“Feeling butterflies in your stomach” when you fall in love or “seething with rage” when anger burns deep inside. Commonly used expressions that convey a good idea of how ‘physical’ a feeling can be. Metaphors with a scientific basis: emotions have a “‘corporeal’ nature”, to the point that experiencing them ‘lights up’ the brain like touching something or making a movement. This is demonstrated by a study by the University of Milan-Bicocca, published in ‘iScience’: “Emotions – the authors discovered – activate cortical regions that typically respond to tactile and motor experiences”.
“In the past, several research projects had demonstrated at a behavioral level that emotions are associated with specific parts of the body. However, it remained to be understood how specific brain areas, typically involved in the processing of tactile and motor sensations, participated in the generation of specific emotions such as sadness, happiness, fear. We have demonstrated this for the first time at a neurophysiological level”, explains Elena Nava, professor of the Department of Psychology UniMiB, who signed the work together with colleagues Michelle Giraud, Laura Zapparoli, Gianpaolo Basso, Marco Petilli and Eraldo Paulesu of the same department.
Here is the experiment. Scientists used a functional 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine – operating at the San Gerardo hospital in Monza – on a sample of 26 people, mapping the specific areas of neuronal response to both motor and tactile and emotional stimuli in the brain.
Von Frey filaments, a tool that allows you to stimulate different parts of the body with the same intensity, were used on the hands, trunk, feet and face of the participants. In the first test – a note explains – the members of the sample were induced to move the same parts individually (for example, they opened or closed their hands, moved their lips and so on). Then they proceeded to an emotional recall: based on interviews conducted in the previous days, the participants were asked to relive autobiographical episodes that were highly emotional for them, both positively and negatively (the wedding day, a bereavement or other). Through functional MRI, the researchers then recorded which area of the brain was activated by each stimulation – motor, tactile or emotional – obtaining two maps, tactile-motor and emotional.
Well, by superimposing the map of the cortical areas activated during the recall of emotions to the map of the cortical areas activated during tactile and motor stimulations, it was seen that some areas are activated with both types of stimulation. “The generation of emotions – says Nava – is associated with activity in somatosensory and motor cortical areas, those that typically respond to touch or motor actions. This demonstrates the idea of an ’embodied’ experience of emotions, and therefore the need to experience emotions at a tactile and motor level in order to generate and feel them consciously”.
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