sciencetech-blog

comments

Although feelings are personal and subjective, the human brain turns them into a standard code, researchers have discovered.

They say the code represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people.

The say the code is like an 'emotionometer', and can deal with positive and negative feelings.

Researchers say brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language, whether we smell, taste or touch something

'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.

Their findings provide insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings.

'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,' Anderson explains.

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.

Researchers say human brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language - even though we all have different feelings

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.

'Despite how personal our feelings feel, the evidence suggests our brains use a standard code to speak the same emotional language,' Anderson concludes.