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Your brain may map emotional concepts onto a hexagonal grid, new study suggests
Medical Xpress • • health
Key Points:
- Researchers discovered that the human brain maps emotions using a hexagonal grid system located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is involved in emotion regulation and decision-making.
- Using fMRI scans during tasks involving facial expressions and emotionally meaningful phrases, the brain showed a sixfold symmetry pattern, indicating a coordinate-based representation of emotions.
- The brain organizes emotions along two dimensions—valence (positive to negative) and arousal (calm to energized)—and this grid-like mapping applies across different types of emotional stimuli, reflecting abstract emotional meaning rather than visual features.
- The strength of the hexagonal grid pattern correlated with the consistency of participants' emotional judgments, suggesting this neural mapping supports reliable emotional understanding and flexible decision-making.
- This study provides new insight into how the brain structures emotional knowledge, proposing that the vmPFC uses a geometric coordinate system to relate emotions to one another rather than treating them as isolated categories.
