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The commonsense view of religious experience is that it is a preconceptual, immediate affective event. Work in philosophy and psychology, however, suggest that religious experience is an attributional cognitive phenomenon. Here the neural correlates of a religious experience are investigated using functional neuroimaging. During religious recitation, self-identified religious subjects activated a frontal-parietal circuit, composed of the dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal and medial parietal cortex. Prior studies indicate that these areas play a profound role in sustaining reflexive evaluation of thought. Thus, religious experience may be a cognitive process which, nonetheless, feels immediate.

To investigate medial frontal lobe mediation of human empathy, the authors analyzed the activation areas in statistical parametric maps of 80 studies reporting neural correlates of empathic processing. The meta-analysis revealed 6 spatially distinct activation clusters in the medial part of the frontal lobe dorsal to the intercommissural plane. The most dorsal cluster coincided with the left supplementary motor area (SMA). Rostrally adjacent was a cluster that overlapped with the right pre-SMA. In addition, there were 3 left-hemispheric and 1 right-hemispheric clusters located at the border between the superior frontal and anterior cingulate gyrus. A broad spectrum of cognitive functions were associated with these clusters, including attention to one's own action, which was related to activations in the SMA, and valuation of other people's behavior and ethical categories, which was related to activations in the most rostroventral cluster. These data complement the consistent observation that lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex interfere with a patient's perception of own bodily state, emotional judgments, and spontaneous behavior. The results of the current meta-analysis suggest the medial prefrontal cortex mediates human empathy by virtue of a number of distinctive processing nodes. In this way, the authors' findings suggest differentiated aspects of self-control of behavior.

Percutaneous vertebroplasty immediately relieves the pain of vertebral body fractures, improves patients' mobility, and lowers their consumption of analgesics. There can be further clinical improvement up to 6 months after the procedure, particularly in patients with fractures due to osteoporosis. As osteoporosis is the most common cause of vertebral body fractures, this patient group is important not just clinically, but economically as well.

The human parietal cortex is a highly differentiated structure consisting of cytoarchitectonically defined subareas that are specifically connected with other cortical and subcortical areas. Based on evidence from neurophysiological studies in subhuman primates these subareas are supposed to be functionally highly specialized. Here, we reviewed 51 different neuroimaging studies on healthy subjects with activation of the parietal lobe in statistical parametric maps. Running a cluster analysis on the stereotactic coordinates of the centers of gravity of the activation areas and plotting them into Talairach space showed a high consistency of the mean activation foci for similar paradigms across different laboratories and functional imaging modalities. Our meta-analysis exposed seven distinct pairs of quite symmetrically distributed subareas of the parietal cortex of each hemisphere as well as three unpaired regions that are critically involved in the generation of limb and eye movements in egocentric and allocentric coordinates, but also in attention, memory and cognitive problem solving. These data highlights the modular organization of the human parietal lobe. By its locally interspersed distributed circuits it orchestrates specialized cognitive subfunctions interfacing perception and action. Our meta-analysis provides a new framework for understanding information processing in the human parietal cortex.