Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Despite its clinical relevance, direct electrical stimulation (DES) of the human brain is surprisingly poorly understood. Karnath and colleagues discuss the complex local and remote effects of DES on physiology and behaviour, and conclude that DES cannot be regarded as the gold standard for inferring causality between neuronal activity and behaviour.
Current theories of addiction all argue for a unitary account of drug addiction. Badiani and colleagues challenge this view by highlighting behavioural, cognitive and neurobiological differences between opiate addiction and psychostimulant addiction. They argue that these differences have important implications for addiction treatment, addiction theories and future research.
Both theoretical and experimental approaches have demonstrated that noise can improve information processing, but there is substantial scope for new biologically appropriate computational hypotheses and noise sources to be investigated. McDonnell and Ward propose a unifying framework for reconciling theory with experiment.
The immediate subjective effects of cocaine are central to its rewarding properties and addictive qualities; however, the mechanisms by which the drug causes these rapid effects were unclear. Wise and Kayatkin describe recent findings that show that cocaine-predictive cues can activate the dopaminergic reward system in less time than it takes for cocaine to reach and block dopamine transporters in the brain.
Collieret al. revisit the idea that age-related and Parkinson's disease-related changes in midbrain dopamine neurons are unrelated. They review studies showing that markers of cellular risk factors accumulate with age in a pattern that mimics the pattern of degeneration seen in Parkinson's disease and propose that ageing induces a pre-parkinsonian state.
Although inter-individual differences in performance are often considered to be 'noise', recent data show that they are linked to structural differences. Kanai and Rees argue that studying these links can help in understanding how structural variation influences the functional capacity of brain regions.
A great many aspects of neuronal physiology and pathology involve or affect the brain barriers. Recent insights into the role of the blood–brain barrier during development, and advances in our understanding of how it affects neurological disorders, have led to closer links between the two topics.
