Word: cortexes
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...team devised. First they trained their monkeys to pick up a morsel of food and either eat it or put it into a container. Then they had the monkeys watch a researcher doing the same things. In both instances, mirror neurons in an area of the monkeys' parietal cortex, or inferior parietal lobule, fired more strongly when the goal of the grabber was to eat rather than to set the food aside. UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni and his colleagues recorded a similar response in 23 human volunteers when they watched a series of videos, one showing a hand reaching...
...MACAQUES, MIRROR NEURONS HAVE THUS FAR BEEN LOCALIZED to just two brain areas (the parietal and premotor cortexes) that exercise control over voluntary movement. In humans, however, evidence suggests that neurons with mirror properties may be more widely distributed. For example, a recent experiment conducted by Keysers and his colleagues revealed that a discrete patch of the somatosensory cortex lit up when the human subjects felt their legs brushed by a glove and when they watched a video in which an actor's legs were brushed...
...even more provocative result comes from a study undertaken in 2005 by UCLA developmental psychologist Mirella Dapretto and her colleagues. They found that autistic children, compared with other children, showed depressed activity in their premotor cortex while imitating or observing facial expressions--and the more severe the autism, the more depressed the activity was. The results did not surprise Dapretto. A central problem in autism, after all, is an impaired ability to understand the feelings of others, and it seems plausible, if far from proven, that a deficiency in the mirror-neuron system could be involved...
...each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these...
...groups--those who actually tickled the ivories and those who only imagined doing so--they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music--just as it had in those who actually played...