In smoking-cessation programmes, cognitive therapy is more successful if it is tailored to individuals than if it is applied generically. The difference may lie in the recruitment of brain areas activated by thinking about oneself, scientists have found.

Hannah Faye Chua and her colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor presented would-be quitters with messages relevant to their lives and the obstacles they perceived to changing their smoking behaviour, while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Activation of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, an area that is activated when people think about themselves, was correlated with how likely participants were to have stopped smoking four months after the scanning. This correlation was not seen when the patients were given non-tailored messages about smoking during scanning.

Nature Neurosci. doi:10.1038/nn/2761 (2011)