Apraxia, metaphor and mirror neurons

Summary Ideomotor apraxia is a cognitive disorder in which the patient loses the ability to accurately perform learned, skilled actions. This is despite normal limb power and coordination. It has long been known that left supramarginal gyrus lesions cause bilateral upper limb apraxia and it was prop...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Medical hypotheses 2007, Vol.69 (6), p.1165-1168
Main Authors: McGeoch, Paul D, Brang, David, Ramachandran, V.S
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Apraxia, Ideomotor
Apraxias - diagnosis
Brain - physiology
Humans
Internal Medicine
Models, Biological
Models, Neurological
Models, Theoretical
Neurons - metabolism
Neurons - physiology
Parietal Lobe - physiology
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Summary:Summary Ideomotor apraxia is a cognitive disorder in which the patient loses the ability to accurately perform learned, skilled actions. This is despite normal limb power and coordination. It has long been known that left supramarginal gyrus lesions cause bilateral upper limb apraxia and it was proposed that this area stored a visual-kinaesthetic image of the skilled action, which was translated elsewhere in the brain into the pre-requisite movement formula. We hypothesise that, rather than these two functions occurring separately, both are complementary functions of chains of “mirror neurons” within the left inferior parietal lobe. We go on to propose that this neural mechanism in the supramarginal gyrus and its projection zones, which originally evolved to allow the creation of a direct map between vision and movement, was subsequently exapted to allow other sorts of cross-domain mapping and in particular those sorts of abstract re-conceptualisation, such as metaphor, that make mankind unique.
ISSN:0306-9877
1532-2777
DOI:10.1016/j.mehy.2007.05.017