I’ve heard of lots of strange ways to quit smoking, but voluntarily damaging your brain? I don’t care what you say about smoking and I don’t care what you say about the health risks – the idea of voluntarily submitting yourself for brain damage to stop smoking? Well, I know some people who went through a shots treatment to stop smoking and after three miserable days, they didn’t stop – so who knows.
Science Journal
In the Science Journal this week, there was a report from a Dr. Antoine Bechara, a neuroscientist, who has discovered what he believes to be the area of the brain that governs nicotine addiction. The area, identified as the insula is located deep within the brain and only takes up about 2 and a half centimeters of space.
So how did these scientists discover that this area of the brain has anything to do with the smoking habit? Apparently, a heavy smoker (someone who smoked 40 cigarettes a day) quit smoking immediately after he experienced a stroke that affected that area of his brain. He described the experience as being one where his body forgot it liked to smoke.
The study explored 69 brain damaged smokers and found that of the 19 who had received damage to the insula, that 13 of them stopped smoking with 24 hours of the injury and they reported no urge to smoke again. Of the remaining smokers in this category, they reported quitting became far less difficult and rated it a 3 on scale of 1 to 7.
So What Does This Mean?
Potentially, this could be another way for smokers to quit, but the insula controls a number of every day functions and damaging it willfully could create more consequences than just stopping smoking. I’m still on track towards my quit date – just four days from now, but I have to say, even with this information – the idea of volunteering for brain damage to quit smoking – I’d rather do it some other way.
Would you volunteer for such a procedure? Even knowing it could cause other problems in order to quit smoking?
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