Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy have inexplicable fear attack as the aura. However, the underlying neural mechanisms of seizure‐modulated fear are not clarified. Recent studies identified stathmin as one of the key controlling molecules in learning and innate fear. Stathmin binds to tubulin, inhibits microtubule assembly and promotes microtubule catastrophes. Therefore, stathmin is predict...

Dyspnea is common in many cardiorespiratory diseases. Already the anticipation of this aversive symptom elicits fear in many patients resulting in unfavorable health behaviors such as activity avoidance and sedentary lifestyle. This study investigated brain mechanisms underlying these anticipatory processes. We induced dyspnea using resistive-load breathing in healthy subjects during functional...

Increasing evidence about the central nervous representation of pain in the brain suggests that the operculo-insular cortex is a crucial part of the pain matrix. The pain-specificity of a brain region may be tested by administering nociceptive stimuli while controlling for unspecific activations by administering non-nociceptive stimuli. We applied this paradigm to nasal chemosensation, deliveri...

To determine how opiate receptor distribution is co-localized with the distribution of nociceptive areas in the human brain, eleven male healthy volunteers underwent one PET scan with the subtype-nonselective opioidergic radioligand [(18)F]fluoroethyl-diprenorphine under resting conditions. The binding potential (BP), a parameter for the regional cerebral opioid receptor availability, was compu...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Temporal lobe epilepsy is one of the most common forms of medically refractory epileptic syndromes. In a small percentage, temporal lobectomy fails to control the seizures in patients with epilepsy of clear temporal origin, and in some of these patients, seizures originating from the insular cortex is believed to be the cause behind the surgical failures. We retrospective...

The insular cortex has been considered to be the neural base of visceral sensation for many years. Previous studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have accumulated evidence indicating that interoception is an essential factor in the subjective feeling of emotion. Recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that anterior insular cortex activation is associated with accessing interoce...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Acute poststroke hyperglycemia has been associated with larger infarct volumes and a cortical location, regardless of diabetes status. Stress hyperglycemia has been attributed to activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis but never a specific cortical location. We tested the hypothesis that damage to the insular cortex, a site with autonomic connectivity, resul...

BACKGROUND Precise localization of an epileptic focus in the perisylvian/insular area is a major challenge. The difficult access and the high density of blood vessels within the sylvian fissure have lead to poor coverage of intrasylvian (opercular and insular) cortex by available electrodes. OBJECTIVE To report the creation of a novel electrode designed to record epileptic activity from both ...

The present study tested the hypothesis that lesions of the insular cortex of the rat retard the acquisition of conditioned taste aversions (CTAs) because of an impairment in the detection of the novelty of taste stimuli. Demonstrating the expected latent inhibition effect, nonlesioned control subjects acquired CTAs more rapidly when the conditioned stimulus (0.15% sodium saccharin) was novel r...

We aimed to test whether tyrosine phosphorylation of the NMDA receptor (NMDAR) in the insular cortex is necessary for novel taste learning. We found that in rats, novel taste learning leads to elevated phosphorylation of tyrosine 1472 of the NR2B subunit of the NMDAR and increases the interaction of phosphorylated NR2B with the major postsynaptic scaffold protein PSD-95. Injection of the tyrosi...