Working in Movement

Do you know what's going on inside you? If so, is that good, bad or indifferent? Body Awareness Makes Some People Anxious, published on the Brain Connection site summarizes some research that attempts an answer. In a study of 38 people, British researchers found subjects with better body awareness and heightened activity in a certain region of the brain tended to have more anxiety and other negative emotions. I was thrown at first when reading this into making the connection between body awareness and negative emotions. But it turns out it's not that simple. It was the subjects whose fMRI scans showed more activity in the right anterior insular cortexin those who slef-reported the anxiety. This supports previous research that suggested this is the region that controls awareness of emotion. The unique thing about this research is the finding that people who are more aware of their internal body states, and tend to experience more anxiety and negative emotions in daily life, have a larger size anterior insular cortex.

And it's not as bad as it sounds at first. It's easy to believe that any amount of anxiety or other negative emotions interfere with practicing good judgment. Evidence suggests otherwise, at least for folks with brain damage that wipes out emotional experiencing. It turns out that low levels of such awareness results in poor social and emotional intelligence, according to Antoine Bechara, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Iowa.

Incidentally, Brain Connection is from Scientific Learning Corporation, an interesting company that I've written about previously.