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...

The columnar organization is most apparent in the whisker barrel cortex but seems less apparent in the gustatory insular cortex. We addressed here whether there are any differences between the two cortices in columnar information processing by comparing the spatiotemporal patterns of excitation spread in the two cortices using voltage-sensitive dye imaging. In contrast to the well known excitat...

PURPOSE Different lines of evidence have suggested an involvement of the insular cortex in speech production. These have included results from lesion studies, functional imaging techniques, and electrical stimulation of the human insular cortex during invasive evaluation of epileptic patients. METHODS We evaluated 25 patients who had drug refractory focal epilepsy with at least one electrode ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Insular cortex ischemia is proposed to mediate a sympathetic stimulus that leads to acute hyperglycemia after stroke. METHODS We retrospectively analyzed insular perfusion on perfusion CT (median 180 minutes after onset) in 35 patients. RESULTS We found no association of hypoperfusion (relative cerebral blood flow <0.51) with early (<6 hours) or delayed (<72 hours) hy...

BACKGROUND The insular cortex is not routinely removed in modified functional hemispherectomy due to the risk of injury to the main arteries and to deep structures. Our study evaluates the safety and usefulness of applying intraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) on the insular during the hemispherectomy. METHODS We included all patients who underwent insular ECoG during a modified function...

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...

The insular cortex is implicated in general attention and in taste perception. The effect of selective attention to taste on insular responses may therefore reflect a general effect of attention or it may be (taste) modality specific. To distinguish between these 2 possibilities, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate brain response to tastes and odors while subjects passivel...

The anterior portion of rodent agranular insular cortex consists of a ventral periallocortical region (AIv) and a dorsal proisocortical region (AId). Each of these two cortical areas has distinct efferent connections, but in certain brain areas their projection fields are partially or wholly overlapping. Bilateral projections to layers I, III and VI of medial frontal cortex originate in the dor...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the primary motor cortex (M1) is a promising treatment for chronic pain, but its mechanism action remains unclear. Competing dynamic causal models effective connectivity between M1 and medial lateral pain systems suggest direct input into insular, anterior cingulate cortex, parietal operculum. This supports hypothesis that analgesia produced from most likely...