A specialized brain system may be required to recognize disgust on another person's face, and also to experience it firsthand.In the November issue of Nature Neuroscience, Calder et al. describe a patient shown by magnetic resonance imaging to have lesions in the insula and putamen, brain regions involved in taste and motor control, respectively.The patient could recognize happiness, fear, anger, sadness or surprise in facial expressions or in nonverbal sounds, and reacted normally to scenarios evoking anger or fear.He understood the concept of disgust intellectually and could correctly identify disgusting visual scenes.

nature neuroscience • volume 2 no 7 • july 1999 news and views 'now' .This suppression mechanism, they propose, is lost in confabulators.The authors relate their own findings to phenomena described in monkeys with orbital frontal lesions, who fail to suppress habits that no longer bring any rewards 9 .Such a mechanism would presumably be part of an error correction process.This is an interesting proposal, but there are several lines of evidence to suggest that loss of a suppression mechanism is only a partial explanation for confabulations.First, there is the richness of confabulations, exemplified by a patient of ours who described walking down the street the previous day talking to a previous Prime Minister about a joint building job 6 .Second, an individual patient can show confabulations that are stable across time and highly selective in content; one such example is a patient whose only confabulation was a belief that he had to go stock-taking, leading him to dress in formal clothes every morning 10 .It is difficult

April will see the launch of Neurolab, a set of experiments aboard the space shuttle that will investigate the effects of zero gravity on the nervous system.