Embodied visual perception of distorted finger postures.

Bodily abnormalities in other persons often evoke an uneasy feeling, even disgust. Here, we studied the brain basis of such perceptual salience by presenting static pictures of distorted hand postures to healthy subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Cortical activation sensitive to distorted (vs. natural) finger postures was found-with right-hemispheric dominance-in the primary motor cortex, postcentral somatosensory areas, amygdala, and insula, and bilaterally in the putamen. This activation pattern suggests that the instantaneous "gut feelings" during the observation of bodily distortions in others are related to embodied percepts that also involve affect-related brain areas.