Right now our work is focused on autism. So we're trying to figure out the difficulty with autism is that there's so many different subtypes. And so we're working on different subtype of autism and trying to categorize them so that we can focus interventions not just everyone with autism gets to do this one intervention but maybe if you have this particular subtype this would help you more. How would you just explain what autism is to someone who didn't know what it was? Yeah. Autism is defined by a deficit in social interaction. Not being able to think about other people's emotions and understand their intentions is probably the biggest disorder in autism.
Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. In some sense this is trivially true; our brains interact with the rest of our bodies, taking in signals and giving back instructions. But it seems bold to situate important elements of cognition itself in the actual non-brain parts of the body. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technologies to study how different parts of the brain and body are involved in different cognitive tasks. We talk a lot about mirror neurons, those brain cells that light up both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see someone else performing the action. Understanding how these cells work could be key to a better view of empathy and interpersonal interactions. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is an Associate Professor in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Department of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, and has also done research at the University of Parma and the University of California, Berkeley. Home page USC profile Lab home page Google Scholar Talk on Brain and Body
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