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In response to the recent news about how a little damage to the brain caused people to instantly give up cigarettes, Ms. Sandra Blakeslee gives us a further report on this spotlighted part of the brain, the insula:
Maybe it is the wasteland between desire and disappointment.
(Source: Sandra Blakesless for The New York Times)
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In response to the recent news about how a little damage to the brain caused people to instantly give up cigarettes, Ms. Sandra Blakeslee gives us a further report on this spotlighted part of the brain, the insula:
They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.Maybe the insula is the seat of the soul?
... For example, the insula “lights up” in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone’s face, are shunned in a social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate.
...[T]he insula was “assigned to the brain’s netherworld,” said John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology. It was mistakenly defined as a primitive part of the brain involved only in functions like eating and sex. Ambitious scientists studied higher, more rational parts of the brain, he said.
The insula emerged from darkness a decade ago when Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist now at the University of Southern California, developed the so-called somatic marker hypothesis, the idea that rational thinking cannot be separated from feelings and emotions. The insula, he said, plays a starring role.
... It is in the frontal insula, Dr. Craig said, that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions. A bad taste or smell is sensed in the frontal insula as disgust. A sensual touch from a loved one is transformed into delight.
The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.
Maybe it is the wasteland between desire and disappointment.
(Source: Sandra Blakesless for The New York Times)
