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Chapter 8°
8 The lead author is Steven L. Small, M.D., Ph.D., a Professor of Neurology and Psychology, Associate Chair for Research in Neurology, Member of the Committees on Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience, and Senior Fellow, Computation Institute, at The University of Chicago. He is currently Director of the Human Neuroscience Laboratory and was founder of the Brain Research Imaging Center. He is an elected member of the American Neurological Association, a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Brain and Language. Small’s research concerns the neural basis of human language and its breakdown after injury. He has published more than 120 scientific articles, primarily about human language, from the perspectives of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience, human systems neuroscience, and clinical neurology.
Human language represents a unique product of our social species and the tremendous evolution of the primate cerebral cortex simultaneously supported the development of both. Language 1s the defining feature of our species: In his 12" century volume, Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides viewed it as tautological that man is a speaking animal, 1.c., “there is no third element besides life and speech in the definition of man”. But how does the brain implement this unique function in the context of its common ontogeny with social function? The current essay discusses the possibility that the recently discovered “mirror neurons” of the cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys play a special role in the ability of humans to understand each other with language by using a mechanism of observation and covert emulation. If the neurobiology of language were partly grounded on such systems of visual observation and imitation, this would overlap integrally with the biology of the social brain.
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Hidden Forces in Understanding Others: Mirror Neurons and Neurobiological Underpinnings
It is one thing to perceive objects in the environment and another to understand what is perceived. A rodent that senses an apple definitely has a notion that this represents something edible. A monkey might realize that the apple can be eaten but also can be thrown. A human might perceive it as a food, an object to be propelled, a temptation that should be resisted, or something that falls out of a tree at a specific acceleration. For each individual animal or person, understanding an apple means to take the sensory perceptions of the apple and to use previous experience and knowledge to fit it into an overall context. In this way, understanding a particular apple depends on our previously having seen, touched, and smelled apples, eaten them, read about them, and perhaps even been hit by a falling or thrown apple. All of our previous experiences come to bear every time we encounter a new perception that we must make sense of, and of course, this represents virtually every moment of our waking lives.
Our perceptions vary enormously from seeing simple objects (e.g., apples), taking in more complex entities (e.g., restaurants, neighborhoods), hearing noises or speech, and seeing actions (e.g., simple manual actions, sporting events). A major question for brain research is how we can possibly understand all these different kinds of input, and what brain circuits are used to do so. We assume that such an understanding means taking these inputs, weighing them against our previous
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