Scientists identify part of brain linked to gambling addiction

New research reveals that brain damage affecting the insula – an area with a key role in emotions – disrupts errors of thinking linked to gambling addiction.

The research, led by Dr Luke Clark from the University of Cambridge, was published on April 7 2014 in the journal PNAS.

During gambling games, people often misperceive their chances of winning due to a number of errors of thinking called cognitive distortions. For example, ‘near-misses’ seem to encourage further play, even though they are no different from any other loss. In a random sequence like tossing a coin, a run of one event (heads) makes people think the other outcome (tails) is due next; this is known as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’.

There is increasing evidence that problem gamblers are particularly prone to these erroneous beliefs. In this study, the researchers examined the neurological basis of these beliefs in patients with injuries to different parts of the brain.

“While neuroimaging studies can tell us a great deal about the brain’s response to complex events, it’s only by studying patients with brain injury that we can see if a brain region is actually needed to perform a given task,” said Dr Clark.

For the study, the researchers gave patients with injuries to specific parts of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, or the insula) two different gambling tasks: a slot machine game that delivered wins and ‘near-misses’ (like a cherry one position from the jackpot line), and a roulette game involving red or black predictions, to elicit the gambler’s fallacy. For the control groups, they also had patients with injuries to other parts of the brain as well as healthy participants undergo the gambling tasks.

All of the groups with the exception of the patients with insula damage reported a heightened motivation to play following near-misses in the slot machine game, and also fell prey to the gambler’s fallacy in the roulette game.

Clark added: “Based on these results, we believe that the insula could be hyperactive in problem gamblers, making them more susceptible to these errors of thinking. Future treatments for gambling addiction could seek to reduce this hyperactivity, either by drugs or by psychological techniques like mindfulness therapies.”

Gambling is a widespread activity: 73% of people in the UK report some gambling involvement in the past year* and around 50% play games other than the National Lottery. For a small proportion of players (around 1-5%), their gambling becomes excessive, resulting in features seen in addiction. Problem gambling is associated with both debt and family difficulties as well as other mental health problems like depression.

Meditation as object of medical research

Mindfulness meditation produces personal experiences that are not readily interpretable by scientists who want to study its psychiatric benefits in the brain. At a conference near Boston April 5, 2014, Brown University researchers will describe how they’ve been able to integrate mindfulness experience with hard neuroscience data to advance more rigorous study.

Mindfulness is always personal and often spiritual, but the meditation experience does not have to be subjective. Advances in methodology are allowing researchers to integrate mindfulness experiences with brain imaging and neural signal data to form testable hypotheses about the science — and the reported mental health benefits — of the practice.

A team of Brown University researchers, led by junior Juan Santoyo, will present their research approach at 2:45 p.m on Saturday, April 5, 2014, at the 12th Annual International Scientific Conference of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Their methodology employs a structured coding of the reports meditators provide about their mental experiences. That can be rigorously correlated with quantitative neurophysiological measurements.

“In the neuroscience of mindfulness and meditation, one of the problems that we’ve had is not understanding the practices from the inside out,” said co-presenter Catherine Kerr, assistant professor (research) of family medicine and director of translational neuroscience in Brown’s Contemplative Studies Initiative. “What we’ve really needed are better mechanisms for generating testable hypotheses – clinically relevant and experience-relevant hypotheses.”

Now researchers are gaining the tools to trace experiences described by meditators to specific activity in the brain.

“We’re going to [discuss] how this is applicable as a general tool for the development of targeted mental health treatments,” Santoyo said. “We can explore how certain experiences line up with certain patterns of brain activity. We know certain patterns of brain activity are associated with certain psychiatric disorders.”

Structuring the spiritual

At the conference, the team will frame these broad implications with what might seem like a small distinction: whether meditators focus on their sensations of breathing in their nose or in their belly. The two meditation techniques hail from different East Asian traditions. Carefully coded experience data gathered by Santoyo, Kerr, and Harold Roth, professor of religious studies at Brown, show that the two techniques produced significantly different mental states in student meditators.

“We found that when students focused on the breath in the belly their descriptions of experience focused on attention to specific somatic areas and body sensations,” the researchers wrote in their conference abstract. “When students described practice experiences related to a focus on the nose during meditation, they tended to describe a quality of mind, specifically how their attention ‘felt’ when they sensed it.”

The ability to distill a rigorous distinction between the experiences came not only from randomly assigning meditating students to two groups – one focused on the nose and one focused on the belly – but also by employing two independent coders to perform standardized analyses of the journal entries the students made immediately after meditating.

This kind of structured coding of self-reported personal experience is called “grounded theory methodology.” Santoyo’s application of it to meditation allows for the formation of hypotheses.

For example, Kerr said, “Based on the predominantly somatic descriptions of mindfulness experience offered by the belly-focused group, we would expect there to be more ongoing, resting-state functional connectivity in this group across different parts of a large brain region called the insula that encodes visceral, somatic sensations and also provides a readout of the emotional aspects of so-called ‘gut feelings’.”

Unifying experience and the brain

The next step is to correlate the coded experiences data with data from the brain itself. A team of researchers led by Kathleen Garrison at Yale University, including Santoyo and Kerr, did just that in a paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in August 2013. The team worked with deeply experienced meditators to correlate the mental states they described during mindfulness with simultaneous activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). They measured that with real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging.

They found that when meditators of several different traditions reported feelings of “effortless doing” and “undistracted awareness” during their meditation, their PCC showed little activity, but when they reported that they felt distracted and had to work at mindfulness, their PCC was significantly more active. Given the chance to observe real-time feedback on their PCC activity, some meditators were even able to control the levels of activity there.

“You can observe both of these phenomena together and discover how they are co-determining one another,” Santoyo said. “Within 10 one-minute sessions they were able to develop certain strategies to evoke a certain experience and use it to drive the signal.”

Toward therapies

A theme of the conference, and a key motivator in Santoyo and Kerr’s research, is connecting such research to tangible medical benefits. Meditators have long espoused such benefits, but support from neuroscience and psychiatry has been considerably more recent.

In a February 2013 paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Kerr and colleagues proposed that much like the meditators could control activity in the PCC, mindfulness practitioners may gain enhanced control over sensory cortical alpha rhythms. Those brain waves help regulate how the brain processes and filters sensations, including pain, and memories such as depressive cognitions.

Santoyo, whose family emigrated from Colombia when he was a child, became inspired to investigate the potential of mindfulness to aid mental health beginning in high school. Growing up in Cambridge and Somerville, Mass., he observed the psychiatric difficulties of the area’s homeless population. He also encountered them while working in food service at Cambridge hospital.

“In low-income communities you always see a lot of untreated mental health disorders,” said Santoyo, who meditates regularly and helps to lead a mindfulness group at Brown. He is pursuing a degree in neuroscience and contemplative science. “The perspective of contemplative theory is that we learn about the mind by observing experience, not just to tickle our fancy but to learn how to heal the mind.”

It’s a long path, perhaps, but Santoyo and his collaborators are walking it with progress.

New hope for heavy smokers after study finds zapping their brains with magnetic pulses made it easier for them to quit

Heavy smokers could be helped to kick the habit by having their brains zapped with electromagnetic pulses, new research suggests.

Repeated use of a high frequency magnet to stimulate the brain helps some smokers quit for up to six months after treatment, an Israeli study found.

The smokers had already tried a range of treatments, from patches to psychotherapy, raising hopes that brain stimulation could be an effective alternative for those who had so far failed to kick the habit.

Abraham Zangen of Ben Gurion University told the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, California, that more than half the smokers given high-frequency magnetic pulses quit.

More than a third were still abstaining six months on.

'Our research shows us that we may actually be able to undo some of the changes to the brain caused by chronic smoking,' said Dr Zangen.

'We know that many smokers want to quit or smoke less and this could help put a dent in the number one cause of preventable deaths.'

Dr Zangen’s team recruited 115 heavy smokers aged between 21 and 70 who were interested in quitting but who had failed in doing so on at least two previous attempts.

They then split the smokers into three groups, giving them either high frequency repeated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), low frequency rTMS, or placebo treatment for 13 days.

Repeated high frequency Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive technique that uses magnetic fields to stimulate large areas of neurons in the brain.

The researchers focused on stimulating the prefrontal cortex and the insula, which are the two brain areas associated with nicotine addiction.

Before each session, Dr Zangen got one of his PhD students to light a cigarette and take a drag in front of half the smokers in each group to awaken their cravings.

This was to make sure the smokers’ attention was directed at their addiction and not some other craving, said Dr Zangen.

The results were striking. Nearly half - 44 per cent - of the smokers who received the cue before their rTMS session gave up immediately after the 13-day course, with 33 per cent still of the smokes six months later.

Overall, participants who received high frequency rTMS smoked less and were more likely to quit, with success rates four times that of the low frequency group and more than six times greater than the placebo group.

Dr Zangen’s team are now planning a much larger trial involving smokers in several countries, which is set to start in the next few months.

He told The Guardian: ‘It’s quite easy to quit for a few days, or even for a few weeks, but if we can help people quit for more than three months, then they are actually quite unlikely to relapse later on.’

Dr Zanger did reveal that he has a financial interest in the company which provided the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation equipment used in the study.

A neurological basis for the lack of empathy in psychopaths

When individuals with psychopathy imagine others in pain, brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and be connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and decision-making, reports a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Previous research indicates that the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, greater than the average population which is around 1%.

To better understand the neurological basis of empathy dysfunction in psychopaths, neuroscientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the brains of 121 inmates of a medium-security prison in the USA.

Participants were shown visual scenarios illustrating physical pain, such as a finger caught between a door, or a toe caught under a heavy object. They were by turns invited to imagine that this accident happened to themselves, or somebody else. They were also shown control images that did not depict any painful situation, for example a hand on a doorknob.

Participants were assessed with the widely used PCL-R, a diagnostic tool to identify their degree of psychopathic tendencies. Based on this assessment, the participants were then divided in three groups of approximately 40 individuals each: highly, moderately, and weakly psychopathic.

When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.

But when participants imagined pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. Moreover, psychopaths showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain.

This atypical activation combined with a negative functional connectivity between the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex may suggest that individuals with high scores on psychopathy actually enjoyed imagining pain inflicted on others and did not care for them. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a region that plays a critical role in empathetic decision-making, such as caring for the wellbeing of others.

Taken together, this atypical pattern of activation and effective connectivity associated with perspective taking manipulations may inform intervention programs in a domain where therapeutic pessimism is more the rule than the exception. Altered connectivity may constitute novel targets for intervention. Imagining oneself in pain or in distress may trigger a stronger affective reaction than imagining what another person would feel, and this could be used with some psychopaths in cognitive-behavior therapies as a kick-starting technique, write the authors.

Schizophrenia symptoms linked to faulty ‘switch’ in brain

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have shown that psychotic symptoms experienced by people with schizophrenia could be caused by a faulty ‘switch’ within the brain.

In a study published today in the leading journal Neuron, they have demonstrated that the severity of symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations which are typical in patients with the psychiatric disorder is caused by a disconnection between two important regions in the brain — the insula and the lateral frontal cortex.

The breakthrough, say the academics, could form the basis for better, more targeted treatments for schizophrenia with fewer side effects.

The four-year study, led by Professor Peter Liddle and Dr Lena Palaniyappan in the University’s Division of Psychiatry and based in the Institute of Mental Health, centred on the insula region, a segregated ‘island’ buried deep within the brain, which is responsible for seamless switching between inner and outer world.

"Powerful explanation"

Dr Lena Palaniyappan, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, said: “In our daily life, we constantly switch between our inner, private world and the outer, objective world. This switching action is enabled by the connections between the insula and frontal cortex. This switch process appears to be disrupted in patients with schizophrenia. This could explain why internal thoughts sometime appear as external objective reality, experienced as voices or hallucinations in this condition. This could also explain the difficulties in ‘internalising’ external material pleasures (e.g. enjoying a musical tune or social events) that result in emotional blunting in patients with psychosis. Our observation offers a powerful mechanistic explanation for the formation of psychotic symptoms.”

Several brain regions are engaged when we are lost in thought or, for example, remembering a past event. However, when interrupted by a loud noise or another person speaking we are able to switch to using our frontal cortex area of the brain, which processes this external information. With a disruption in the connections from the insula, such switching may not be possible.

Compromised brain function

The Nottingham scientists used functional MRI (fMRI) imaging to compare the brains of 35 healthy volunteers with those of 38 schizophrenic patients. The results showed that whereas the majority of healthy patients were able to make this switch between regions, the patients with schizophrenia were less likely to shift to using their frontal cortex.

The insular and frontal cortex form a sensitive ‘salience’ loop within the brain — the insular should stimulate the frontal cortex while in turn the frontal cortex should inhibit the insula — but in patients with schizophrenia this system was found to be seriously compromised.

The results suggest that detecting the lack of a positive influence from the insula to the frontal cortex using fMRI could have a high degree of predictive value in identifying patients with schizophrenia.

The results of the study offer vital information for the development of more effective treatments for the condition.

Schizophrenia is one of the most common serious mental health conditions affecting around 1 in 100 people. Its onset occurs most commonly in a patient’s late teens or early 20s which can have devastating consequences for their future.

Genetic and environmental triggers

Scientists remain unsure what causes schizophrenia but believe it could be a combination of a genetic predisposition to the condition combined with environmental factors. Drug use is known to be a key trigger – people who use cannabis, or stimulant drugs, are three to four times more likely to go on to develop recurrent psychotic symptoms.

It is also believed that underdevelopment of the brain in the womb caused by complications in the mother’s pregnancy and in early childhood linked to issues such as malnutrition could play a key part. Previous observations from this research group have also uncovered the presence of unusually smooth folding patterns of the brain over the insula region in patients, suggesting an impairment in the normal development of this structure in schizophrenia.

At present, treatment involves a combination of antipsychotic medications, psychological therapies and social interventions. Currently, only one in five patients with schizophrenia achieve complete recovery and many patients who develop the condition in the long-term struggle to find a treatment that is 100 per cent effective in managing their condition.

Antipsychotic drugs, though effective in a number of patients, have poor acceptance rates due to the side effect burden meaning that many patients stop taking them in the longer run, leading to recurrence of disabling symptoms.

Researchers in Nottingham are also looking at a technique called TMS – transcranial magnetic stimulation — which uses a powerful magnetic pulse to stimulate the brain regions that are malfunctioning.

Compassion-based therapy

Despite the fact that the insular region is buried so deeply within the brain that TMS would usually be ineffective, the results of the Nottingham study suggest that the loop between the insular and the frontal cortex could be exploited for TMS– if a pulse is delivered to the frontal lobe it could stimulate the insula and reset the ‘switch’.

Other future treatment options could include the use of a compassion-based meditation therapy called mindfulness, which may have the potential to ‘reset’ the switching function of the insula and can promote physical changes within the brain. Meditation over a long period of time has been shown to increase the folding patterns within the insula area of the brain. These ideas are in its early stages at present, but may deliver more focussed treatment approaches in the longer term.

Scientists Identify Key Brain Circuits that Control Compulsive Drinking in Rats

Gallo Center Research Could Have Direct Application For Treating Human Drinking Problems

A research team led by scientists from the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco has identified circuitry in the brain that drives compulsive drinking in rats, and likely plays a similar role in humans.

The scientists found they could reduce compulsive drinking in rats by inhibiting key neural pathways that run between the prefrontal cortex, which is involved with higher functions such as critical thinking and risk assessment, and the nucleus accumbens, a critical area for reward and motivation.

The authors noted that there are already several FDA-approved medications that target activity in these pathways, thus potentially opening an accelerated track to new treatments for compulsive drinking.

The study describing their finding was published online on June 30 in Nature Neuroscience.

The study was conducted on rats that regularly drank 20 percent alcohol. The rats drank both unmixed alcohol and alcohol mixed with extremely bitter quinine, said senior investigator F. Woodward Hopf, PhD, an assistant adjunct professor of neurology at UCSF.

Hopf explained that this alcohol-quinine solution, which he described as “like a vodka tonic without the sugar,” is often used as a rodent model of compulsive drinking, or “drinking in the face of negative consequences.” In rats, he said, the negative consequence is the bitter taste, while in humans who drink compulsively, “the negative consequences are profound: people continue to drink despite the potential loss of jobs, marriages, freedom, even their lives.”

The drinking rats showed a notable increase in the NMDA receptor (NMDAR), which lead author Taban Seif, PhD, a Gallo Center researcher, called “a molecule that excites the brain.” When the rats were injected with an NMDAR blocker, their consumption of quinine-laced alcohol dropped significantly, while regular alcohol use was unaffected. “In other words, only the compulsive drinking was affected,” said Seif.

Focus on Two Regions of the Prefrontal Cortex

The team then focused its research on connections from two specific regions of the rats’ prefrontal cortex where they had discovered the presence of unusual types of NMDARs: the medial prefrontal cortex, which mediates conflict during decision-making, and the insula, which is critical for self-awareness and feelings.

“In a non-addict, these brain areas tell you when something is potentially harmful and bad, and to run away as fast as possible,” said Hopf. “But if you’re a compulsive drinker, it seems instead that they give you a comforting pat on the back, in effect telling you it’s OK to have another drink, nothing to worry about.”

Using a technique called optogenetics, the scientists inserted halorhodopsin, a light-sensitive protein, into these areas. They then used fiber-optic cables implanted in the rats’ brains to send pulses of laser light that activated the halorhodopsin, which in turn inhibited the regions’ connections to the nucleus accumbens. The researchers found that rats inhibited in this way drank significantly less quinine-laced alcohol, while their intake of regular alcohol solution remained unaffected.

“The fact that we reduced the rats’ compulsive drinking using two different methods – an NMDAR blocker and direct inhibition of connections – tells us that we have probably identified the right areas,” said Hopf.

Potential Treatments for Humans

The next logical step for the research team, said Hopf, would be to work with clinical researchers on an NMDAR blocker trial in human subjects.

“What is interesting is that we have a new drug which could perhaps treat compulsive aspects of drinking,” said Hopf, “but only if you are in conflict about your drinking – if you care. Any therapy with NMDAR blockers would need a strong behavioral and cognitive component to make sure the patient stayed mentally engaged.”

Seif and Hopf also plan further experimental studies focusing on how the insula drives behavior and connects to other areas of the brain.

For combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ‘fear circuitry’ in the brain never rests

Chronic trauma can inflict lasting damage to brain regions associated with fear and anxiety. Previous imaging studies of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, have shown that these brain regions can over-or under-react in response to stressful tasks, such as recalling a traumatic event or reacting to a photo of a threatening face. Now, researchers at NYU School of Medicine have explored for the first time what happens in the brains of combat veterans with PTSD in the absence of external triggers.

Their results, published in Neuroscience Letters, and presented today at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatry Association in San Francisco, show that the effects of trauma persist in certain brain regions even when combat veterans are not engaged in cognitive or emotional tasks, and face no immediate external threats. The findings shed light on which areas of the brain provoke traumatic symptoms and represent a critical step toward better diagnostics and treatments for PTSD.

A chronic condition that develops after trauma, PTSD can plague victims with disturbing memories, flashbacks, nightmares and emotional instability. Among the 1.7 million men and women who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an estimated 20% have PTSD. Research shows that suicide risk is higher in veterans with PTSD. Tragically, more soldiers committed suicide in 2012 than the number of soldiers who were killed in combat in Afghanistan that year.

"It is critical to have an objective test to confirm PTSD diagnosis as self reports can be unreliable," says co-author Charles Marmar, MD, the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Psychiatry and chair of NYU Langone’s Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Marmar, a nationally recognized expert on trauma and stress among veterans, heads The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center for the Study of Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury at NYU Langone Medical Center.

The study, led by Xiaodan Yan, a research fellow at NYU School of Medicine, examined “spontaneous” or “resting” brain activity in 104 veterans of combat from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars using functional MRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain. The researchers found that spontaneous brain activity in the amygdala, a key structure in the brain’s “fear circuitry” that processes fearful and anxious emotions, was significantly higher in the 52 combat veterans with PTSD than in the 52 combat veterans without PTSD. The PTSD group also showed elevated brain activity in the anterior insula, a brain region that regulates sensitivity to pain and negative emotions.

Moreover, the PTSD group had lower activity in the precuneus, a structure tucked between the brain’s two hemispheres that helps integrate information from the past and future, especially when the mind is wandering or disengaged from active thought. Decreased activity in the precuneus correlates with more severe “re-experiencing” symptoms—that is, when victims re-experience trauma over and over again through flashbacks, nightmares and frightening thoughts.

How We Know It Hurts: Item Analysis of Written Narratives Reveals Distinct Neural Responses to Others’ Physical Pain and Emotional Suffering

People are often called upon to witness, and to empathize with, the pain and suffering of others. In the current study, we directly compared neural responses to others’ physical pain and emotional suffering by presenting participants (n = 41) with 96 verbal stories, each describing a protagonist’s physical and/or emotional experience, ranging from neutral to extremely negative. A separate group of participants rated “how much physical pain”, and “how much emotional suffering” the protagonist experienced in each story, as well as how “vivid and movie-like” the story was. Although ratings of Pain, Suffering and Vividness were positively correlated with each other across stories, item-analyses revealed that each scale was correlated with activity in distinct brain regions. Even within regions of the “Shared Pain network” identified using a separate data set, responses to others’ physical pain and emotional suffering were distinct. More broadly, item analyses with continuous predictors provided a high-powered method for identifying brain regions associated with specific aspects of complex stimuli – like verbal descriptions of physical and emotional events.

The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

We all enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

It’s in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

Researchers Confirm the “Pinocchio Effect”: When you Lie, your Nose Temperature Raises

When a person lies they suffer a “Pinocchio effect”, which is an increase in the temperature around the nose and in the orbital muscle in the inner corner of the eye. In addition, when we perform a considerable mental effort our face temperature drops and when we have an anxiety attack our face temperature raises. These are some of the conclusions drawn in this pioneer study conducted at the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology, which has introduced new applications of thermography.

Excitement is the Same in Men and Women

Sexual excitement and desire can be identified in men and women using thermography, since they induce an increase in chest and genital temperature. This study demonstrates that –in physiological terms– men and women get excited at the same time, even although women say they are not excited or only slightly excited.

When we lie on our feelings, the temperature around our nose raises and a brain element called “insula” is activated. The insula is a component of the brain reward system, and it only activates when we experience real feelings (called “qualias”). "The insula is involved in the detection and regulation of body temperature. Therefore, there is a strong negative correlation between insula activity and temperature increase: the more active the insule (the greater the feeling) the lower the temperature change, and viceversa", the researchers state.

The Thermal Footprint of Flamenco

Researchers also determined the thermal footprint of aerobic exercise and different dance modalities such as ballet. "When a person is dancing flamenco the temperature in their buttocks drops and increases in their forearms. That is the thermal footprint of flamenco, and each dance modality has a specific thermal footprint”, professor Salazar explains.

The researchers have demonstrated that temperature asymmetries in both sides of the body and local temperature changes are associated with the physical, mental and emotional status of the subject. "The thermogram is a somatic marker of subjective or mental states and allows us see what a person is feeling or thinking”, professor Salazar states.