Word: rizzolatti
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Dates: during 2007-2007
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...question is one few researchers 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...
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...
...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 time, became increasingly complex...
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