Word: neuroscientists
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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...
...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 of the grabber was to eat rather than to set the food aside. UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni and his colleagues recorded a similar response in 23 human volunteers when they watched a series of videos, one showing a hand reaching for a brimming teacup next to a plate full of cookies, another showing a hand reaching for an empty cup surrounded by crumbs...
...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...
...fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test...
...EXTREME EXAMPLE OF HOW CHANGES IN the input reaching the brain can alter its structure is the silence that falls over the somatosensory cortex after its owner has lost a limb. Soon after a car crash took Victor Quintero's left arm from just above the elbow, he told neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego that he could still feel the missing arm. Ramachandran decided to investigate. He had Victor sit still with his eyes closed and lightly brushed the teenager's left cheek with a cotton swab...