Listening to humans walking together activates the social brain circuitry.

Human footsteps carry a vast amount of social information, which is often unconsciously noted. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we analyzed brain networks activated by footstep sounds of one or two persons walking. Listening to two persons walking together activated brain areas previously associated with affective states and social interaction, such as the subcallosal gyrus bilaterally, the right temporal pole, and the right amygdala.

The compassionate brain: humans detect intensity of pain from another's face.

Understanding another person's experience draws on "mirroring systems," brain circuitries shared by the subject's own actions/feelings and by similar states observed in others. Lately, also the experience of pain has been shown to activate partly the same brain areas in the subjects' own and in the observer's brain. Recent studies show remarkable overlap between brain areas activated when a subject undergoes painful sensory stimulation and when he/she observes others suffering from pain.

Yearning to yawn: the neural basis of contagious yawning.

Yawning is contagious: Watching another person yawn may trigger us to do the same. Here we studied brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects watched videotaped yawns. Significant increases in the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal, specific to yawn viewing as contrasted to viewing non-nameable mouth movements, were observed in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) and bilaterally in the anterior STS, in agreement with the high affinity of STS to social cues.

Evidence for the different additivity of the temporal and frontal generators of mismatch negativity: a human auditory event-related potential study.

The auditory sensory-memory mechanisms in the human brain were investigated using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential. MMNs were recorded to stimuli deviating from the repetitive standard stimuli simultaneously either in one or two features (frequency, intensity). If the processing of these two features is independent of each other, the MMN to the double deviant should equal the sum of the MMNs elicited by the corresponding single deviants.