After I stumbled across your tumblr today. I wondered, some people say they feel no pain, or remorse, etc, etc, and generally are stoic. Is it really possible to ‘turn off’ your feelings and emotions via frontal cortex?
First of all, I’d like to apologize for the radio silence. It’s been due to both my research picking up and coming down with an exhausting illness. Hopefully with this new year, I can maintain more regular posting!
Now, this question was asked a long time ago, but it’s an interesting one, so I thought it would be fun to begin with an answer. Although I cannot speak for everyone who claims to feel no remorse, a lack of remorse can be caused by dysfunctional prefrontal activity. As you may know, personality is largely encoded by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and antisocial personality can be caused by underactivity or lesions of the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). For instance, they have found that psychopathic murderers often show severe underactivity in vmPFC. Also, you may have heard of the famous case of Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who though an accident, had an iron rod driven through his head. In this unlucky circumstance, Gage somehow survived (likely due to the fact that the damage was restricted to PFC and it was very hot so cauterized the area as it went through), but his personality completely changed. He became more impulsive and antisocial. This case gave us a lot of information about where emotions and personality come from.
Pain is a different process, and there are people who cannot feel pain. Pain also varies from person to person and the types of receptors, receptor concentration, etc. they have. It is encoded in the somatosensory cortex of the brain, which is in the parietal lobe.
