structure, the insula, plays a crucial part in conscious urges to take drugs. The insula has been highlighted as a region that integrates interoceptive (i.e. bodily) states into conscious feelings and into decision-making processes that involve uncertain risk and reward. Here, we propose a model in which the processing of the interoceptive effects of drug use by the insula contributes to conscious drug urges and to decision-making processes that precipitate relapse.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c3d49d333514ca29ffa128dca631e5f5cfbfe5b

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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In Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

Citations in the corpus

A Convergent Functional Architecture of the Insula Emerges Across Imaging Modalities (2012, positive): “Given the implication of the insula across several clinical and psychiatric disorders, including autism and addiction (Di Martino et al., 2009a; Naqvi and Bechara, 2009), delineating these connectivity-based functional building blocks of the insula will inform investigations of the role of this…”
Cognitive Control of Drug Craving Inhibits Brain Reward Regions in Cocaine Abusers (2009, background): “…involved with salience attribution) (Hare et al., 2008) and right insula, (region involved with interoception including awareness of craving) (Naqvi and Bechara, 2009) with CI, suggests that both the alteration in salience to the cues and in interoceptive awareness were involved in the…”
Pro v Con Reviews: Is Food Addictive? (2012, background): “ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and ventral striatum) and appears to have an interoceptive function, integrating the autonomic and visceral information with emotion and motivation, thus providing conscious awareness of these urges (135).”
The Neurobiology of Anhedonia and Other Reward-Related Deficits (2011, background): “The anterior insula encodes the subjective value of rewards [97] and representations of interoceptive effects of rewards (reviewed in [98]).”
Resting state functional connectivity in addiction: Lessons learned and a road ahead (2012, background): “Multiple studies of cigarette-cue reactivity have noted positive associations between insula responses and subjective use-urges (Naqvi and Bechara, 2009).”
How we relate to brands: Psychological and neurophysiological insights into consumer–brand relationships (2012, background): “Recently, Reimann and Aron (2009) suggested that these ideas of relationships may be relevant to consumers' close relationships with brands as people also form a similar type of relationship with objects (Belk, 1988).”
Neural substrates of smoking cue reactivity: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies (2011, positive): “The insula has been shown to be important in interoception (Craig, 2002) and taste perception (Pritchard et al., 1999), and may thus be involved in perception of cue-evoked conditioned responses, resulting in a subjective craving for cigarettes (Naqvi & Bechara, 2009; Naqvi & Bechara, 2010).”
Neurocircuitry of Addiction (2009, background): “Our understanding of the neurobiological substrates for the reinforcing effects of drugs of abuse can be traced to early work on the identification of a reward system in the brain with the discovery of electrical brain stimulation reward or intracranial self-stimulation by Olds and Milner (1954). Br”
The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction. (2019, positive): “The relevance of the insula to addiction ﬁrst emerged with a seminal study that showed that smokers with insular lesions (due to stroke) were able to quit smoking with remarkable ease, without cravings or relapse (243).”
Reward Mechanisms in Obesity: New Insights and Future Directions (2011, background): “, prefrontal cortex) and in interoceptive processing (insular cortex) have been heavily implicated in drug addiction (Everitt et al., 2008; Fineberg et al., 2010; Koob and Volkow, 2010; Naqvi and Bechara, 2009), yet little is known of their precise role in compulsive eating and obesity, e.”
The effects of poor quality sleep on brain function and risk taking in adolescence (2013, positive): “Moreover, the insula integrates emotional information to and from limbic and cortical areas and is involved in the representation of interoceptive responses to emotionally salient and rewarding stimuli, such as drug craving, urgency, and impulsivity (Bonson et al., 2002; Naqvi and Bechara, 2009; Vil”