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What happens in our brain when the mind is considering itself? Until now, it has been unclear what happens during a navel-gazing session. Now a team of neuroscientists has shed light on the process by identifying an area of the brain that is larger in more introspective individuals. Introspection is the act of assessing or thinking about one's own thoughts, decisions and feelings. Stephen Fleming from University College London and his colleagues were interested in how the act of introspection - thought to be a crucial component of consciousness - links to the physiology of the brain.

Individuals with a high level of introspective ability should be more confident after making a correct choice and less confident after a poor decision than people who are less good at self-reflection. After the perceptual test, the team scanned the participants' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for links between the individual's introspective ability and their brain structure. They found that people with a high introspective ability had a larger amount of grey matter in the right anterior prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain located just behind the eyes, involved in decision-making. It is thought that there are different levels of consciousness. Sometimes we are aware of mental processes, like playing the piano, while others may proceed in the absence of consciousness, like driving a car, says Fleming. Thinking about our own thoughts occurs when we are more highly aware of our own consciousness.

"I am cautious about saying that what we are measuring here is consciousness," he says. "But we might be measuring something that is required for a particular type of conscious awareness." "The study addresses an intriguing problem," says neuroscientist Alan Cowey from the University of Oxford in the UK. "The results reveal a fascinating correlation between a level of self-awareness and activity in the prefrontal cortex. They do not yet reveal the neural mechanisms that underlie introspection but that will surely follow".