Word: insula
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...fail to understand that pay a price. Lindstrom admits to being mystified by TV ads that give viewers close-up food-porn shots of meat on a grill but accompany that with generic jangly guitar music. One of his earlier brain studies showed that numerous regions, including the insula and orbital frontal cortex, jump into action when such discordance occurs, trying to make sense...
...brains become more active when they face a potential social interaction. Specifically, when an older girl anticipates meeting someone new - someone she believes will be interested in her - her nucleus accumbens (which is associated with reward and motivation), hypothalamus (associated with hormone secretion), hippocampus (associated with social learning) and insula (associated with subjective feelings) all become more active. By contrast, boys in the same situation show no such increase in activity in these areas. In fact, the activity in their insula actually declines. (Read "The Truth About Teen Girls...
...Encountering warmth or cold lights up the insula - a walnut-sized section of the brain - says John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale, who co-authored the paper with Lawrence E. Williams of the University of Colorado who received his Ph.D. from Yale earlier this year. And the insula is the same part of the brain engaged when we evaluate who we can trust in economic transactions, Bargh says...
...also found that spousal hand-holding had an effect in an entirely different part of the brain: the right anterior insula, which responds to the threat of pain by calling your attention to the part of your body that's in danger, increasing the amount of discomfort you ultimately feel. In Coan's study, the right anterior insula of happily married women stayed relatively quiet. "This suggests," he says, "that your spouse may function as an analgesic...
Harris guesses that if the anterior insula collaborates in prompting distaste for such disparate things as bad math, waterboarding and sour milk, it may also act when a religious believer recoils at the statement "God is dead." His next trial will test religious belief and disbelief. Can he remain unbiased? He points out that it's impossible to prove or disprove God's existence just by studying what humans think is true or false. Faith, however, is more vulnerable. He admits that those who regard faith as a communion with the divine, at least partly independent of body chemistry...