Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.1
The Quiet Revolution of Existential Neuroscience
by Marco Iacoboni
Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center
Dept. of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
Neuropsychiatric Institute
Brain Research Institute
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Address correspondence to:
Marco Iacoboni, MD PhD
Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
660 Charles E. Young Drive South
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
iacoboni@loni.ucla.edu
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.2
Introduction: Clarifying the Assumptions
In the last two decades, we have witnessed the merging of scientific disciplines
into novel, interdisciplinary enterprises. Cognitive science and neuroscience have
produced the novel and quite successful field of cognitive neuroscience. Social
psychology and neuroscience have produced in parallel the new exciting field of
social neuroscience. Moreover, in the last decade, social psychologists and
cognitive neuroscientists have effectively joined forces to create the fascinating
field of social cognitive neuroscience. In this last field, the scientific approach that
dominates is the one that uses functional imaging techniques to study brainbehavior relationships. Other approaches, for instance lesion studies in
neurological patients, are also used to study the neural basis of social cognition
but less frequently than the functional imaging approach. In this chapter, I will
discuss some of the work that has been performed in my lab on mirror neurons,
imitation, and social cognition. This work has been carried out mostly using
imaging techniques. Before discussing this work, however, I would like to make
explicit some tacitly held assumptions in the functional imaging and the social
cognitive neuroscience field.
The dominant underlying broadly shared assumptions of all the scientific
fields mentioned above, and particularly of functional neuroimaging - those
unsaid but implicitly held concepts that constitute a general framework for data
interpretation and more generally for what make sense in the practice of science
- are mostly derived from assumptions dominant in classical cognitive science
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.3
and in what John Haugeland termed good old-fashioned artificial intelligence
(GOFAI) (Haugeland 1985). The three main assumptions I will discuss here can
be called the subject/world and inner/outer dichotomy, the strictly linked
assumption on the role of representations in the mind of the cognitive subject
contemplating the world, and finally the assumption, in turn linked to the second
one, of the atomism of the input that the cognitive agent should receive from the
world. The first two assumptions can be formulated as such: the cognitive agent
or subject understands the objects of the world by using internal mental states
that represent those objects of the world and by so doing produces knowledge.
These internal mental states represent the outer objects of the world in an inner
mental world, thus these representations do not really depend on the objects
they represent. These assumptions fit naturally the experimental setup of brain
imaging studies, in which a subject is isolated in a scanner and is presented with
various stimuli that the subject must 'process', yielding some brain activity that
reflects the brain 'representations' of the stimuli. Moreover, different kinds of
elements (motion, color or even 'social' versus 'nonsocial') of what is presented
to the subjects are assumed to be processed largely independently of each other
(the assumption of the atomism of the input), thus yielding different types of brain
activity related to different elements of the input. And this picture seems quite
accurate, in that we can reliably induce activations in specific brain areas for
specific kinds of stimuli. For instance, area V4 is activated by color, area MT/V5
is activated by motion, the so-called face fusiform area (FFA) is activated by
watching a face. Even the empirical work and theoretical approach that
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.4
challenges the notion that certain kinds of stimuli are processed by localized and
specialized neural systems (Haxby et al. 2001) takes the assumption of the
atomism of the input for granted.
What I would like to suggest is that one can look at things with different
eyes. In fact, some empirical work in the neuroscience of sociality seems to
suggest - quietly, but resolutely - that the assumptions of the subject/world,
inner/outer dichotomy, of representations independent of the things they
represent, and of the atomism of the input may not be easily applied in some
cases. Thus, rather than the picture of a meaning-giving brain that looks at the
outside world and makes sense of it with a reflective and analytic approach, what
emerges from some work in social cognitive neuroscience is the view of a human
brain that needs a body to exist in a world of shared social norms in which
meaning originates from being-in-the-world. This view is reminiscent of motives
recurring in at least one flavor of what is called existential phenomenology
(Heidegger 1927). For this reason, I call this view existential neuroscience.
The Subject/World, Inner/Outer Dichotomy
One of the most powerful aspects of human behavior is the tendency to imitate
others. We do this very early in life (Meltzoff and Moore 1977) but we also tend to
do it throughout adulthood (Chartrand and Bargh 1999). There is a
developmental trajectory according to which a prepotent form of imitation earlier
in life (Wapner and Cirillo 1968) is what one could call specular imitation. That is,
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.5
when the imitator and the model are face-to-face, the imitator tends to imitate the
model as if in front of a mirror. Thus, if the model raises the left hand, the imitator
raises the right hand. In our imaging work, we had identified a fronto-parietal
system relevant to imitation (Iacoboni et al. 1999; Koski et al. 2002) that is likely
the human homologue of fronto-parietal areas in the macaque brain containing
mirror neurons, that is, neurons that fire when the monkey performs an action
and when she sees somebody else performing the same action (Rizzolatti and
Craighero 2004). Within the human fronto-parietal mirror system activated during
imitation, the activity in the frontal area (pars opercularis of the inferior frontal
gyrus) seems particularly relevant to aspects of imitation associated with the goal
of an action. For instance, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study
from our group shows that, when actions with visible goals are imitated, the
activity in pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus is higher compared to
imitating the same movement in absence of a visible goal (Koski et al. 2002). In a
subsequent study, we used frameless stereotaxy to guide repetitive Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) over pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus.
The rTMS approach allows experimenters to impair transiently the functions of
the cortical areas directly stimulated. While stimulated over pars opercularis of
the inferior frontal gyrus, subjects had a selective impairment in imitation but not
in a visuo-motor task in which the motor output was identical to the imitation task
(Heiser et al. 2003). Importantly, the deficit in imitation was selective for the goal
of the action, but not for specific aspects of the movement such as movement
time and trajectory. Thus, both fMRI and rTMS provide complementary evidence
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.6
supporting the relevance of pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus with
regard to the goal of imitative actions. It turns out that this same cortical region
shows higher activity during specular imitation (right hand imitation of a left hand
action) compared to anatomical imitation (right hand imitation of a right hand
action) (Koski et al. 2003). If one considers the relevance of goals for this cortical
region, the dominance of specular imitation early in development, and the fact
that specular imitation substantially means that both the imitator and the model
share the same sector of space during imitative behavior, one is led to
hypothesize that a general goal of imitating others seems to be 'directed toward'
them, a process according to which a certain intimacy between model and
imitator is achieved through space and action sharing. What is this intimacy if not
the interdependence of both parties, model and imitator, rather than the
expression of a separation between the perceiver (the imitator) and the perceived
(the model)?
Another example of how the relation between neural activity and space
seems to map better onto a concept of being-amidst rather than onto the concept
of a subject-world dichotomy comes from the neurophysiological work in primates
of Graziano and collaborators. The classical and intuitive concept of space is that
space is a unitary medium through which we move and operate and interact with
others (here, a socially relevant practice that seems strongly culture-dependent is
the practice to stand the appropriate distance from people) (Dreyfus 1991). This
classical and intuitive concept of a unitary space, however, has been challenged
in the last two decades by converging observations in clinical neurology and
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.7
primate neurophysiology. Patients with hemi-inattention tend to neglect things
located in the hemi-space contralateral to the cerebral lesion. Typically, the
lesions associated with hemi-neglect are located in the right hemisphere and the
hemi-inattention is for the left hemi-space. Some of these patients, however,
show a double dissociation, such that some patients show hemi-neglect only for
near space and some other patients show hemi-neglect only for far space
(Bisiach et al. 1986; Halligan and Marshall 1991). Near space is practically
definable by what is reachable with the hand. The boundaries between near and
far space, however, are flexible. In fact, when a patient with near space neglect is
given a long stick to bisect a line in far space, the patient shows the classical
rightward bias typical of unilateral neglect also in far space. In contrast, if the
patient bisects the line in far space with a lightpen, no rightward bias is observed
(Berti and Frassinetti 2000). These data suggest that the use of the stick altered
the near space map, stretching it at a much larger distance from the body of the
patient. Neurophysiological data from Iriki and collaborators provide the singlecell mechanism for this phenomenon (Iriki et al. 1996). Iriki and colleagues
trained monkeys to use a rake to get food. Monkeys were initially clumsy with the
rake but eventually learned how to use it proficiently. Single-cell recordings in
parietal bimodal neurons with a tactile receptive field at the hand and a visual
receptive field around the hand and anchored to this body part demonstrated that
after the monkey had learned how to master the tool, the visual receptive field of
the parietal neuron had extended to incorporate the entire length of the rake.
These data suggest that the kind of spatial maps provided by the primate brain
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.8
are pragmatic maps, determined by the kind of actions that can be performed in
that space sector. In fact, the fronto-parietal networks associated with near and
far space have physiological properties in line with this concept. The frontoparietal cortical areas relevant to far space are the frontal and parietal eye fields,
with neurons having properties associated with ocular movements and with
sensory responses to non graspable stimuli like light flashes. The fronto-parietal
cortical areas associated with near space have neurons active during reaching
and grasping movements, and with sensory responses to three-dimensional,
graspable objects (Rizzolatti et al. 1994; Rizzolatti et al. 1997).
The work of Graziano and colleagues has initially defined the polysensory
properties of premotor and posterior parietal neurons that seem relevant to
creating a peripersonal space map (Graziano et al. 1994; Graziano et al. 1997;
Graziano and Gross 1998; Graziano et al. 1999). Neurons in two polysensory
areas in the frontal and parietal lobe that are also well connected anatomically,
the ventral intraparietal area (VIP) and the polysensory zone (PZ) in the
precentral gyrus, have tactile receptive fields mostly with respect to the arm and
the head. These neurons also respond to visual and auditory stimuli located
close to their tactile receptive field. These properties seem to suggest that these
neurons provide a map of the space around us. This space map might as well be
the map representing a space completely separated from us, albeit close.
However, electrical stimulation of these two areas produces complex,
coordinated movements that are identical to defensive movements occurring in
natural conditions (Cooke and Graziano 2003; Cooke et al. 2003; Cooke and
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.9
Graziano 2004). For instance, a set of polysensory neurons with tactile receptive
fields on the face of the monkey and visual receptive fields around the tactile
receptive field, when stimulated produce a defensive posture that includes '..a
facial grimace, a squinting of the eye, a turning of the head away from the side of
the sensory receptive fields, a hunching of the shoulders, a fast thrusting of the
hand into the space beside the head, and a turning of the hand such that the
palm faced outward, away from the head' (Graziano et al. 2002). The sensorymotor integration properties of these frontal and parietal areas suggest that,
rather than implementing an abstract representation of an 'outer' near space,
these neural ensembles are relevant to a direct sense of being-amidst, of beingin-the-world. One could argue, however, that after all these fronto-parietal cortical
areas seem relevant to very basic aspects of sensory-motor behavior, but not so
relevant to more complex behaviors that may play a more central role in human
sociality. The following sections of this chapter will discuss increasingly more
complex, and more 'social', aspects of human behavior to test whether or not we
should abandon the mentalistic dominant assumptions I discussed above in favor
of a more 'existential' (remember the dictum 'existence precedes essence')
approach.
The Assumption of Internal Representations
A corollary of the inner/outer dichotomy is that the outer world must be
represented internally. Recent data on motor facilitation during action
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.10
observation, however, suggest that this idea, dominant in cognitive science, may
not be entirely correct. Using TMS, Fadiga and colleagues (Fadiga et al. 1995)
reported for the first time that action observation facilitates corticospinal
excitability. They stimulated the primary motor cortex of normal volunteers while
recording motor evoked potentials (MEPs) over muscles of the hand contralateral
to the stimulated motor cortex. Fadiga and colleagues recorded greater MEPs
while subjects observed actions, compared to control experimental conditions.
These findings have been replicated in other labs, including ours (Strafella and
Paus 2000; Gangitano et al. 2001; Aziz-Zadeh et al. 2002; Aziz-Zadeh et al.
2004). The most commonly accepted explanation for this effect is the following:
watching an action activates inferior frontal mirror neurons in ventral premotor
cortex. These neurons have a direct input onto primary motor cortex. Thus, the
activation in inferior frontal mirror neurons modulates the sub-threshold
membrane potential of primary motor neurons, such that these neurons are more
readily excitable by the trans-cranial magnetic pulse.
One of the most important aspects of this motor facilitation is that it is
muscle-specific. That is, facilitation can be observed only in muscles involved in
the observed action, but not in other muscles. This is true even for muscles of the
same body part. That is, if subjects observe the extension of fingers, only
muscles involved in finger extension, but not muscles involved in finger flexion,
will show the facilitation. The specificity of the effect and the fact that the effect
can be measured at the level of muscle activity in observing subjects not directly
involved in any task suggest that this motor resonance behavior – rather than
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.11
being the correlate of a representation of actions of others, that is an entity with
informational content about the actions of others that is completely independent
of those actions – is a dynamic, embodied, relational process of some form of
imitation. Given that it would be highly inefficient to parrot others continuously, it
is likely that there exist neural control mechanisms that suppress such embodied,
imitation-like form of action recognition. In fact, there is evidence that patients
with large prefrontal lesions may show uncontrolled imitative behavior (Lhermitte
et al. 1986; De Renzi et al. 1996), likely due to the dysfunction of such control
mechanisms.
Similar phenomena have been observed even in the domain of language.
Listening to speech sounds activates primary motor areas necessary to produce
speech sounds, as reported in a recent fMRI study performed in our lab (Wilson
et al. 2004). Moreover, while listening to speech sounds, tongue muscles show
facilitation when stimulated with TMS. Once again, this facilitation is specific to
the muscles necessary to emit the sounds listened to (Fadiga et al. 2002). It
seems that the only way we can perceive things is by using our motor system
and our body to mimic those things.
This seems to be true even in the domain of emotions and empathy. It is
well known that humans have the automatic tendency to imitate each other while
interacting socially, the so-called 'Chameleon Effect' (Hatfield et al. 1994). It has
been shown that the tendency to imitate others in social situation correlates with
the tendency to be empathic (Chartrand and Bargh 1999). At the level of neural
systems, it is well known that the limbic system is very important for emotional
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.12
behavior. In our work on imitation, we had identified a neural architecture for
imitation comprising three major cortical systems, the superior temporal cortex,
the rostral part of the posterior parietal cortex, and the inferior frontal cortex.
Within this architecture, the superior temporal cortex would provide a higher
order visual description of the action, the posterior parietal cortex would provide
somatosensory information, and the inferior frontal cortex would code the goal of
the action (Iacoboni 2003, in press; Iacoboni et al. in press). Thus, we have here
two well-identified large-scale neural systems for emotion and imitation, but a
strong functional link between the two, as suggested by the behavioral data on
mimicry and empathy (Hatfield et al. 1994; Chartrand and Bargh 1999), suggest
that these two systems must interact in an even larger scale network. Anatomical
data on the insula suggest that the dysgranular sector of the insula connect the
limbic system to the three major systems comprising the neural architecture for
imitation, namely superior temporal cortex, posterior parietal cortex and inferior
frontal cortex. To test whether these anatomical connections would result in a
functionally significant large-scale network we used fMRI while subjects were
observing and imitating facial emotional expressions. What we observed (Carr et
al. 2003) was a substantially similar pattern of activated areas during observation
and imitation - with greater activity during imitation than observation - in all the
critical areas outlined above, thus suggesting two main concepts: first, to
perceive emotions of others we need to activate the same brain areas we use to
express those emotions; second, we do this by using a large scale neural
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.13
network comprising cortical areas relevant to imitation, the anterior insula and the
limbic system.
The assumption of the atomism of the input
Another critical assumption that permeates cognitive neuroscience in
general and social cognitive neuroscience in particular is what could be called
the assumption of the atomism of the input. This basically means that one
assumes the mind can process elements of the world independent of each other
and of the context they are in. Thus, a given situation can be processed by using
some combinatorial strategy over categories of fixed, self-standing, and contextfree elements. This assumption has been challenged on logical grounds (Andler
2000; Taylor 2000). Here I am providing some experimental neuroscience
evidence that challenges the assumption of the atomism of the input as well.
In area F5 of the macaque brain there are premotor neurons that fire
during object-directed actions such as grasping, manipulating, holding, tearing
(Rizzolatti et al. 1988). Some of these neurons have also sensory properties, in
that the neurons fire while the monkey is not making any movement but is simply
observing certain kinds of stimuli. There are at least two major classes of visuomotor neurons in F5, the so-called mirror neurons discussed above and
canonical neurons. Canonical neurons have motor properties identical to mirror
neurons, that is, both types of neurons fire during object-directed actions. Mirror
and canonical neurons are distinguished by their sensory properties. As said
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.14
above, mirror neurons fire at the sight of object-directed actions performed by
others but not at the sight of pantomimed actions in absence of the object.
Canonical neurons fire at the sight of graspable three-dimensional objects
(Gallese et al. 1996). The commonly accepted interpretation of these sensory
properties is that mirror neurons provide some form of action recognition,
whereas canonical neurons provide some form of analysis of the affordance of
the object, how-to-grab-that-thing. This interpretation is quite reasonable and at
first sight it does not seem to go against the assumption of the atomism of the
input. In fact, it looks like different kinds of things (actions and objects) are
processed by different kinds of neurons. However, there is indeed a problem.
Canonical neurons do not fire at the sight of an object-directed action, even
though the object is visible. This neural property of canonical neurons, which is
not well known (Vittorio Gallese made me aware of this property of canonical
neurons during a conversation in Tucson in 2001 and Giacomo Rizzolatti has
recently confirmed it in an e-mail) is really problematic for the assumption of the
atomism of the input, because there is no apparent reason why canonical
neurons should not fire at the sight of a cup that somebody else is going to
grasp. After all, these neurons do fire at the sight of the cup when nobody is
going to grasp it. Thus, the neural activity in F5 while watching somebody
grasping a cup – rather than being a combinatorial activity of neurons that
respond separately to elements of the scene, that is of mirror neurons
responding to the sight of the action and of canonical neurons responding to the
sight of the visible object –mysteriously sums up to firing in mirror neurons and
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.15
absence of firing in canonical neurons. This firing pattern is not readily explained
by an account of processing of self-standing, context-free elements. It is much
more readily explained by a holistic stance, which assumes that the nature of any
given element is determined only by the 'whole' and that this 'whole' is never
simply determined by the sum of its elements. Thus, when the cup is going to get
grasped by somebody, it is no longer simply a cup, it belongs to the grasping
action. This concept is reminiscent of the intentional arc of Merleau-Ponty ("From
the outset the grasping movement is magically at its completion") (Merleau-Ponty
1945).
A different kind of empirical evidence also seems in support of a holistic
stance and much less of the atomism of the input. In a recent imaging study we
investigated the role of mirror neurons in understanding the intentions of others
(Iacoboni et al. 2004a). It has been proposed early on that mirror neurons may
provide a neural mechanism for understanding the intentions of other people
(Gallese and Goldman 1998). Most of the evidence on mirror neurons, however,
could be interpreted more parsimoniously as suggesting that mirror neurons
provide a relatively simple action recognition mechanism. Such a mechanism is
reminiscent of some features of categorical perception (Liberman et al. 1957;
Diehl et al. 2004). In fact, some mirror neurons do not discriminate between
stimuli of the same category (i.e., the sight of different kinds of grasping actions
can activate the same neuron) but do discriminate well between actions
belonging to different categories even when the observed actions share several
visual features. These properties seem more likely to support an action
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.16
recognition mechanism ("that's a grasp") than an intention coding mechanism.
This is because the same action can be associated with different intentions. We
can grasp a cup in order to drink or in order to clean up the table. Given that
there is not a one-to-one mapping between actions and intentions, one might
conclude that mirror neurons are exclusively involved in action recognition or at
least in some aspects of it.
Typically, however, the context in which the actions occur is an important
clue for clarifying the intentions of others (the "why" of an action). The same
action done in two different contexts acquires different meanings and may reflect
two different intentions. Thus, we investigated whether the observation of the
same grasping action – either embedded in contexts that cued the intention
associated with the action or in absence of a context cuing the observer - elicited
the same or differential activity in mirror areas for grasping in the human brain. If
mirror neurons for grasping simply code the type of observed action, then the
activity in mirror areas should not be influenced by the presence or the absence
of context. If, in contrast, mirror neurons code the intention associated with the
observed action, then the presence of a context that cues the observer should
modulate activity in mirror areas. To test these competing hypotheses, we
studied 23 normal volunteers with fMRI while they watched three kinds of stimuli:
grasping hand actions without a context, context only (a scene containing
objects), and grasping hand actions embedded in contexts. The context cued the
intention associated with the grasping action (either drinking or cleaning up) in
the condition displaying both action and context. We found that observing
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.17
grasping actions embedded in contexts yielded greater activity in inferior frontal
cortex mirror areas than observing grasping action in absence of contexts and
observing contexts only (Iacoboni et al. 2004a). This suggests that mirror
neurons do not simply provide an action recognition mechanism, but rather they
represent a neural system for coding the intentions of other people. Above all,
the activity in inferior frontal mirror areas while subjects observed the action
embedded in the context was above and beyond the sum of activity in the same
area while subjects observed only the grasping action or only the context. Again,
rather then the combinatorial processing of elements, this neural pattern seems
to reflect more a holistic stance towards contexts, actions and intentions.
A default human state: Being social
We are skilled at existing. And skilled at existing certainly means the
ability to negotiate a complex network of social interactions in which we are
thrown into. In spite of this complexity, it seems we are able to understand the
social relations between people automatically and effortlessly, even though we
briefly glance at interacting people with our peripheral vision while we are
engaged in our everyday activities, like driving, going to the mall, buying fresh
produce at the Farmer's market. How do we do this? In a recent study, we asked
subjects to watch 20-seconds videoclips depicting realistic everyday interactions.
The clips were organized such that during the first twelve seconds only one
person was shown (the single person segment), whereas in the last eight
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.18
seconds there was an interaction between the first person and a second person
(the relational segment). When compared to a resting baseline, both the single
person and the relational segments yielded activation in areas known to be
relevant to socially important stimuli, such as the face fusiform area, inferior
frontal mirror areas and superior temporal areas responding to actions and
biological motion. Moreover, two medial cortical areas, the dorsomedial prefrontal
cortex and the medial parietal cortex, revealed signal increases compared to the
resting baseline. The relational segment of the clip also yielded signal increases
in all these areas compared to the single person segment of the clip (Iacoboni et
al. 2004b). What is notable here is that the dorsomedial prefrontal and medial
parietal cortices belong to a set of areas that are known collectively as the default
state areas of the human brain. This is because these areas tend to show taskindependent de-activation in a wide variety of experimental conditions. This
puzzling feature led researchers to assign functions to these regions on the basis
of the experimental conditions that de-activated less these areas (Mitchell et al.
2002). However, this interpretational approach is quite unusual. Typically,
functions to brain systems are assigned on the basis of the experimental
conditions that increase activity in the neural systems under investigation. What
we proposed on the basis of our findings is that one of the default state of
humans is to 'think socially', explicitly or implicitly, and the cortical areas mostly
engaged with this continuous social thinking are the ones that get de-activated
when artificial laboratory tasks with very little ecological validity are used. Other
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.19
reports have recently supported our suggestion (Greene et al. 2001; Mitchell et
al. 2004; Rilling et al. 2004).
Interestingly, these medial prefrontal and medial parietal areas show
signal increase in politically sophisticated individuals while these subjects
respond to political questions. In contrast, political novices (that is, people that
know and care little about politics) show decreased activity in these medial areas
while responding to political questions (Schreiber and Iacoboni, in preparation).
These political novices behave like typical subjects in a typical cognitive
experiment. Taken together, these findings suggest that the activity of these
areas truly reflect an existential form of skill. Politically sophisticated people think
about politics almost continuously. Politics is certainly one of the fabrics of their
lives. We are all skilled at understanding social relationships, we do it all the time.
The activity in these medial cortical areas seems to correlate with this existential
form of skill. If this is correct, a prediction that can be made is that people with
social problems, like autistic individuals, should show reduced activity in medial
prefrontal and medial parietal cortex while watching social interactions, compared
to control subjects.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I invited the reader to look at things with different eyes. We
are so entrenched in our way of doing science that we take for granted
assumptions that may need to be re-discussed. Some of these assumptions are
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.20
so basic that often mold our own language, making it very difficult to see things
differently. I hope I provided some evidence from the neuroscience of social
behavior that will invite people to adopt, at least temporarily, a different
interpretational perspective. This approach may disclose a whole new world.
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.21
Acknowledgements
Supported by Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, Brain Mapping
Support Foundation, Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation,
Tamkin Foundation, Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, Capital Group
Companies Charitable Foundation, Robson Family, William M. and Linda R.
Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation,
Northstar Fund, and grants from National Center for Research Resources
(RR12169, RR13642 and RR08655), National Science Foundation (REC0107077), and National Institute of Mental Health (MH63680).
Iacoboni: Existential Neuroscience.22
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