Our Words Have a Weight. Motor and Perceptual Resonance through Language Grounding

This work starts from reviewing anatomical and neuro-physiological studies conducted on the monkey brain. Compelling evidence demonstrates the presence of neurons encoding different properties of the stimuli, i.e. motor neurons that are activated also by visual stimulation. These neurons are located in the ventral part of the monkey premotor cortex. Also in human brain there is an area that seems to be endowed with analogue functional properties: interestingly this area partially corresponds to the Broca’s area. The coexistence of motor and sensory properties at the level of neuronal structure suggests that motor system not only executes overt actions but also represents them internally. Interestingly this motor resonance seems to be the neural underpinning of the idea of simulation emerged in cognitive sciences: our concepts consist in the re-enactment of the same neural activation pattern running when we perceive their referents or when we interact with them. Consistently, perception and action cannot be conceived as secondary processes of our cognitive system. In this chapter I illustrate their bi-directional relationship by discussing two empirical studies in which authors used a linguistic task in addition to a motor and a perceptual one. If language understanding activates the motor system it should affect action production as well as action perception. The symmetrical modulation we found suggests the presence of analogous mechanisms underlying motor and perceptual resonance.