Word: mirror
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...MIRROR NEURONS OPERATE ON A subconscious level; their activity is reflexive and involuntary. Yet their firing patterns may be capable of encoding not just movements but also the meaning behind the movements. Consider one of the tests Rizzolatti and his 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...
...links that are emerging between movement and meaning have inspired some scientists to see the mirror-neuron system as the biological foundation on which human language is constructed. Such speculation is supported indirectly by the fact that Broca's area--a critical language center in the left hemisphere of the human brain--appears to be a close analogue of the premotor mirror region in monkeys. Broca's area, it turns out, is important for sign language as well as spoken language, and its connection to the mirror system has led Rizzolatti and U.S.C. neuroscientist Michael Arbib to propose that language...
...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...
...while human mirror systems are similar, they are not identical. Individuals vary widely, for example, in their capacity to resonate with the emotional state of others--something that can be measured by psychological tests. In a sequel to their rancid-butter experiment, Keysers' team found that subjects with higher empathy scores on such tests also exhibited stronger mirror reactions to facial expressions of both disgust and pleasure...
...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...