  Drug-related cues hijack attention away from alternative reinforcers in drug
addiction, inducing craving and motivating drug-seeking. However, the neural
correlates underlying this biased processing, its expression in the real-world,
and its relationship to cue-induced craving are not fully established,
especially in opioid addiction. Here we tracked inter-brain synchronization in
the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc), a hub of motivational salience, while
heroin-addicted individuals and healthy control subjects watched the same
engaging heroin-related movie. Strikingly, the left NAc was synchronized during
drug scenes in the addicted individuals and non-drug scenes in controls,
predicting scene- and movie-induced heroin craving in the former. Our results
open a window into the neurobiology underlying shared drug-biased processing of
naturalistic stimuli and cue-induced craving in opiate addiction as they unfold
in the real world.
