AP11210

=Study cracks how brain processes emotions =

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Their findings provide insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings – what Anderson calls the last frontier of neuroscience – and upend the long-held view that emotion is represented in the brain simply by activation in specialized regions for positive or negative feelings. For the study, the researchers presented participants with a series of pictures and tastes during functional neuroimaging, then analyzed participants’ ratings of their subjective experiences along with their brain activation patterns. We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling. Anderson’s team found that valence was represented as sensory-specific patterns or codes in areas of the brain associated with vision and taste, as well as sensory-independent codes in the orbitofrontal cortices (OFC), suggesting, the authors say, that representation of our internal subjective experience is not confined to specialized emotional centers, but may be central to perception of sensory experience.They also discovered that similar subjective feelings – whether evoked from the eye or tongue – resulted in a similar pattern of activity in the OFC, suggesting the brain contains an emotion code common across distinct experiences of pleasure (or displeasure), they say. Furthermore, these OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences were partly shared across people.=====

References:
 * 1) Junichi Chikazoe, Daniel H Lee, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Adam K Anderson.**Population coding of affect across stimuli, modalities and individuals**. //Nature Neuroscience//, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3749
 * 2) Cornell University. "Study cracks how brain processes emotions." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 July 2014. .
 * 3) materials  provided by **Cornell University** . The original article was written by Melissa Osgood. //Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. //

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