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Do you know someone who has been diagnosed with psychiatric condition called borderline personality disorder (BPD)?

People who suffer from BPD show erratic mood-swings and find it difficult to trust and understand the motives of others. As a result, they suffer from fraught personal relationships with friends, colleagues and partners.

Brooks King-Casas at Baylor College of Medicine has researched possible activity in the brain that might reflect BPD behavioural tics. Specifically, he searched for areas which respond differently in healthy and BPD brains, in response to the size of the investors' investment. He found one - the anterior insula.

The insula has increasingly become the focus of attention for its role in body representation and subjective emotional experience. Functionally speaking, the insula is believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience.

Other psychological studies have suggested that this part of the brain plays a role in assessing fairness, and it has a particular propensity for reacting to injustice. In ultimatum games, where one player offers a share of a pot and the other decides whether to take it, the anterior insula is most active when offers are low and when players reject. When people watch someone else being punished, their anterior insula is most active when the parties are punished after apparent fair play, and least active when the person actually cheated.

Regular meditation has been shown to thicken the cortical region of the brain. This region is related to somatosensory, auditory, visual and interoceptive processing. Regular meditation practice may also slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex. Who knew meditation may be associated with structural changes in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing?

It is amazing how the brain works isn't it? I always say if we understood our brains better and could somehow work on fine tuning our use of our brain imagine all we could do.

Labels: borderline personality disorder, brain, Emotional, neurology