Research Seminar - March 05, 1999

Abstract

This talk presents a report on joint work with Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma, Italy.

In monkeys, premotor cortex contains neurons that discharge both when the monkey grasps or manipulates objects and when it observes the experimenter making similar actions. These neurons (mirror neurons) appear to represent a system that matches observed events to similar internally generated actions, forming in this way a link between actor and observer.

Imaging the human brain shows that a mirror system for gesture recognition exists also in humans and includes Broca's area, a key brain region in the human language system.

We thus develop the hypothesis that speech derived from an ancient gestural communication system based on the mirror mechanism in which the link between actor and observer became a link between the sender and the receiver of each message.

(The talk will not assume that the audience has a background in neuroscience.)