This process of associating drug use with a particular setting is a type of learning, and a lot of current addiction research explores the neurobiology of such learning. This work focuses not so much on those dopamine neurons, but on the neurons that project to them. Many of them come from cortical and hippocampal regions that carry information about setting. If you repeatedly use a drug in the same setting, those projections onto those dopamine neurons are repeatedly activated and eventually become potentiated, strengthened, in the same ways as the hippocampal synapses
