Ferdinand Binkofski

The embodied approach to language may find a neurophysiological basis in the recent discovery, in monkeys as well as in humans, of two kinds of visuomotor neurons: canonical and mirror neurons. These neurons were first found in the rostral part of ventral premotor cortex in the monkey (area F5) and later on also in a sector of the inferior parietal lobule. Both neurons are active during the actual execution of object directed actions. Besides their motor properties, canonical neurons discharge to the visual presentation of objects that can be grasped with the specific type of prehension (object directed action) motorically coded by the neuron even when grasping movement is not required. Mirror neurons instead fire when the monkey makes a goal- directed action and when it observes another monkey or an experimenter performing the same or a similar action.

The discovery of canonical and mirror neurons has clearly demonstrated that an organism’s worldview is derived from a strict integration of sensory and motor information inside the brain (for a review see Rizzolatti and Craighero, 2004). More generally, many recent theories argue against the existence of a separation between perception, action, and cognition, favouring rather a view that incorporates motor aspects in perception and that underlines the continuity and the interchanges between perception and action (Anderson, 2003; Berthoz, 1997; Hommel et al., 2001). The view that cognition is embodied, i.e., that it depends on the experiences that result from possessing a body with given physical characteristics and a particular sensorimotor system, has been recently supported by experimental evidence.