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One rationale for “detoxifying” people with severe drinking problems outside their usual environments is that brain reward centers can be conditioned to drinking-associated stimuli, such as the sight of a bottle or the smell of alcohol. This clever series of animal experiments provides some evidence for why relapse is common when patients return home.
In operant conditioning chambers, rats learned to respond preferentially to one of two aural stimuli by entering a port where alcohol was delivered. The rats were then moved to another chamber with different walls, floor, and smells and underwent extinction of the conditioned response. After extinction, the rats were returned to the original chamber, where they again responded to the stimulus b…