Conjoint activity of anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortex: awareness and response

Abstract

There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the literature and reinforce the case that these brain regions are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events. This model seeks to integrate higher-order cortical functions with sensory representation and autonomic control: it is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness. Correspondingly, autonomic nervous system reactivity is particularly important amongst the responses that accompany conscious experiences. Potential clinical implications are also discussed.

Altered Insula Connectivity under MDMA

“…Our results revealed decreased right insular connectivity with the right SFG and anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC). While decreased connectivity with the right SFG was also associated with greater levels of trait anxiety, decreased connectivity with the aMCC, a region implicated in body awareness (Medford and Critchley, 2010;Vandenbergh et al, 2005), was uniquely related to awareness of unusual bodily sensations. As interoceptive awareness has been found to mediate the relationship between trait anxiety and the intensity of unpleasant feelings (Pollatos et al, 2007), our results raise the possibility that MDMA might attenuate unpleasant feelings-and conversely produce its characteristic positive feelings (Liechti and Vollenweider, 2000)-by decreasing the integrity of a neural network important for encoding trait anxiety and supporting interoceptive awareness.…”

The Neural Basis of Self-Touch in a Pain-Free Situation

“…It has been suggested that autonomic control and efference copy signals [47] originate in the rACC, which can be interpreted as the "visceromotor cortex" given its function in the autonomic modulation of bodily arousal to meet behavioral demands [48][49][50][51]. The neural basis of interoceptive prediction signals is thought to be an output from the VMPFC, which has robust connections with limbic regions, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, midbrain, brainstem (including the RVM), and spinal cord areas, which are involved in regulation of the internal bodily state (physiological state) [52,53].…”

Right-hemispheric cortical contributions to language ability in healthy adults

“…Word fluency is typically characterized in the brain by activation of Broca's area (Heim, Eickhoff, & Amunts, 2009), often accompanied by activation in adjacent prefrontal regions and also activation in the temporal and parietal cortices (Friedman et al, 1998;Fu et al, 2002;Gauthier, Duyme, Zanca, & Capron, 2009). Further, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insular cortex (AIC) are frequently engaged across a wide distribution of cognitive tasks, including language (Fu et al, 2002;Medford and Critchley, 2010). Performance differences on language production or perception tasks may be attributed to in-or decreased activation of these areas.…”