How the Human Brain Processes Emotion: The Standard Code of Happiness

How do you feel? Emotions are part of our everyday lives, but scientists have long wondered how people process them in the brain. Now, they've provided insight into how the brain represents our innermost feelings and have debunked the long-held view that emotion is represented in the brain simply by activation in specialized regions.

In order to better understand how the brain processes emotion, the researchers presented volunteers with a series of pictures and tastes during functional neuroimaging. Then, the scientists analyzed the participants' ratings of their subjective experiences along with their brain activation patterns.

"We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual's subjective feeling," said Adam Anderson, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In fact, the researchers found that valence was represented as sensory-specific patterns or codes in areas of the brain associated with vision and taste, as well as sensory-independent codes in the orbitofrontal cortices (OFC).

"If you and I derive similar pleasure from sipping a fine wine or watching the sun set, our results suggest it is because we share similar fine-grained patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex," said Anderson. "It appears that the human brain generates a special code for the entire valence spectrum of pleasant-to-unpleasant, good-to-bad feelings, which can be read like a 'neural valence meter' in which the leaning of a population of neurons in one direction equals positive feeling and the leaning in the other direction equals negative feeling."

The findings reveal how OFC activity patterns of positive and negative experiences are partly shared across people. This means that there may, in fact, be a standard code in order to speak the same emotional language.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.