One line of our research on experience-driven sensory processes is to determine the sensory cortical and subcortical components of cue-triggered feelings of anxiety, drug-craving, drug-seeking and relapses in addiction and stress-related behaviors. The overarching hypothesis is that cues central to the initial experience of overwhelming stress and/or drug-taking are associative and induce robust physiological plasticity in sensory systems. Some of these plasticity events may be so robust since they are initiated at an epigenetic level of control on cued behavior. As such, changes in basic sensory processes may encode aberrant levels of associative salience to the sensory cues that surround highly emotional drug-taking experiences.