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“This tiny bit of the brain could offer clues about addiction. It’s responsible for getting you to stop doing things”, reads the headline in the most viewed piece on the phenomenon of addiction on Google News in December 2017 (Wetsman, 2017). The article goes on to explain that new research “points to a small area of the brain, called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC), as the region responsible for taking in contextual information (like the spider) and using it to update the original plan”. The discovery of this area for contextual decision-making is presented as a clue to solving addiction problems. An audit of hundreds of media items by my colleague confirms that this is a very typical way of media reporting on addiction in today’s world. Sequences of information – some correlations of intent and areas in the brain – are made to represent revolutionary knowledge that can solve the problem and mystery of addiction. For an ordinary reader it is impossible to know how well grounded the excitement over a finding such as the one of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex really is. Professor Emeritus of pharmacology Harold Kalant is among those who have expressed great concern over the promises made by brain-based understandings of addiction. He has long remained firmly sceptical towards the use value of findings by addiction brain science. For example, he points out that most of the research concerning the brain changes presumed to underlie addiction has not even been able to prove convincingly the presence of addiction in its experimental subjects (Kalant, 2015, p. 54). According to Kalant, it is impossible to explain and understand addiction by pursuing “the analytical study of drug interactions with the nervous system at ever-finer levels of molecular structure and function” (2010, p. 787). The addicted brain has raised a legion of other questions. These have concerned basic reliability and validity issues, such as the nature of brain images as evidence, or, the reductionist foci on one motivational impulse, such as craving or cue dependency. The critique that has viewed the praxis of the addiction neuroscience

The epistemic project of the addicted brain