Resumen de Brain's mirror cells help actions speak louder
Powerful magnetic fields are known to temporarily disrupt brain cell activity, and a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is increasingly used in the lab to dampen specific areas of the brain. But TMS can also cause people's facial muscles to twitch, which could have distracted them from the task. John Michael at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and his team avoided this problem by using a longer-lasting kind of TMS, which dims brain activity for 20 minutes after the field is turned off. When TMS was applied to the brain region that controls hand movements, people were less able to guess the object in a hand-related task than in a task involving the mouth--and vice versa. Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma, part of the team that discovered mirror neurons, says the work supports the idea that they are involved in interpreting behavior.
