No man is an island

The insula (islands) in the brain seem to pop up repeatedly in our talks.

On the latest from our friend Marco Iacoboni from ScienceBlog:

Using powerful fMRI equipment at the Semel Institute's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the research team scanned the brains of 10 registered Democrats and 10 registered Republicans as the subjects viewed the faces of 2004 presidential contenders George Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader. The study was conducted in the heat of the campaign that year.

Viewing an opposition candidate produced signal changes in cognitive control circuitry in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), as well as in emotional regions in the insula and anterior temporal poles. The ACC is important to attention control and self-monitoring, and together with the DLPFC forms a network that monitors response conflict and, when necessary, regulates emotion.

Kaplan JT, Freedman J, Iacoboni M. (in Press). Us versus them: Political attitudes and party affiliation influence neural response to faces of presidential candidates. Neuropsychologia.

The latest incidence before this one was at a Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) conference where the degenerated region was surprisingly the insula.