Kawabata, H;
Zeki, S;
(2008)
The Neural Correlates of Desire.
PLOS ONE
, 3
(8)
, Article e3027. 10.1371/journal.pone.0003027.
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Abstract
In an event-related fMRI study, we scanned eighteen normal human subjects while they viewed three categories of pictures (events, objects and persons) which they classified according to desirability (desirable, indifferent or undesirable). Each category produced activity in a distinct part of the visual brain, thus reflecting its functional specialization. We used conjunction analysis to learn whether there is a brain area which is always active when a desirable picture is viewed, regardless of the category to which it belongs. The conjunction analysis of the contrast desirable. undesirable revealed activity in the superior orbito-frontal cortex. This activity bore a positive linear relationship to the declared level of desirability. The conjunction analysis of desirable. indifferent revealed activity in the mid-cingulate cortex and in the anterior cingulate cortex. In the former, activity was greater for desirable and undesirable stimuli than for stimuli classed as indifferent. Other conjunction analyses produced no significant effects. These results show that categorizing any stimulus according to its desirability activates three different brain areas: the superior orbito-frontal, the mid-cingulate, and the anterior cingulate cortices.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Neural Correlates of Desire |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0003027 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003027 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2008 Kawabata, Zeki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, London, UK; and by the Honda Research Institute, Wako, Japan. Funding bodies had no role in design, execution or analysis of the study. |
| Keywords: | ANTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX, LATERAL OCCIPITAL COMPLEX, VISUAL SEXUAL STIMULI, ORBITOFRONTAL CORTEX, FACIAL ATTRACTIVENESS, HUMAN BRAIN, FUNCTIONAL SPECIALIZATION, AMYGDALA RESPONSE, NUCLEUS-ACCUMBENS, FACE PERCEPTION |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Cell and Developmental Biology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/117572 |
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