Throwing light on how our brain processes emotions, researchers found that it uses a set of standard codes to specify a particular feeling.
Ever wondered how the brain distinguishes one emotion from another? Here's your answer. Researchers from Cornell's College of Human Ecology found that the brain uses a certain set of standard codes that represent emotions across different senses, situations and even people.
"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," said Cornell University neuroscientist Adam Anderson in a press statement.
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.
They found that for each experience, codes were sent to areas of the brain associated with vision and taste, as well as sensory-independent codes in the orbitofrontal cortices (OFC). This suggested that there are no specialized emotional centers that separately represent our internal subjective experience. The researchers also found that similar subjective feelings send out similar codes and result in a similar pattern of activity in the OFC. Furthermore, these OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences were partly shared across people.
"If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex," Anderson said. "It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a 'neural valence meter' in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling."
Emotional responses seem to be centralized within one area of the brain: the limbic system. This system is located underneath the cortex. There are a number of parts to the limbic system. The amygdala and hippocampus, both small structures within it, are believed to be the primary areas managing your emotions, according to health reports.
The hippocampus region, for its part, tackles memory. In fact, it's a necessary component for making new memories. It's not critical for short-term memory, or for the kind or memory needed to learn skills by rote, such as riding a bike, but it is the mechanism the brain uses to file away new memories.
Another important limbic area related to emotions is the thalamus. The thalamus is a kind of traffic cop of sensory input, routing visual, auditory and touch senses to the cortex.
Findings of the study were published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
