Increasing DA tone with appropriate pharmacological tools, is only one of the possible strategies. Endogenous activity of DA-containing neurons can be augmented with non-pharmacological tools such as TMS (Strafella et al., 2001) thereby providing, in principle, an adjunct to the “therapeutic arsenal” against addiction, endowed with lesser systemic side-effects and limited contraindications. However, while the rationale is “neurochemical” for pharmacological agents (neurotransmitter receptors, brain area etc.,), it must be anatomically based for TMS. Being that DA-containing neurons are located deeply in the brainstem (thereby making the neurons inaccessible to direct TMS stimuli) it becomes unavoidable to reach them indirectly through neurons located elsewhere in the brain. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPfcx) by projecting monosynaptically to the rat (Carr and Sesack, 2000) and primate (Frankle et al., 2006) VTA may serve this function. These studies show a projection from the PFC to midbrain DA neurons, terminating both within the SN proper as well as in the VTA. They arise from a broad region of the PFC, including the DLPfcx, cingulate, and orbital cortices. Indeed, these pyramidal neurons (Figure 1) could be
