anatomy of feeling

Professor Hugo Critchley MBChB DPhil MRCPsych, Chair of Psychiatry

In everyday experience, the physical state of one’s body shapes thinking and feeling; yet this dynamic influence on cognitive and emotional processes is typically underemphasised within neuroscientific research. Ultimately, adaptive success and subjective wellbeing depend on the coherent balance of intention and action, where a primary reference is homoeostatic bodily control.

One strategy for dissecting the mechanisms through which brain and body interact lies in the combination of functional brain imaging with simultaneous subject monitoring in both healthy individuals and, importantly, in selected patient groups. These studies have explored the central processes engendering phasic and tonic changes in bodily arousal via axes of the autonomic nervous system. They have begun to delineate the influence of feedback from viscera and skeletomusculature, through spinal and vagus nerve pathways, on the neural substrates supporting affective behaviour and subjective feelings. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence to show that the physical embodiment of cognition and emotion underpins social communication and empathy. Together these approaches illuminate fundamental questions about why we feel anxious or ill, how mood states are governed by conscious and implicit processes and how emotional stress may lead to psychological and physical morbidity, including the precipitation of cardiac arrhythmia.

Integrative methods from affective neuroscience are anticipated to enhance exponentially the biological understanding of psychiatric health and disorder and to have a broad impact across medical scientific disciplines.

Professor Critchley discussed how brain systems control emotion, venturing into the borderland between physiology and philosophy. He began his lecture with the example of the personality changes suffered by Phineas Gage, whose frontal lobes were damaged when a metal bar went through his head in 1848. Professor Critchley related these changes in behaviour to the functioning of systems within the brain controlling emotion and the arousal of the body. He illustrated the discipline of functional neuroanatomy, which attempts to localise events in the brain. Technical advances such as functional MRI can measure small changes in brain activity in space and time, to within a few millimeters and seconds. These approaches, when combined with patient studies, help understand healthy brain function and also indicate what goes wrong in pathological conditions, thereby guiding treatment.

Professor Critchley described a hierarchy of feeling states, starting with the most basic like hunger and cold, followed by fear and happiness and finally complex emotions like jealousy and regret. Throughout, he argued, emotional feelings arise from the interpretation of body states. He described how only about 10% of people were able to perceive accurately events in their body (shown when people judge whether series of ten musical notes were synchronized with their heartbeat) and found that brain activity in the right anterior insular cortex correlated with this ability. This activity also correlated with their anxiety states, confirming a link between emotional feelings and perception of bodily state.

He briefly discussed the field of neuroeconomics, examining how emotional processes affect decision making, and how the outcomes of gambling tasks can be used to evoke different emotions in the brain by triggering different body states. Lastly, he presented examples of how empathy, the ability to share the feelings of others, is dependent on bodily arousal and is reflected in the ability to share these bodily states.

He concluded that ‘It’s an exciting time in neuroscience – advanced imaging techniques are bridging the gap between brain and behaviour’.