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In the Making
Published in Stephen Temple, Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design, 2018
Another aspect of the brain, mirror neurons, were discovered in pioneering experiments at Parma, Italy, in the 1990s by cognitive neurologist Vittorio Gallese and his team. This work concluded that the actions that we see are simulated in the neural circuits that activate the area of the brain that processes this information but not the areas that actually coordinate action. (Mallgrave 2013, 134). Mirror neurons involve not just sight and touch but hearing as well (Robinson 2015, 49). Through mirror neurons, we embody the perceived actions of others and are thereby enabled to place ourselves, figuratively, within different types of media representations, be they digital or analog. This type of neural activity allows us to inhabit the worlds of our intangible, speculative thinking through what has been termed “embodied simulation” (Gallese 2015, 75). Pallasmaa recounts that the brain is consciously able to convert a maximum of 100 bits/second of information, but the total “information transmission capacity” of the brain is 1015 power. Thus, the majority of information passing through the brain happens unconsciously (Pallasmaa 2010, 2). It is in this unconscious, embodied realm—Valéry’s nowhere—where creative thinking begins.
Human Consciousness and the Mind
Published in Junichi Takeno, Self-Aware Robots, 2022
The discovery of mirror neurons is described here. Mirror neurons have a special function and were discovered in 1996 by G. Rizzolatti, an Italian brain science researcher (Rizzolatti, 1996). Mirror neurons were accidentally discovered when a researcher was having his lunch during an experiment and happened to notice that the nerve cells of the monkey in the experiment were activated vigorously. These particular nerve cells were also activated when the monkey was eating its own food. Surprisingly, the brain cells in question reacted in the same way as if the monkey itself was eating by just seeing others eating (Fig. 4.11). Based on this finding, the brain cell was named mirror neuron because it acts like a mirror.
Is the Motor Cortex Only an Executive Area? Its Role in Motor Cognition
Published in Alexa Riehle, Eilon Vaadia, Motor Cortex in Voluntary Movements, 2004
The description of the (motor) brain activity during action representation strongly suggests that the same areas are involved during different types of repre- sentations.28 Consciously evoking a motor image, making an evaluation of the feasibility of a movement, or observing an action performed by somebody else — to name only those factors — results in closely similar activation patterns. In addition, this same activation pattern can also be recorded during execution of the corresponding action. In other words, the neural correlates of representing an action are shared by different types of representations. A dramatic illustration of this concept of shared representation is offered by the finding of mirror neurons.29 Mirror neurons were identified in the monkey premotor cortex. They are activated in two conditions: first, they fire when the animal is involved in a specific motor action, like picking a piece of food with a precision grip; second, they fire when the immobile animal watches the same action performed by an external agent (another monkey or an experimenter). In other words, mirror neurons represent one particular type of action, irrespective of the agent who performs it. At this point, it could be suspected that the signal produced by these neurons, and exploited by other elements downstream in the information processing flow, would be the same for an action performed by the self and by another agent: the two modalities of that action (executed and observed) would thus completely share the same neural representation. In fact, other premotor neurons (the canonical neurons), and presumably many other neuron populations as well, fire only when the monkey performs the action and not when it observes it from another agent. This is indeed another critical feature of the shared representations concept: they overlap only partially, and the part of a given representation that does not overlap can be the cue for attributing the action to the self or to another.
Classification of autism spectrum disorders individuals and controls using phase and envelope features from resting-state fMRI data
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 2022
Mahshid Naghashzadeh, Mehran Yazdi, Alireza Zolghadrasli
Most of the scientific studies were initially dedicated to describing the type and extent of behavioural dysfunction seen in ASD. Results from this work caused the development of cognitive theories. Theory of mind (ToM), proposed by Baron-Cohen, is one of the most regarded explanations of autistic behaviour. Theory of Mind refers to the ability of the brain to understand the full range of the subjective mental states, including emotions, beliefs, imaginations, etc. ToM hypothesis suggests that individuals with ASD have an absent or underdeveloped ToM which impedes them from inferring the mental states of others (Baron-Cohen 2000; Hull et al. 2017). Another important theory about ASD is dysfunction in Mirror Neuron System (MNS). When an individual performs a task or watches another person doing a task, the Mirror Neuron system is activated. The lack of MNS activity during both the imitation and the observation of emotional expressions in children with ASD indicates that early dysfunction in the mirror neuron system may be at the core of the social deficits observed in autism (Dapretto et al. 2006).
Grasping the world from a cockpit: perspectives on embodied neural mechanisms underlying human performance and ergonomics in aviation context
Published in Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2018
Mariateresa Sestito, John Flach, Assaf Harel
Twenty-six years ago in Parma, Italy, a group of researchers headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti made a discovery that challenged conventional assumptions about the independence of perceptual and motor functions in the brain. Rizzolatti and colleagues found a special class of motor neurons in the monkey brain presenting a unique characteristic: these neurons responded not only when the animal performed an action, but also when it saw the same action being performed by someone else (Rizzolatti et al. 1996; Gallese et al. 1996) (Figure 1). Termed Mirror Neurons, these cells provide neural evidence that there is a tight functional coupling between perception and action. This idea was originally proposed by the psychologist J.J. Gibson, and served as the basis for the theory of direct perception and ecological psychology (Gibson, Olum, and Rosenblatt 1955). This theory and its consequent perception–action mapping at neural level contrasted with the traditional view in the field of cognitive psychology and neuroscience which considers perception and action as sequential information processing stages, segregated and substantiated in distinct brain areas (Mesulam 1998; see also Flach, Dekker, and Stappers 2008 for suggested ontological considerations).