Word: area
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...tamped the noise with a hard-shell top and what it calls tortional stiffness--this car is a rock. That's important when you're cruising on the highway at 120 m.p.h. (We tested the car in Europe.) On the winding back roads in the beautiful Argonne area of France, the ride was tight and sporty yet still luxe, at least in the front seats. The interior also features heat-deflecting leather so the seat won't scorch you when you leave the top down. The six-speed manual transmission is buttery, particularly on the downshift. In town...
...Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain's reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can dampen the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug's hold...
That led researchers to wonder about other biological differences in the way men and women become addicted and, significantly, respond to treatments. Alcohol dependence is one very promising area. For years, researchers had documented the way female alcoholics tend to progress more rapidly to alcoholism than men. This telescoping effect, they now know, has a lot to do with the way women metabolize alcohol. Females are endowed with less alcohol dehydrogenase--the first enzyme in the stomach lining that starts to break down the ethanol in liquor--and less total body water than men. Together with estrogen, these factors have...
...changes induced by addiction do not just involve one system," says Volkow. "There are some areas in which the changes persist even after two years." One area of delayed rebound involves learning. Somehow in methamphetamine abusers, the ability to learn some new things remained affected after 14 months of abstinence. "Does treatment push the brain back to normal," asks NIDA's Frascella, "or does it push it back in different ways...
That's exciting, but because the insula is so critical to other brain functions--perceiving danger, anticipating threats--damaging this area isn't something you would ever want to do intentionally. With so many of the brain's systems entangled with one another, it could prove impossible to adjust just one without throwing the others into imbalance...