Orbitofrontal activation restores insight lost after cocaine use

Addiction is characterized by a lack of insight into the likely outcomes of one’s behavior. Insight or the ability to imagine outcomes is evident when outcomes have not been directly experienced. Using this concept, work in both rats and humans has recently identified neural correlates of insight in the medial and orbital prefrontal cortices. Here we show that these correlates are selectively abolished in rats by cocaine self-administration. Their abolition was associated with behavioral deficits and reduced synaptic efficacy in orbitofrontal cortex, reversal of which by optogenetic activation restored normal behavior. These results provide a link between cocaine use and problems with insight. Deficits in these functions are likely to be particularly important for problems such as drug relapse, in which behavior fails to account for likely adverse outcomes. As such, these data provide a neural target for therapeutic approaches to address these defining long-term effects of drug use.