Reading about sensations recruits the posterior insula: An intracranial EEG study

How do we assess the meaning conveyed by words and sentences such as "it burns me" or "I feel cold"? As an alternative to symbolic and abstract semantic representation, embodied cognition suggests mental simulations of bodily experiences through sensorimotor activation. We recorded intracranial neural activity in human patients while they read short sentences related to abstract, action, and sensation semantic categories. Our results revealed an early functional dissociation between anterior and posterior insula: anterior insula showed a non-selective response across all semantic categories, whereas posterior insula presented an early selective response (around 170 ms) for sensation-related only. Furthermore, the intensity of this selective neural response in the posterior insula varied according to the intensity of subjective perceived pain evoked by the sentence. These results provide direct intracranial evidence for body sensation-related mechanisms in language comprehension.