Brain Imaging Shows Overlap Between Emotional Pain And Physical Pain
Heart-ache can be a literal thing, as well as a metaphor for all those weepy, jilted-lover torch songs.
Consensus thinking in the peer-review literature is that the parts of one’s brain responsible for physical pain, the dorsal anterior cingulate and anterior insula, also underlie emotional pain.
Researchers at Columbia University in New York recruited 40 people who’d recently ended a romantic relationship, put them in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, and recorded their reactions to physical and then emotional pain.
Physical pain was created by heating the person’s left forearm, compared to having the arm merely warmed. Emotional pain was created by looking at pictures of the former partner and remembering the breakup, compared to when looking at a photo of a friend.
The fMRI scans showed physical and emotional pain overlapped in the dorsal anterior cingulate and anterior insula, with overlapping increases in thalamus and right parietal opercular/insular cortex in the right side of the brain (opposite to the left arm).
The theory is that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
An international team of researchers has developed a rather reliable test that predicts the future improvement of reading abilities in kids with dyslexia. The method uses functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) to scan the brain, and data crunching software to interpret the data. The researchers hope that the finding will help parents and therapists uniquely identify which learning tools are best for each child.
