Yoga, an increasingly popular discipline among Westerners, is frequently used to improve painful conditions. We investigated possible neuroanatomical underpinnings of the beneficial effects of yoga using sensory testing and magnetic resonance imaging techniques. North American yogis tolerated pain more than twice as long as individually matched controls and had more gray matter (GM) in multiple...

The insular cortex has consistently been associated with various aspects of emotion regulation and social interaction, including anger processing and overt aggression. Aggression research distinguishes proactive or instrumental aggression from retaliation, i.e. aggression in response to provocation. Here, we investigated the specific role of the insular cortex during retaliation, employing a co...

BACKGROUND Neuroimaging studies have proved that hippocampus relate to the deficient of memory in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many studies in healthy subjects also shown that insular cortex (IC) be involved in the declarative memory. This study was designed to investigate whether insular cortex is involved in declarative memory deficits in patients with PTSD. METHODS ...

Surgical treatment of deep-seated insular lesions causing refractory epilepsy is thought to be difficult due to the complicated accessibility and close proximity of eloquent areas. Here we report our experience with insular lesionectomies. Twenty-four patients (range 1-62 years, mean 27) who underwent epilepsy-surgery for a lesion involving the insular region, were identified from the epilepsy ...

We demonstrate that the NMDA receptor is involved in taste learning in the insular cortex of the behaving rat and describe two facets of this involvement. Blockage of the NMDA receptor in the insular cortex by the reversible antagonist APV during training in a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) paradigm impaired CTA memory, whereas blockage of the NMDA receptor in an adjacent cortex or before a r...

Extracellular neuronal responses were recorded from the posterior insular cortex following electrical and chemical stimulation of the thalamic reticular nucleus (Rt) regions. In the present study, most neurons (29/32) were first characterized for their responses to electrical stimulation of the superior laryngeal (SL) nerve or glossopharyngeal (IXth) nerve. In the first experiment, 15 neurons i...

introduction: malignant astrocytic gliomas are the most common and lethal brain malignancies due to their refractory to the current therapies. nowadays, molecular targeted therapy has attracted great attention in treatment of glioma. connexin 43 (cx43) and micro ribonucleic acid- 21(mir-21) are among molecules that are involved in glioma development and progression. these molecules showed poten...

Subjective sensory experiences are constructed by the integration of afferent sensory information with information about the uniquely personal internal cognitive state. The insular cortex is anatomically positioned to serve as one potential interface between afferent processing mechanisms and more cognitively oriented modulatory systems. However, the role of the insular cortex in such modulator...