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Consciousness of body and mirror neuron system

Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: The consciousness of one's own body is the fundamental process of self-recognition.! This process is based on perception of peripersonal space and one's own body using visual, somatosensory, and vestibular inputs and also intrinsic motor signals. Of course these signals are very important for action control of the body. The sensory feedback and intrinsic motor signals were used for monitoring own action and update the representation of one's own body state. The consciousness of the one's own body is based on sensory motor integration for the motor control system. Accordingly, internal representation of the body in the brain is spatiotemporal dynamic organization, as Berlucchi and Aglioti claimed. In this paper, we use the term awareness3 for this dynamic consciousness of the body. We discuss here that corporeal awareness shares the parieto-premotor network with the sensorimotor control in the brain. This system appears to have the function of monitoring one's own body state and may be involved in the mechanisms of discrimination between self and others. Furthermore, the brain should represent other' s body. For example, recent neurophysiological studies revealed that neurons in the ventral premotor cortex (FS) and inferior parietal cortex (PFG) represent other's visual action on own motor representation, designated mirror neurons. These neurons of the monkey were activated during observation of other's action and also executing same action. The functional properties of these neurons are considered to be related to action recognition. Existence of mirror neurons suggests that there are some mechanisms for perception of other's body in the brain. We also discuss representation of other's body in brain. 2 Pathology of corporal awareness and the parieto-frontal circuit
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W261780554
FWCI:
Cites: 84
Cited by: 1
Related to: 10