Brains II

Insula damage is associated with apathy. Sex desire? Damage here loses swxual attraction along with taste. Is this why mating involves dining??? Fear, disguist, inner feelings also get affected here. What is most interesting, is that some have asserted that annorexia nervosa lives here. Interesting, as all the bits of that are at play. As a surgeon, I was called to place a feeding tube into a 14 year old girl who looked like a corpse in a war film. Beyond skeletal with multiple spinal collapse fractures, sunken eyes. Given a mirror she described what she saw as being fat and discusting, an impossible description of reality. Yet, she could judge relative states of health of those around her. To a surgeon, that goes beyond psychological to being an organic defect in Vomiting with hearing things not heard by others in insular seizures (some, not all). Documented (electrical) insular seizures can mimic seizures in other brain locations [?? by spread or ??]. Drug unresponsive seizures are very suspect as insular in origin. Choking feelings, There are known genetic things, and weird MRI, SEEG, PET and other stuff that makes this the property of very specialized clinicians with access to some far out technologies. The insula is the top of the embryonic brain before the huge outgrowth and curvature which in C-shape covers it as is seen in the mature structure. As if a ram’s horn grows curved & gets very fat to obscure the rams’s head (the insula in this metaphore). You will note that many wel known brain tracts and structures follow this curve as they were dragged along this pathway of developmental growth. the main circuitrym maybe a seizure like focal glitch? Addiction also seems to live here, at least sometimes.