Can Neural Stimulation Zap Addiction?

ON A RAINY THURSDAY afternoon earlier this year, a neuroscientist named Vaughn Steele placed a figure-eight-shaped wand over a man’s scalp and began jolting him with powerful magnetic pulses. “We’ll start low and ramp up,” said Steele, an addiction researcher at Yale School of Medicine. The patient’s left eyebrow twitched with each zap as he stared at images of pill bottles, syringes, and other drug paraphernalia.

The patient, whom we’ll call Peter B. to protect his privacy, first tried heroin at a New Year’s party in the mid-1990s. He quickly moved from snorting to injecting the drug, and within a year, he was a daily user. Despite four overdoses, five residential detox programs, and a couple of stints in jail, he’s still struggling with addiction nearly three decades later.

Now in his mid-50s and in treatment with methadone, Peter continues to inject a synthetic opioid drug called fentanyl several times per week—“just to prevent getting sick,” he said. Without the drugs, he gets achy. Hot flashes, sweats, and shivers overtake him. “It’s just miserable,” he said.

Peter, a former construction worker from East Hartford, Conn., wishes things were different. “But I’ll be honest with you,” he said, “it’s a strong addiction.” And with his neural circuitry now reliant on drugs, getting sober seems like a near impossibility—unless Steele can rewire his brain with electromagnetism.

Continue reading the August 2023 cover story from IEEE Spectrum.