Can zapping the brain help treat addiction?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—Joe Hilton was inside an MRI machine, wearing a $1 million helmet and goggles showing him pictures of heroin being cooked in a spoon and injected into an arm. Doctors behind a glass partition used the MRI images to ensure ultrasound waves from the helmet were correctly aimed at a target in Hilton’s brain a couple of millimeters in size.

Then, more than 1,000 probes pulsed ultrasound waves to this area, known as the brain’s reward center. After the treatment Hilton, 39 years old, tried to mentally connect with the pictures of a drug he had used for more than two decades. Instead of causing him to sweat and shake with cravings as he had minutes earlier, the pictures felt meaningless.

Inside the MRI machine, he pressed a button on a joystick to let the doctors know his cravings had dropped to near zero. “It just wasn’t there, the feeling," he said later in a hospital room. In Appalachia, in the heart of one of the earliest and deadliest waves of the opioid crisis, doctors at West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute are conducting a radical experiment.

Using focused ultrasound waves, they are resetting cells inside the brain’s reward center, the nucleus accumbens. They hope the procedure can treat addictions ranging from drugs like opioids and methamphetamine to gambling and eating. While neuroscientists have long defined addiction as a brain disease, tools to fight the U.S.

drug crisis that is behind 100,000 overdose deaths a year have changed little in decades. Most treatment involves medications like methadone and buprenorphine to replace other opioids, or naltrexone to block the part of the brain that feels pleasure from alcohol or opioids. For