tool: anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or a purpose"We examine the line between language and music, how the brain processes sound, and we meet a composer who uses computers to capture the musical DNA of dead composers in order to create new work. We also re-imagine the disastrous 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…through the lens of modern neurology."http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21
One of the hallmarks of being human is our ability to empathise with others – to read people’s expressions and emotions. Even with complete strangers, we somehow understand how they are feeling, what they are thinking and what their intentions are. But how do we do it? Scientists have been grappling with this for ages. There just didn’t seem to be any obvious mechanism to explain it.Source: http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/apr01.html
But then, about 15 years ago, something weird happened in a monkey lab in Italy. Scientists there discovered a new type of brain cell. They called it a “mirror neuron”, because of its ability to mirror the activity of those around it. The neurons were firing not only when the monkey itself performed an action, but when it watched an experimenter perform it as well. So, even when the monkey was completely still, and did nothing but watch someone else pick up a peanut, its brain fired as though it were picking up the peanut itself. And that got researchers wondering if this could be the key to our exquisite mind-reading abilities. Toronto science journalist Alison Motluk set out to explore the implications of mirror neurons, and prepared a documentary, called Knowing Me, Knowing You. Here are the people she spoke to:
Dr. Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has been studying these neurons for some years now. He says they have the uncanny ability to mirror or mimic what’s going on in the brains of others.
Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, had had a hunch that imitating other people’s facial expressions was somehow linked to feeling what they were feeling. This turned out to be true.
Dr. Mirella Dapretto, who works with Dr. Iacoboni at UCLA, immediately began wondering if malfunctioning mirror neurons might explain the problems that autistic people have.
Dr. V.S. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. He thinks the combination of language and learning by imitation that mirror neurons seem to enable may explain why humans have such a rich and rapidly evolving culture.
