25 One of these mirror-touch synesthetes17 experienced touch upon seeing someone else being touched, but not when an object was touched. The feeling of touch was experienced on the same body part as that being touched on the other person. Functional MRI revealed a hyperactivation of the somatosensory cortices, the see more premotor cortex, and the anterior insula relative to controls during the observation of a
video of someone being touched. Increased activity in the primary somatosensory cortex Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (SI) encompassing earlier stages of somatosensory perception may possibly provoke this phenomenon by which the feelings of others invade an area that would normally be reserved for the self. Participants Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical with this form of synesthesia also report being more empathic.26 Shared circuits for pain and disgust The possible importance of shared circuits for understanding the emotions of others also became clear early on,27 with several studies demonstrating that perceiving (or imagining) someone else in pain as well as witnessing disgust on the face of someone provokes an increase of activity in several brain areas involved in the first-person experience of these emotions. In one experiment, the participants viewed people taking a sip from a glass and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical being either disgusted, pleased, or neutral. Disgust observation was accompanied by a specific increase of activity in the anterior insular cortex,28 an area shown to be strongly
activated by the experience of disgust in the same participants. Moreover, another experiment using a similar paradigm found that the experience and the observation of strong gustatory pleasure can also trigger activity in a similar Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical sector of the insula, suggesting that this region is not devoted only to the processing of negative emotions.29 Using Granger causality analysis, this vicarious activity in the insula appears to be triggered by activity in the inferior frontal gyrus,30 a region active both while viewing facial expressions Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and while performing similar expressions.31,32 This suggests
that the insula performs an emotional simulation of what it would feel like to experience the positive or negative emotions of others, and that this simulation can be triggered by inputs from the region performing a motor simulation of the observed facial expressions. Multiple experiments have also demonstrated the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula during pain observation. Increased activity is found in these regions when the participants Astemizole are shown body parts in various painful situations,33-39 as well as when observing a painful facial expression,40,41 or just upon knowing that a loved one is experiencing pain.42,43 Furthermore, in at least two experiments, the level of activity in these regions was correlated to the intensity of the pain perceived, in accordance with the hypothesis of a role of simulation in understanding the feelings of others.