01-26-2007, 05:35 PM
I read an article today about how scientists have discovered patients with strokes that effected the insula experienced relief from addictions. It said this is the part of the brain that connects physical experiences with emotional reactions so when it is damaged there is no more craving for something that brings a physical response.
I googled 'autism' and 'insula' and found this article on empathy and how it could possibly be taught by first training the brain with the basics of imitating emotions.
I don't know what I think, I'm still reading more on it and I want to process it all - but it is very interesting and thought I would share it in case anyone else has read anything on the Insula and it's connection with autism.
I googled 'autism' and 'insula' and found this article on empathy and how it could possibly be taught by first training the brain with the basics of imitating emotions.
I don't know what I think, I'm still reading more on it and I want to process it all - but it is very interesting and thought I would share it in case anyone else has read anything on the Insula and it's connection with autism.
Quote:
Empathy Is Physical
Preliminary observations of stroke patients with problems relating emotionally to others suggest that in order to feel empathy, people must be able to imitate the actions of others. In other words, to understand what others are feeling, you must put yourself physically in their shoes.
Stroke can damage any area of the brain, but the patients in question all have lesions to one particular brain structure - the insula, which lies between the frontal and temporal lobes on both sides of the brain.
On tests of their ability to gauge the emotions being experienced by people from their facial expressions in photographs, these patients perform very poorly compared to healthy controls.
The study, which is being carried out by neurologist Gian Luigi Lenzi and his colleagues at La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, is preliminary because damage to the insula in the brain's left hemisphere can also extend to language areas, affecting the patient's ability to communicate and hence potentially masking any separate, emotional impairment.
But if the insula does turn out to be the key to their emotional deficit, it would fit very well with data that Lenzi and his collaborators at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the neural correlates of empathy.
They scanned people's brains using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging while they either observed or imitated images of facial expressions of emotion. In both tasks, they found activation of the limbic system, which is key to the processing of emotion.
But in the imitation task, they also found activation of the brain's mirror or imitation circuit, which is stimulated both by the observation and execution of an action, and of the insula. The limbic system was also significantly more active during this task.
According to one of the UCLA researchers, Marco Iacoboni, the findings suggest that empathy, or the ability to feel the emotions of others, is correlated with the degree to which one mimics their behavior.
The findings contradict the longheld view that an intellectual, computer-like brain generates empathy within itself, suggesting instead that "a brain needs a body to understand other brains," he says.
And they also support behavioral studies relating to the phenomenon of emotional contagion, or the chameleon effect, in which people unthinkingly adopt the postures and mannerisms of those around them.
"People who tend to subconsciously and automatically imitate the postures and mannerisms of other individuals also tend to be concerned about the feelings of other people," said Iacoboni.
He thinks that the insula could play a pivotal role in this imitation-empathy mechanism, relaying information from the mirror circuit to the limbic system. In terms of its location in the brain and its connectivity, he thinks it is ideally placed to do so.
Although empathy is a complex phenomenon, he believes that a kind of "emotional resonance" might be a first step towards it, that is achieved through imitation and the activity of the insula.
By teaching autistic children to imitate the expressions of others, he speculates that it might be possible to encourage them to develop the emotional understanding of others, which they lack -this will be the goal of his next research project.
But Jonathan Cole, a clinical neurophysiologist at Poole Hospital in Dorset, UK, is dubious. He has studied patients with Möbius syndrome, who congenitally lack facial expression. Although other studies have produced conflicting results, he says that his work suggests that the ability of such patients to recognize emotional facial expressions in others is "not that bad."
Andrew Meltzoff, a developmental psychologist at the University of Washington's Center for Mind, Brain and Learning in Seattle, says the UCLA group's work is "admirable", but that it is important to distinguish between emotional contagion and true empathy, which is different in that it involves the capacity to hold both your own emotional state and another's simultaneously - rather than to just "catch" their emotion and feel it as your own.
He believes, on the basis of his research in infants, that emotional contagion precedes empathy in developmental terms. And that preceding both of these, in the very youngest newborn babies, is the ability to imitate another's actions and expressions.
"Neuroscience has not fully cracked the brain basis of the mature adult feelings of empathy, but we are getting close," said Meltzoff.
Image caption - 3D image of the brain seen from below. Three solid objects correspond to the posterior part of inferior frontal cortex, a mirror area important for imitation (green), the anterior insula (blue), and the amygdala, one of the emotional centers of the brain (yellow). Kindly provided by Marco Iacoboni, UCLA.
Preliminary observations of stroke patients with problems relating emotionally to others suggest that in order to feel empathy, people must be able to imitate the actions of others. In other words, to understand what others are feeling, you must put yourself physically in their shoes.
Stroke can damage any area of the brain, but the patients in question all have lesions to one particular brain structure - the insula, which lies between the frontal and temporal lobes on both sides of the brain.
On tests of their ability to gauge the emotions being experienced by people from their facial expressions in photographs, these patients perform very poorly compared to healthy controls.
The study, which is being carried out by neurologist Gian Luigi Lenzi and his colleagues at La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, is preliminary because damage to the insula in the brain's left hemisphere can also extend to language areas, affecting the patient's ability to communicate and hence potentially masking any separate, emotional impairment.
But if the insula does turn out to be the key to their emotional deficit, it would fit very well with data that Lenzi and his collaborators at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the neural correlates of empathy.
They scanned people's brains using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging while they either observed or imitated images of facial expressions of emotion. In both tasks, they found activation of the limbic system, which is key to the processing of emotion.
But in the imitation task, they also found activation of the brain's mirror or imitation circuit, which is stimulated both by the observation and execution of an action, and of the insula. The limbic system was also significantly more active during this task.
According to one of the UCLA researchers, Marco Iacoboni, the findings suggest that empathy, or the ability to feel the emotions of others, is correlated with the degree to which one mimics their behavior.
The findings contradict the longheld view that an intellectual, computer-like brain generates empathy within itself, suggesting instead that "a brain needs a body to understand other brains," he says.
And they also support behavioral studies relating to the phenomenon of emotional contagion, or the chameleon effect, in which people unthinkingly adopt the postures and mannerisms of those around them.
"People who tend to subconsciously and automatically imitate the postures and mannerisms of other individuals also tend to be concerned about the feelings of other people," said Iacoboni.
He thinks that the insula could play a pivotal role in this imitation-empathy mechanism, relaying information from the mirror circuit to the limbic system. In terms of its location in the brain and its connectivity, he thinks it is ideally placed to do so.
Although empathy is a complex phenomenon, he believes that a kind of "emotional resonance" might be a first step towards it, that is achieved through imitation and the activity of the insula.
By teaching autistic children to imitate the expressions of others, he speculates that it might be possible to encourage them to develop the emotional understanding of others, which they lack -this will be the goal of his next research project.
But Jonathan Cole, a clinical neurophysiologist at Poole Hospital in Dorset, UK, is dubious. He has studied patients with Möbius syndrome, who congenitally lack facial expression. Although other studies have produced conflicting results, he says that his work suggests that the ability of such patients to recognize emotional facial expressions in others is "not that bad."
Andrew Meltzoff, a developmental psychologist at the University of Washington's Center for Mind, Brain and Learning in Seattle, says the UCLA group's work is "admirable", but that it is important to distinguish between emotional contagion and true empathy, which is different in that it involves the capacity to hold both your own emotional state and another's simultaneously - rather than to just "catch" their emotion and feel it as your own.
He believes, on the basis of his research in infants, that emotional contagion precedes empathy in developmental terms. And that preceding both of these, in the very youngest newborn babies, is the ability to imitate another's actions and expressions.
"Neuroscience has not fully cracked the brain basis of the mature adult feelings of empathy, but we are getting close," said Meltzoff.
Image caption - 3D image of the brain seen from below. Three solid objects correspond to the posterior part of inferior frontal cortex, a mirror area important for imitation (green), the anterior insula (blue), and the amygdala, one of the emotional centers of the brain (yellow). Kindly provided by Marco Iacoboni, UCLA.
