Ricerca Bibliografica: Mirror Neuron System

Recent developments in neuroscience have provided us with a wealth of the basic knowledge and tools which are required for neurobiological understanding of the psychological concepts. This advantage enables contemporary scientists to suggest and test brain models for psychological concepts, theories, and methods. Considering the current dominance of biological ideas in psychiatry and psychology, such models are essential in confirmation of the psychological theories of mind. In this article a brain model for schemas as essential to cognitive theory is proposed. Schemas are seen as patterns which are recognized and memorized through the training phase of an autoassociative neural network. Then, these patterns are used to complete ambiguous aspects of future experiences through thalamo and hippocampal-cortical pathways. In relation to the self or the outside world when a pattern with unknown, noisy, or vague aspects is encountered, those aspects are completed by the principal components of previously learned patterns (schema). This process is to help the observer acquire a better understanding of the environment or the self. However, the patterns which are used to complete the uncertainties about the self or the environment are sometimes not good estimates of the reality and lead the person/patient to an illusionary perception of the self/environment. In this article, the role of the mirror neuron system in pattern recognition is also explained. Psychological and biological therapeutic implications of this model are discussed and the importance of a link between dynamic and cognitive therapies is rationalized. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21699351 34. J Neurophysiol. 2011 Jul;106(1):1-3. Epub 2011 Apr 27. Involvement of action-related brain regions in nicotine addiction. Yalachkov Y, Naumer MJ. Institute of Medical Psychology, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. [email protected] The study of Wagner et al. (J Neurosci 31: 894-898, 2011) reveals the neural correlates of spontaneously activated action representations in smokers when subjects watch movie characters smoke. We stress the importance of differentiating how these representations are activated: while the anterior intraparietal sulcus and inferior frontal gyrus are part of the mirror neuron system of smokers, the middle frontal gyrus, premotor cortex, and superior parietal lobule represent the smoking-related tool use skills and action knowledge activated by smoking paraphernalia. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21525371