The rolandic mu rhythm consists of two main frequency components: one around 10 Hz and the other around 20 Hz. Reactivity of the mu rhythm, especially its motor cortex 20-Hz component, provides an ...illuminating window to the involvement of the human sensorimotor system in the loop that connects action and perception with the environment.
People are embedded in social interaction that shapes their brains throughout lifetime. Instead of emerging from lower-level cognitive functions, social interaction could be the default mode via ...which humans communicate with their environment. Should this hypothesis be true, it would have profound implications on how we think about brain functions and how we dissect and simulate them. We suggest that the research on the brain basis of social cognition and interaction should move from passive spectator science to studies including engaged participants and simultaneous recordings from the brains of the interacting persons.
Social interaction is central to human behavior and brain function. Hari et al. outline why brain imaging studies of social cognition should incorporate subjects’ active participation and discuss the promises and challenges involved in simultaneous brain imaging of interacting subjects.
Bodily maps of emotions Nummenmaa, Lauri; Glerean, Enrico; Hari, Riitta ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2014, Letnik:
111, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different ...emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.
We discuss the importance of timing in brain function: how temporal dynamics of the world has left its traces in the brain during evolution and how we can monitor the dynamics of the human brain with ...non-invasive measurements. Accurate timing is important for the interplay of neurons, neuronal circuitries, brain areas and human individuals. In the human brain, multiple temporal integration windows are hierarchically organized, with temporal scales ranging from microseconds to tens and hundreds of milliseconds for perceptual, motor and cognitive functions, and up to minutes, hours and even months for hormonal and mood changes. Accurate timing is impaired in several brain diseases. From the current repertoire of non-invasive brain imaging methods, only magnetoencephalography (MEG) and scalp electroencephalography (EEG) provide millisecond time-resolution; our focus in this paper is on MEG. Since the introduction of high-density whole-scalp MEG/EEG coverage in the 1990s, the instrumentation has not changed drastically; yet, novel data analyses are advancing the field rapidly by shifting the focus from the mere pinpointing of activity hotspots to seeking stimulus- or task-specific information and to characterizing functional networks. During the next decades, we can expect increased spatial resolution and accuracy of the time-resolved brain imaging and better understanding of brain function, especially its temporal constraints, with the development of novel instrumentation and finer-grained, physiologically inspired generative models of local and network activity. Merging both spatial and temporal information with increasing accuracy and carrying out recordings in naturalistic conditions, including social interaction, will bring much new information about human brain function.
Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
Modern neuroimaging provides a common platform for neuroscience and related disciplines to explore ...the human brain, mind, and behavior. We base our review on the social shaping of the human mind and discuss various aspects of brain function related to social interaction. Despite private mental contents, people can share their understanding of the world using, beyond verbal communication, nonverbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions, and postures. The understanding of nonverbal messages is supported by the brain's mirroring systems that are shaped by individual experience. Within the organism-environment system, tight links exist between action and perception, both within an individual and between several individuals. Therefore, any comprehensive brain imaging study of the neuronal basis of social cognition requires appreciation of the situated and embodied nature of human cognition, motivating simultaneous monitoring of brain and bodily functions within a socially relevant environment. Because single-person studies alone cannot unravel the dynamic aspects of interpersonal interactions, it seems both necessary and beneficial to move towards "two-person neuroscience"; technological shortcomings and a limited conceptual framework have so far hampered such a leap. We conclude by discussing some major disorders of social interaction.
Maps of subjective feelings Nummenmaa, Lauri; Hari, Riitta; Hietanen, Jari K. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
09/2018, Letnik:
115, Številka:
37
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life. We defined the organization and determinants of a feeling space involving 100 core feelings that ranged from cognitive and affective processes ...to somatic sensations and common illnesses. The feeling space was determined by a combination of basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis. A total of 1,026 participants took part in online surveys where we assessed (i) for each feeling, the intensity of four hypothesized basic dimensions (mental experience, bodily sensation, emotion, and controllability), (ii) subjectively experienced similarity of the 100 feelings, and (iii) topography of bodily sensations associated with each feeling. Neural similarity between a subset of the feeling states was derived from the NeuroSynth meta-analysis database based on the data from 9,821 brain-imaging studies. All feelings were emotionally valenced and the saliency of bodily sensations correlated with the saliency of mental experiences associated with each feeling. Nonlinear dimensionality reduction revealed five feeling clusters: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states and illnesses, and homeostatic states. Organization of the feeling space was best explained by basic dimensions of emotional valence, mental experiences, and bodily sensations. Subjectively felt similarity of feelingswas associated with basic feeling dimensions and the topography of the corresponding bodily sensations. These findings reveal a map of subjective feelings that are categorical, emotional, and embodied.
Nonhuman primates use social touch for maintenance and reinforcement of social structures, yet the role of social touch in human bonding in different reproductive, affiliative, and kinshipbased ...relationships remains unresolved. Here we reveal quantified, relationship-specific maps of bodily regions where social touch is allowed in a large cross-cultural dataset (N= 1,368 from Finland, France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom). Participants were shown front and back silhouettes of human bodies with a word denoting one member of their social network. They were asked to color, on separate trials, the bodily regions where each individual in their social network would be allowed to touch them. Across all tested cultures, the total bodily area where touching was allowed was linearly dependent (meanr² = 0.54) on the emotional bond with the toucher, but independent of when that person was last encountered. Close acquaintances and family members were touched for more reasons than less familiar individuals. The bodily area others are allowed to touch thus represented, in a parametric fashion, the strength of the relationship- specific emotional bond. We propose that the spatial patterns of human social touch reflect an important mechanism supporting the maintenance of social bonds.
Discrete Neural Signatures of Basic Emotions Saarimäki, Heini; Gotsopoulos, Athanasios; Jääskeläinen, Iiro P ...
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991),
06/2016, Letnik:
26, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Categorical models of emotions posit neurally and physiologically distinct human basic emotions. We tested this assumption by using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to classify brain activity ...patterns of 6 basic emotions (disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise) in 3 experiments. Emotions were induced with short movies or mental imagery during functional magnetic resonance imaging. MVPA accurately classified emotions induced by both methods, and the classification generalized from one induction condition to another and across individuals. Brain regions contributing most to the classification accuracy included medial and inferior lateral prefrontal cortices, frontal pole, precentral and postcentral gyri, precuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex. Thus, specific neural signatures across these regions hold representations of different emotional states in multimodal fashion, independently of how the emotions are induced. Similarity of subjective experiences between emotions was associated with similarity of neural patterns for the same emotions, suggesting a direct link between activity in these brain regions and the subjective emotional experience.
Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate understanding their intentions and actions. Here we show that networks of brain areas “tick together” in participants who are viewing similar emotional ...events in a movie. Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional MRI while they watched movies depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant emotions. After scanning, participants watched the movies again and continuously rated their experience of pleasantness–unpleasantness (i.e., valence) and of arousal–calmness. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to derive multisubject voxelwise similarity measures intersubject correlations (ISCs) of functional MRI data. Valence and arousal time series were used to predict the moment-to-moment ISCs computed using a 17-s moving average. During movie viewing, participants' brain activity was synchronized in lower- and higher-order sensory areas and in corticolimbic emotion circuits. Negative valence was associated with increased ISC in the emotion-processing network (thalamus, ventral striatum, insula) and in the default-mode network (precuneus, temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal sulcus). High arousal was associated with increased ISC in the somatosensory cortices and visual and dorsal attention networks comprising the visual cortex, bilateral intraparietal sulci, and frontal eye fields. Seed-voxel–based correlation analysis confirmed that these sets of regions constitute dissociable, functional networks. We propose that negative valence synchronizes individuals’ brain areas supporting emotional sensations and understanding of another’s actions, whereas high arousal directs individuals’ attention to similar features of the environment. By enhancing the synchrony of brain activity across individuals, emotions may promote social interaction and facilitate interpersonal understanding.
The whole human primary somatosensory (SI) cortex is activated by contralateral tactile stimuli, whereas its subarea 2 displays neuronal responses also to ipsilateral stimuli. Here we report on a ...transient deactivation of area 3b of the ipsilateral SI during long-lasting tactile stimulation. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data with a 3 T scanner from 10 healthy adult subjects while tactile pulses were delivered at 1, 4, or 10 Hz in 25 s blocks to three right-hand fingers. In the contralateral SI cortex, activation positive blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) response outlasted the stimulus blocks by 20 s, with an average duration of 45 s. In contrast, a transient deactivation (negative BOLD response) occurred in the ipsilateral rolandic cortex with an average duration of 18 s. Additional recordings on 10 subjects confirmed that the deactivation was not limited to the right SI but occurred in the SI cortex ipsilateral to the stimulated hand. Moreover, the primary motor cortex (MI) contained voxels that were phasically deactivated in response to both ipsilateral and contralateral touch. These data indicate that unilateral touch of fingers is associated, in addition to the well known activation of the contralateral SI cortex, with deactivation of the ipsilateral SI cortex and of the MI cortex of both hemispheres. The ipsilateral SI deactivation could result from transcallosal inhibition, whereas intracortical SI-MI connections could be responsible for the MI deactivation. The shorter time course of deactivation than activation would agree with stronger decay of inhibitory than EPSP at the applied stimulus repetition rates.
PDF
