Contributing Editor's Note: Damage to the systems that
impact emotion, feeling and/or memory leads to compromise one's ability to
make advantageous decisions. The part of the brain responsible called
ventromedial (VM) region in the prefrontal cortex. The VM region links
the systems involved in judgement/decision making together, and therefore when
damaged there are alterations of emotional experience and social functioning.
Excerpts: Specifically, evidence suggests that the VM region serves
as a link between (i) a certain category of event based on memory records in
high order association cortices and (ii) effector structures that produce an
emotional response, and also (iii) the substrates of feeling. During
judgement/decision-making, category events are brought to ¡¥working memory¡¦,
which includes several processes. However, maintaining an active
representation of memory over a delay period involves the dorsolateral sector
of the prefrontal cortex. Effector structures that mediate the emotional
response are in the brainstem, whereas neural representations of feelings are
thought to involve the insula, surrounding parietal cortices, and the
cingulate.