After providing all the funding for The Brain from Top to Bottom for over 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction informed us that because of budget cuts, they were going to be forced to stop sponsoring us as of March 31st, 2013.

We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work. But we have not managed to find the funding we need. We must therefore ask our readers for donations so that we can continue updating and adding new content to The Brain from Top to Bottom web site and blog.

Please, rest assured that we are doing our utmost to continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no adverstising.

Whether your support is moral, financial, or both, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet, and Al Daigen





Tuesday, 6 August 2013
“Centres” of Cognitive Functions in the Brain: A Misleading Concept

The media nowadays often publish reports that scientists using brain-imaging technology have just discovered the brain’s “centre” for anger, jealousy, generosity, or some other specific emotion or cognitive function. But the idea of such a centre is, at best, an outrageous oversimplification, and at worst, completely misleading.

That is the argument made by Dr. William A. Cunningham in the February 2012 issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. His article deconstructs a very limited view of a part of the brain called the amygdala,which the popular press often describes as the brain’s “fear centre”.

There is no question that when somebody is afraid of something, their amygdala becomes highly active. But as Dr. Cunningham notes, numerous brain-imaging experiments have shown that this is far from the only situation in which the amygdala “lights up”. By analyzing numerous studies of the amygdala, Cunningham has found that the actual role of this brain structure is far more subtle. In reality, it seems to become active in conjunction with any “event that may be of immediate concern to a person”. A situation that arouses fear, such as finding yourself face-to-face with a bear, is certainly an event of immediate concern. But so is seeing a picture of food, for a person who is hungry, or seeing a picture of other people in distress, for a person who is highly empathetic. And in fact studies show that the amygdala also becomes very active in precisely such situations.

One reason that the amygdala can become active in such very different situations is that it never really acts alone. The brain comprises a vast network of richly interconnected structures, and for someone to experience the slightest emotion or perform the smallest cognitive task, it is never just one area of the brain that must be activated, but rather several. The number of areas seen to be activated may be two, five, 10, 12, or more, depending on the task or emotion involved, the accuracy of the instruments used to detect their activation, and even the methodology used for this purpose (see the third and fourth links below). A particular brain structure such as the amygdala can thus be part of various functional networks, the activation of any one of which, distributed throughout the brain, may be associated with a particular task or emotion.

Instead of trying to simplistically label a brain “centre” that is supposedly responsible for such a task or emotion, we would do better to consider the network involved, as a whole. Perhaps one day, scientists will in fact identify a specific function for a particular brain structure. But that function may not necessarily be describable in catchy terms for the mass media. You have to admit that if you’re trying to sell newspapers, calling the amygdala “a structure that becomes active in response to an event that is of immediate concern to a person” is far less sexy than calling it “the brain’s fear centre”.

i_lien Why Brain Imaging Studies Can Be Misleading
i_lien THE AMYGDALA AND FEAR ARE NOT THE SAME THING
i_lien New Approach Increases the Usefulness of Brain Scans
a_exp Decoding subject-driven cognitive states with whole-brain connectivity patterns

Emotions and the Brain | 1 comment

One comment at; ““Centres” of Cognitive Functions in the Brain: A Misleading Concept”

  1. Brenda says:
    January 31, 2020 at 12:20 pm

    Hello, Does the update posted on Sept 2019 negate the findings of the UPstairs/Downstairs Mind Study/lecture findings?

    To wit:
    So, the summary at this point is that when you think you have decided to take an action, your brain has already started working on it a about third of a second, or even longer, before that. But, our awareness clicks fast enough for us to alter or veto the activity, like having a ‘free won’t’ editor. [Sept. 2019: More recent work now questions these conclusions. The question of free will is far from solved. More recent experiments, have suggested that the brain signals noted in Libet’s original experiment ~500 msec before a movement was made may not be the actual neural initiator of the movement. An artificial intelligence classifier comparing control brain noise in subjects not instructed to move shows divergence from noise in those instructed to move about 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making the decision to move in Libet’s experiment.]