The Pack Mentality

“It’s easy to quit smoking.  I’ve done it a thousand times.”

The old trope, variously attributed to Mark Twain and W.C. Fields, reflects a common difficulty many of us have with quitting bad habits, be it cigarettes, booze, gambling or eating (why don’t we ever have any healthy “bad” habits?).

What separates the successful quitter from the rest of struggling humanity? Will power? Yes, and no. Brain wiring plays an important role, according to the latest research.

A new study suggests that people who successfully trash the ash have greater connectivity between the area of their brain that controls cravings and urges and the area that’s important for motor control and sense of touch.

In other words, if your buddy gave up the smokes and you are still struggling, it could be because his brain is “hard-wired” for success.

Researchers at Duke University School of Medicine studied the MRI scans of 85 smokers taken a month before they tried to quit. All of the people in the study stopped smoking. The researchers gave them nicotine replacement therapy and then followed them for 10 weeks.

If your buddy gave up the smokes and you are still struggling, it could be because his brain is “hard-wired” for success.

Forty-one people in the group started smoking again.

Studying the scans of the 44 people who did successfully quit, researchers found those people had more coordinated activity — synchrony — between the insula, home to urges and cravings, and the somatosensory cortex, which is vital for motor control and sense of touch.

“Simply put, the insula is sending messages to other parts of the brain that then make the decision to pick up a cigarette or not,” Merideth Addicott, an assistant professor at Duke and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

This is not the first study to highlight the role of the insula in smoking and smoking cessation. Numerous other studies have found that this large region in the cerebral cortex is active when smokers crave cigarettes. And smokers who suffer damage to that area in the brain appear to lose interest in smoking.

In an earlier study, researchers from University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and the University of Southern California found that smokers with damage to this area of the brain are likely to quit easily and immediately, and stay off cigarettes. What that study didn’t explore, however, was whether smokers with insula damage still gain pleasure from smoking.

The Duke researchers said their findings show that targeting the connectivity between the two areas of the brain could be a good strategy for smoking cessation.

“There’s a general agreement in the field that the insula is a key structure with respect to smoking and that we need to develop cessation interventions that specifically modulate insula function,” Joseph McClernon, an associate professor at Duke and the study’s senior author, said in the statement.

But more research is needed to understand exactly how this greater connectivity increases the chances of effectively extinguishing the smoking habit.