---
title: How Repairing a Key Brain Circuit Could Help Avert Drug Relapse
date: 2023-08-30T05:30:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/how-repairing-a-key-brain-circuit-could-help-avert-drug-relapse"
section: Articles
---
# How Repairing a Key Brain Circuit Could Help Avert Drug Relapse

*August 30, 2023* — by [Nathaniel Underland](/author/nathaniel-underland)


> $1.9M NIH Award to Fund UMD Psychologists’ Study of the Neurobiology of Decision-Making

*I Stock 1317785463 1920x1080 — Two UMD researchers will investigate whether the phenomenon of relapse can be sidestepped by repairing a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps resolve disputes between disparate neural signals.*

In a famous neuroscience experiment, it takes participants nearly twice as long to identify the color in which a word is written if there’s a color “clash”—for example, to say “red” when the color is used to spell “green”—as it does when each word is written in the color that it denotes. Your brain just needs a moment to resolve the contradiction between color name and ink color, and it does so by engaging an area in the frontal lobe called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

Now, two University of Maryland researchers are investigating whether lapses in this conflict-resolving brain area could also be key to understanding the importance of decision-making in relapse for people who struggle with drug addiction.

Funded by a five-year, $1.9 million award from the National Institutes of Health, Professor Matthew Roesch and Assistant Professor Anna Li, both in the Department of Psychology, will establish the role of the ACC in drug-seeking behavior and look into the possibility of manipulating its function through cutting-edge epigenetic tools, which influence whether and how genetic code gets read to form cells and their components. The team suspects that neural activity in the ACC and its circuits is associated with decision-making, and that enhancing the ACC may repair these circuits and help avoid relapse.

The collaboration between Roesch and Li originated in a 2018 seed grant award from the university’s [Brain and Behavior Institute](http://bbi.umd.edu/).

For more than a decade, Roesch has worked to determine the connections across different parts of this decision-making circuit, which comprises brain areas related to habitual action, motivation and learning. This research examined how changes to these brain areas months after exposure to cocaine can result in poor decision-making.

“Some people think that addicts lack self-control or are born without willpower, but there is more to it than that,” said Roesch. “Drugs of abuse change neural signals long-term and modify behavior, making it much more difficult to stop.”

The brains of recovering addicts are both more likely to receive conflicting signals—contradictory messages from brain areas related to habitual action, motivation and learning—and less able to manage those conflicts. Imagine that someone in danger of relapse runs into a friend with whom they used to get high. At that point, the part of the decision-making circuit that governs habitual action suddenly activates and urges the former addict to resume using. But this signal is at odds with another one from the circuit that manages goals, such as to stay clean.


*one square with "blue, purple, green" written in the correct color, and another square with "blue" written in black, "purple" written in white and "green" written in red*




**Topics:** [Research](https://today.umd.edu/tags/research)


**Tags:** [Brain and Behavior](https://today.umd.edu/topic/brain-and-behavior), [Neuroscience](https://today.umd.edu/topic/neuroscience), [Psychology](https://today.umd.edu/topic/psychology), [Research Impact](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research-impact), [Research](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research)


**Units:** [Brain & Behavior Institute](https://today.umd.edu/topic/brain-behavior-institute), [College of Behavioral and Social Sciences](https://today.umd.edu/topic/college-behavioral-and-social-sciences)