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By enabling a person to express and acquire an ongoing habitual behavior, infralimbic cortex can exacerbate addiction. The neurobiological evidences suggest that loss of such behavioral flexibility is witnessed in the case of addiction. Besides initiating cocaine-seeking behavior, infralimbic cortex enables the inhibition of drug-seeking behavior by extinction learning.

Cocaine is a notorious stimulant that produces a high, known as cocaine intoxication. The desire to experience this high is the primary reason why most people start using cocaine. Drug peddlers often mix cocaine powder with cornstarch, talcum powder, flour or amphetamines to maximize profits. According to the results of 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), about 1.9 million individuals aged 12 or older were the current users of cocaine. Of them, about 394,000 were the current users of crack cocaine. Similarly, about 896,000 individuals age 12 or older had a cocaine use disorder in the past year.

Compared to other drugs, cocaine can induce both short- and long-term psychological changes that affect the way the users think and experience emotions. This occurs as a result of cocaine's interaction with the brain and the nervous system. Although cocaine use generates euphoric effects as witnessed in the case of other drugs, this experience differs invariably from person to person.

Considering the level of repercussions of cocaine intoxication, it becomes more important to understand the ways to alleviate this problem. A research published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that the activity in the infralimbic cortex of lab rats inhibited cocaine-seeking behaviors. These findings have widened the scope of treating addictive behaviors in the future.

Diminishing cravings by muting neurons in infralimbic cortex

The infralimbic cortex is located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for inhibition of emotional responses and self-control. The researchers from the University of Iowa (UI) sought to find out more about the unique relationship between this subregion of the brain and cocaine-seeking behaviors. The team led by pressing à domicile Andrea Gutman, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of the UI, assessed the possibilities of manipulating the functions of the infralimbic cortex to regulate impulsive behaviors.

The study entailed two groups of rats as control and experimental that were administered cocaine using a lever. The access of the lever was available for two hours per day for two weeks. After two weeks, the rats in the control group were not provided cocaine. Over the course of another two weeks, the rats became accustomed to the fact that there was no cocaine reward and completely stopped pressing the lever at the end of this period. They had learned to restrain their cravings.

The experimental group of rats not only went through the same routine, but also the additional activity wherein the researchers deactivated the infralimbic cortex of the rats for 20 seconds for each time they pressed the lever. This was done by muting the infralimbic cortex with the gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA) agonist. As a result, they did not learn to restrain their cravings and continued to press the lever till the end of the two-week phase despite not receiving the cocaine reward.

The researchers found the following correlations:

"While our experiments involved cocaine, we think the results could hold true for the infralimbic cortex's role in conditioning withdrawal and relapse from other addictive substances, including opioids," said co-author Ryan LaLumiere, an assistant professor in UI's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. The findings suggest that medications designed to mute neurons in the infralimbic cortex at the time of the expected reward can hold the secrets of curbing addictive behaviors in the future.

Path to recovery

The repeated exposure to cocaine alters the brain's reward pathways that makes it dependent on the substance. Over time, stress circuits become more sensitive that leads to increased displeasure and negative mood when not on the drug, displaying the first symptoms of withdrawal and other health complications. Therefore, it is essential to learn the ways to identify the warning signs and share one's fears to an expert to avoid the worsening of his or her condition.

Paul Blanca (c.1958) is a Dutch art photographer who entered the artworld in the begining of the 1980s with his subversive shocking self-portraits. The self-taught Blanca came into touch with the artscene when he met Eva Veldhoen, the daughter of the well-known Dutch painter Aat Veldhoen (1934). The acquaintance with this artistic environment was a real eye-opener for Blanca and shortly after he started photographing, first in color with a small screen camera but very soon after shooting in B&W using a Hasselblad camera (6 X 6 cm).

In 1980 he met the acclaimed choreographer Hans van Manen (1932), who is a meritorious photographer himself and owned a photo studio. Besides their mutual interest in art photography, Van Manen also used Blanca in one of his dance choreographies called Pose in which Blanca performed as a kick-boxer, he was a practitioner of this full-contact sport from the age of 16, surrounded by ballerina's. Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) who was a close friend of Van Manen was very impressed by Blanca's self-portraits and later introduced him to New York's high society (like Keith Haring, Willem de Kooning, Japser Johns, Grace Jones...etc.) stating 'Paul Blanca is my only competitor'. The art collector Bill Katz says in Anthony Haden Guest's True Colors - The Real Life of the Art World on Blanca: "...he reaches a kind of poetry few artists have".

Most of Blanca's self-portraits deal with strong emotions and violent themes like fear, sadness, pain, agression and sexuality exploring his inner demons. Diametrically against this harsh work, there are the sensitive and gentle pictures like the one called Mother and Son (Mapplethorpe's favourite) depicting himself in a tender embrace with his mother, both fully naked, or the portrait holding his newborn son in the air called Father and Son. In 1986 Blanca worked on a book called Timing (edition of 1000) which featured the upcoming Dutch artists of the eighties and his photographs were accompanied by poems of Koos Dalstra (1950). For his touching series Par la Pluie des Femmes (1989) he asked his female models to think of their most traumatic experiences. In 1991 he produces the magnificent Sangre de Toro series (see the paragraph 'Blood of the Bull' below).

During this time Blanca also started as a research-journalist for the Amsterdam weekly, Nieuwe Revu and the newspaper Het Parool. He wrote about crack and again exploring his own boundaries he started to use it himself, resulting in an addiction. His article for Nieuwe Revu on weapons was the starting point of a downward spiral with him being a suspect in the assault on Rob Scholte in 1995 because of his "knowledge" of grenades. There was a long silence but in 2008 Blanca returned with a project called Mi Mattes photographing the gangmembers hanging around his studio.

Portraits of Purification

Over the years there seems to be an increasing will-power in Blanca's self-portraits. In 1982 he photographed himself With Eelsholding six living eels in his mouth (in his perception a disgusting animal), he looks into the world (at the viewer) with a resigned facial expression like he's thinking "that's how it really goes" with the scavengers fulfilling his wish to immortalization. In Blanca's Selfportrait, Back with Mickey Mouse, the large depiction on his back inflicted with a sharp knife (razor blade) by a befriended tattoo-artist, of Mickey Mouse with his thumbs up and a big smile, like he's saying: "Keep up the good work", is a sceptical statement because the mouse is crying. In his Selfportrait Bull (1982) Blanca becomes, with his painted body disguished as a bull and his agressive facial expression, a disturbed figure. With his erected penis in his left hand and his right hand in a clenched grip, he's looking for an exertion disarming the poetic image. The excessive nature of Blanca's self-portraits serve as a purification and therefore he has to subvert all boundaries and norms.

Bull's Blood

Blanca who had lived and worked in Spain for two years (in the early 90s), had, while there, become obsessed by bullfighting and kept up with all the ferias (local seasonal festivities) to take photographs. To challenge himself emotionally Blanca also participated in a bullfight, not with real bulls but with dangerous vacas(cows) of 850 pounds. It intrigued him that when the corrida (bullfight) was at an end, the bull's meat was served in restaurants but nothing was done with the blood- it is the fluid of life, after all. Blanca investigated whether blood could be used as silk-screen printing-ink. The treated blood was used for the Sangre de Toro port-folio, based on Blanca's photos. Pressing the ink through the screen only once produced no more than a light pink colour, and in the end 35 'pulls' were needed to achieve the darkest tone in the pictures, creating a visible relief. The series forms a high point on the periphery of Blanca's photographic work. For the affecionades(devotees) it is a must, for opponents of bullfighting it is also a monument of beauty.