The Mirror-Neuron System - Rizzolatti & Craighero

2004

“Mirror neurons are a particular class of visuomotor neurons, originally discovered in area F5 of the monkey premotor cortex, that discharge both when the monkey does a particular action and when it observes another individual (monkey or human) doing a similar action (Di Pellegrino et al. 1992, Gallese et al. 1996, Rizzolatti et al. 1996a)”. (P.169)

“The mirror neuron communication system has a great asset: Its semantics is inherent to the gestures used to communicate. This is lacking in speech. In speech, or at least in modern speech, the meaning of the words and the phono-articulatory actions necessary to pronounce them are unrelated. This fact suggests that a necessary step for speech evolution was the transfer of gestural meaning, intrinsic to gesture itself, to abstract sound meaning. From this follows a clear neurophysiological prediction: Hand/arm and speech gestures must be strictly linked and must, at least in part, share a common neural substrate.” (P.184)

Rizzolatti, Giacomo., Craighero Laila. Page 169, 174, 185, The Mirror-Neuron System, in: Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2004.