The influence of insulin on anticipation and consummatory reward to food intake: A functional imaging study on healthy normal weight and overweight subjects employing intranasal insulin delivery.

Aberrant responses within homeostatic, hedonic and cognitive systems contribute to poor appetite control in those with an overweight phenotype. The hedonic system incorporates limbic and meso-limbic regions involved in learning and reward processing, as well as cortical regions involved in motivation, decision making and gustatory processing. Equally important within this complex, multifaceted framework are the cognitive systems involved in inhibitory control and valuation of food choices.

Revealing the mechanisms behind novel auditory stimuli discrimination: An evaluation of silent functional MRI using looping star.

Looping Star is a near-silent, multi-echo, 3D functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. It reduces acoustic noise by at least 25dBA, with respect to gradient-recalled echo echo-planar imaging (GRE-EPI)-based fMRI. Looping Star has successfully demonstrated sensitivity to the cerebral blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response during block design paradigms but has not been applied to event-related auditory perception tasks.

Linking Pain Sensation to the Autonomic Nervous System: The Role of the Anterior Cingulate and Periaqueductal Gray Resting-State Networks.

There are bi-directional interactions between the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and pain. This is likely underpinned by a substantial overlap between brain areas of the central autonomic network and areas involved in pain processing and modulation. To date, however, relatively little is known about the neuronal substrates of the ANS-pain association.