Word: premotor
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...would have thought of asking a decade ago. But that was before University of Parma neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues began publishing the eyebrow-raising results of experiments they had been conducting with macaques. The Italian scientists were monitoring the monkeys' brain activity--observing how neurons in the premotor cortex buzzed with activity as the animals grasped a piece of food--when something strange kept happening. The monkeys would be sitting still, doing nothing in particular, and one of the researchers would pick up some raisins or sunflower seeds in order to place them on a tray. At that...
...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 traces its roots to hand gestures and facial expressions that, over...
...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...
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