One of the fascinating things, though, also, is that the insula is
involved in not only feeling our own feelings, but feeling the feelings of
others. In lecturing to my Undergrads,
the way I demonstrate this is by making a series of puking sounds in front of
them, and making it look as if I'm just going to retch right in front of a
classroom full of students - and getting a very disgusted look back from their
faces, telling them "I just controlled your insula. I have used my own internally generated
disgust and mimicking the behavior of having a vomiting session - to trigger your
own disgusted reaction to that." So, not
only do we process our own internal feelings, but we can process the feelings
of others when our amygdala is being activated.
R: Now... Amygdala, or insula?
D: I'm sorry, yeah. With the insula.
R: So is that connected to "Mirror
Neurons," then?
D: "Mirror Neurons" are found in
a number of different regions of the brain, I'm trying to remember if there are
-- it's related to the general idea of mirror neurons, in the sense that it [is
mirroring? -garbled-] behaviors. Another
study that I had done with most of the same people in this project of the
"Red-Brain, Blue-Brain" paper - we did another experiment where we gave
different people different amounts of money, and we made some people very rich
and some people very poor, randomly allocated, and we looked to see what was
going on in the brains of people. They
were given the opportunity to give to the poor or take from the rich. They could give to the rich if they wanted to
as well, but people didn't do that.
What people did (some people) was they would pay a dollar to take three
dollars away from the richest person in the experiment that they were playing
with, or they would pay a dollar to give three dollars to a poor person in the
experiment.
We then we looked to see what part of the brain was active in these
people that were making more egalitarian outcome[s], and we found that the
amount of insula activation was correlated with the amount of egalitarian
behavior that people were going to engage in.
We called this part "The Robin Hood Effect": how likely are you to give
to the poor and take from the rich; and this is related to the amount of
sensitivity you have in your insula to the relative wealth or poverty of the
other people that you're interacting with.
R: Fascinating.
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