Abstract: Drug addiction has produced serious impairment on human health and threatens the security and stability of the whole society. Therefore, how to prevent and cure drug addiction and to uncover the working mechanisms are always the hot spots of research at home and abroad. In recent years, the brain neural network of human and animal has been clarified in detail, especially underlying the rapid application of the optogenetics technology. Scientists have made some important progress in drug addiction related brain regions and circuits. The drug addiction, especially the psychological addiction, has been regarded as a brain disease, a pathological, solid memory, or mnemonic disease, which we call addiction memory. Therefore, it would be an efficient strategy for treatment of craving and relapse by which to disturb the addiction memory processes according to memory mechanism. Addiction memory is involved by many brain areas (such as the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the ventral tagmental area, the rostromedial tegmental nucleus, and the habenula), which are interconnected by circuits and play crucial roles in normal learning and memory. This paper mainly reviews the recent research progress in treatment of addiction memory and the underlying neural circuits.

Key words: drug addiction, learning and memory, neurocircuitry