New York : Know why partners derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching their favourite game? It is because they share similar “fine-grained patterns of activity” in the brain, reports IANS.
Although innermost feelings are personal, human brain turns them into a standard code that represents emotions across different senses, situations and even people, a promising study reveals. “It appears that the human brain generates a special code for pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, like a ‘neural valence meter’,” explained neuroscientist Adam Anderson from Cornell University.
The findings provide insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings and upend the long-held view that emotion is represented in the brain simply by activation in specialised regions for positive or negative feelings, he said, reports PTI.
For the study, researchers presented participants with a series of pictures and tastes during functional neuroimaging. They analysed participants’ ratings of their subjective experiences along with their brain activation patterns.
Researchers discovered that the brain contains an emotion code common across distinct experiences of pleasure (or displeasure). 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 concluded in a paper published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
