VITTORIO GALLESE
Department of Neuroscience, Section Pysiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Parma, Italy

Embodied simulation and its role in intersubjectivity.

Our seemingly effortless capacity of conceiving of the acting bodies inhabiting our social world as goal-oriented persons like us depends on the constitution of a shared 'we-centric' space. I have proposed that this shared manifold space can be characterized at the functional level as embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism by means of which our brain/body system models its interactions with the world. The mirror neuron system and other mirroring mechanisms in our brain represent sub-personal instantiations of embodied simulation. Embodied simulation provides a new empirically based notion of intersubjectivity, viewed first and foremost as intercorporeity. At difference with standard accounts of Simulation Theory, I qualify simulation as embodied in order to characterize it as a mandatory, pre-rational, non-introspectionist process. The Folk- Psychological model of mind reading proposed by standard accounts of Simulation Theory does not apply to the pre-linguistic and nonmetarepresentational character of embodied simulation. Embodied simulation is in fact challenging the notion that Folk-psychology is the sole account of interpersonal understanding. Before and below mind reading is intercorporeity as the main source of knowledge we directly gather about others. Parallel to the detached third-person sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal non-linguistic 'representations' of the body-states associated with actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, as if he or she were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation. It must be stressed that the term 'representation' is used here very differently from its standard meaning in classic cognitive science and analytic philosophy. It refers to a particular type of content, generated by the relations that our situated and inter-acting brain-body system instantiates with the world of others. Such content is pre-linguistic and pre-theoretical, but nevertheless has attributes normally and uniquely attributed to conceptual content. By means of an isomorphic format we can map others' actions onto our own motor representations, as well as others' emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and somatosensory representations. Social cognition is not only explicitly reasoning about the contents of someone else's mind. Our brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism, embodied simulation, which gives us a direct insight of other minds thus enabling our capacity to empathize with others. This proposal opens new perspectives on our understanding of autism and other psychopathological states such as schizophrenia. It can also shed new light on the mechanisms at work in psychotherapeutic relations.

back