For example, a thief and a non-thief see a car. The thief feels entitled to have it and the non-thief not. Is there an activation in some part of the brain due to this "entitlement" feeling from the thief?
Whoo boy. That brings back grad school seminar fights.
Short answer: no. Absolutely not.
Long answer:
1) The entire brain is active all the time. Usually when people talk about a brain region being "active" they mean (whether they know it or not) "active" according to an fMRI scan, mostly because fMRI scans are the kind that generate crisp pictures of the brain that are later colored in and found everywhere from university labs to adds in magazines. However, for the sake of generality, let's assume "active" here is taken to mean "active" using any neuroimaging technology. Then we run into problem 2.
2) What does "active" mean in terms of a PET scan, fMRI scan, EEG, etc.? Obviously, this depends upon a couple of things. For example, in what is almost certainly the most used neuroimaging technology in cognitive neuroscience (fMRI), it means that nuclear magnetic resonance has oriented all protons in all the atoms that NMR technology can orient in your brain (hydrogen) such that they are aligned rather than "spinning" along axes oriented randomly. Why do we care about the alignment of protons? Simplistically, because of blood. The brain eats up a lot of energy, which means that it needs constant blood flow (this is why you can choke someone out in 3-8 seconds but you can hold your breath for far longer: chokes if you can't breathe, your brain is still being fed oxygenated blood, while choke-holds stop blood from getting to the brain). More importantly, how much energy various regions of the require depends upon the extent to which you are relying upon them. The more you use a particular ROI (region of interest), the more hemodynamic activity, the more hydrogen atoms, and therefore the more protons aligned along the same axes. NMR imaging allows one to generate a signal from this hemodynamic activity that can be used as a proxy for brain activity level in some ROI.
3) “Is there a specific brain area that gets activated when…[do/think/feel/etc. X]”? Before neuroimaging was all that widely used within cognitive neuroscience, a then significant minority of cognitive scientists had already developed a theory of cognition called embodied cognition. In short, higher-level cognitive processes (like language comprehension) isn’t amodal, arbitrary symbol processing as was and is held to be by “classical” cognitive scientists. Once neuroimaging became more popular, scientists found that stimuli such as still frames of people running, being asked to think about running, reading the words “I run”, and so forth cause (particular0 motor regions of your brain greatly increase their activity (the jargon way of saying this is that such stimuli activate a “motor program” or call up a “motor program”). So what? Well, there have been hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of studies that go back to the 80s and were designed to test whether or not cognition is embodied. The cognitive science community, including cognitive neuroscience community, remains divided. One reason for this division (again, simplistically) is that while neuroscientists who argue that cognition is embodied do so by pointing to the significant increase in specific of relevant sensorimotor regions, “classical” cognitive (neuro)scientists argue that this activation is trivial. There are different arguments about why it is, we can think of the counterargument in terms of an analogy: Imagine you are asked to identify tools in images (a hammer, screwdriver, scissors, etc.) during a functional neuroimaging experiment. Every time you use these tools, you use motor regions in your brain. So it is certainly possible that whether you are using a screwdriver, seeing in your tool bag, or seeing it in an image, the motor region that corresponds to the use of the tool shows increase activation because of e.g., basic Hebbian learning. However, the CONCEPT of the tool is represented by patterns of neuronal activity in your frontal cortex and the CONCPT is amodal. In other words, it is extremely difficult to show that increases in activity in a particular brain region corresponds to some cognitive process, let alone what process (actually, it’s much more complicated than this and as a result we have a lot of junk neuroscience research; for example, whole brain scans tell us nothing about function that is of much use, so we have to pick a pretty small area of the brain to begin with and then confront the problem of a lack of any resting state that can be a control).
4) Given any emotional state, cognitive process, perceptual process, etc., there will be multiple regions of the brain that are non-trivially involved. Also, even if one believes that all higher-level cognitive processes, emotional states, and so on are represented by activity in the frontal cortex, brain “regions” in terms of cognitive neuroscience are tiny. They don’t have Brodmann numbers or names like “hippocampus” because even low-resolution voxel settings or the number of neurons a single EEG electrode can “capture” is a very large number. This wouldn’t necessarily be TOO big of a problem were it not for the fact that the patterns of neural activity corresponding to some concept or emotional state overlap with others, require highly coordinated activity among neuronal populations, and they are in more or less constant flux. So while the brain depends upon inter- and intra-neuronal network coordination/synchronization for the representation of concepts (and most likely nonlocal coordination in the sense that the embodied cognition is correct and key to conceptual processing is the capacity for modal-specific regions to represent particular “pieces” of concepts/thoughts/emotions/etc.), and probably nearly-zero lag synchronization or similar coordination among neural populations, neuroimaging studies that seek to determine whether changes in neural activity are significant have to focus on small, individual areas. So for any given neuroimaging study we aren’t capturing most of the information we want and we don’t know how much we aren’t or whether what we are capturing is what we intend to. After all, within a seconds the stimuli will result in different activity. Also, the most important neurons for higher-level cognition receive input from tens of thousands of other neurons.
There is no concept, mental state, emotional state, feeling, etc. that corresponds to any specific, unique area of the brain. The question is whether or not a particular region, despite differential spike train rates or timing, is always involved in a particular emotional state, cognitive process, blah blah blah.
Topically such a phenomenon usually associated with temporal lobe of the brain. A heightened sense of where you are asking, is characteristic of patients with epilepsy. Please see the article for professionals in-depth view (in the annex to the letter).
Such feelings could be implicated to heightened emotional responses. Although it is very difficult to pinpoint which brain area is responsible for a "sense of entitlement", the Amygdala plays a key role in emotional processing in the brain. Take a look here:
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(05)00823-8?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627305008238%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Whoo boy. That brings back grad school seminar fights.
Short answer: no. Absolutely not.
Long answer:
1) The entire brain is active all the time. Usually when people talk about a brain region being "active" they mean (whether they know it or not) "active" according to an fMRI scan, mostly because fMRI scans are the kind that generate crisp pictures of the brain that are later colored in and found everywhere from university labs to adds in magazines. However, for the sake of generality, let's assume "active" here is taken to mean "active" using any neuroimaging technology. Then we run into problem 2.
2) What does "active" mean in terms of a PET scan, fMRI scan, EEG, etc.? Obviously, this depends upon a couple of things. For example, in what is almost certainly the most used neuroimaging technology in cognitive neuroscience (fMRI), it means that nuclear magnetic resonance has oriented all protons in all the atoms that NMR technology can orient in your brain (hydrogen) such that they are aligned rather than "spinning" along axes oriented randomly. Why do we care about the alignment of protons? Simplistically, because of blood. The brain eats up a lot of energy, which means that it needs constant blood flow (this is why you can choke someone out in 3-8 seconds but you can hold your breath for far longer: chokes if you can't breathe, your brain is still being fed oxygenated blood, while choke-holds stop blood from getting to the brain). More importantly, how much energy various regions of the require depends upon the extent to which you are relying upon them. The more you use a particular ROI (region of interest), the more hemodynamic activity, the more hydrogen atoms, and therefore the more protons aligned along the same axes. NMR imaging allows one to generate a signal from this hemodynamic activity that can be used as a proxy for brain activity level in some ROI.
3) “Is there a specific brain area that gets activated when…[do/think/feel/etc. X]”? Before neuroimaging was all that widely used within cognitive neuroscience, a then significant minority of cognitive scientists had already developed a theory of cognition called embodied cognition. In short, higher-level cognitive processes (like language comprehension) isn’t amodal, arbitrary symbol processing as was and is held to be by “classical” cognitive scientists. Once neuroimaging became more popular, scientists found that stimuli such as still frames of people running, being asked to think about running, reading the words “I run”, and so forth cause (particular0 motor regions of your brain greatly increase their activity (the jargon way of saying this is that such stimuli activate a “motor program” or call up a “motor program”). So what? Well, there have been hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of studies that go back to the 80s and were designed to test whether or not cognition is embodied. The cognitive science community, including cognitive neuroscience community, remains divided. One reason for this division (again, simplistically) is that while neuroscientists who argue that cognition is embodied do so by pointing to the significant increase in specific of relevant sensorimotor regions, “classical” cognitive (neuro)scientists argue that this activation is trivial. There are different arguments about why it is, we can think of the counterargument in terms of an analogy: Imagine you are asked to identify tools in images (a hammer, screwdriver, scissors, etc.) during a functional neuroimaging experiment. Every time you use these tools, you use motor regions in your brain. So it is certainly possible that whether you are using a screwdriver, seeing in your tool bag, or seeing it in an image, the motor region that corresponds to the use of the tool shows increase activation because of e.g., basic Hebbian learning. However, the CONCEPT of the tool is represented by patterns of neuronal activity in your frontal cortex and the CONCPT is amodal. In other words, it is extremely difficult to show that increases in activity in a particular brain region corresponds to some cognitive process, let alone what process (actually, it’s much more complicated than this and as a result we have a lot of junk neuroscience research; for example, whole brain scans tell us nothing about function that is of much use, so we have to pick a pretty small area of the brain to begin with and then confront the problem of a lack of any resting state that can be a control).
4) Given any emotional state, cognitive process, perceptual process, etc., there will be multiple regions of the brain that are non-trivially involved. Also, even if one believes that all higher-level cognitive processes, emotional states, and so on are represented by activity in the frontal cortex, brain “regions” in terms of cognitive neuroscience are tiny. They don’t have Brodmann numbers or names like “hippocampus” because even low-resolution voxel settings or the number of neurons a single EEG electrode can “capture” is a very large number. This wouldn’t necessarily be TOO big of a problem were it not for the fact that the patterns of neural activity corresponding to some concept or emotional state overlap with others, require highly coordinated activity among neuronal populations, and they are in more or less constant flux. So while the brain depends upon inter- and intra-neuronal network coordination/synchronization for the representation of concepts (and most likely nonlocal coordination in the sense that the embodied cognition is correct and key to conceptual processing is the capacity for modal-specific regions to represent particular “pieces” of concepts/thoughts/emotions/etc.), and probably nearly-zero lag synchronization or similar coordination among neural populations, neuroimaging studies that seek to determine whether changes in neural activity are significant have to focus on small, individual areas. So for any given neuroimaging study we aren’t capturing most of the information we want and we don’t know how much we aren’t or whether what we are capturing is what we intend to. After all, within a seconds the stimuli will result in different activity. Also, the most important neurons for higher-level cognition receive input from tens of thousands of other neurons.
There is no concept, mental state, emotional state, feeling, etc. that corresponds to any specific, unique area of the brain. The question is whether or not a particular region, despite differential spike train rates or timing, is always involved in a particular emotional state, cognitive process, blah blah blah.
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