Part VII Introduction Music, Language, and Motor Programming: A Common Neural Organization?

摘要

The human species is expert at communicating information, ideas, and emotional states. Such communication usually involves complex arrangements of motor movements, varying from the vibration of vocal chords during speech, to the coordination of arm movements during physical gestures, to the bowing of a violin during a musical performance. In recent years, the organization and prediction of such motor behavior has come to the forefront in studies of human perception and cognition, a trend that has been iueled by the discovery of "mirror neurons" in macaque brains (neurons that fire not only when an action is performed, but also when that action is heard or observed) and the subsequent identification of a homologous mirror-neuron system (MNS) in the human brain.