Mar 15th, 2007
Preparation And Performance Are One Brain Process
This doesn’t really surprise me. If you see someone trip & fall, you feel it, you react to it as if it happened to you. Ever since they discovered mirror neurons, it’s been no secret that seeing, thinking about, and doing something are one thing to the brain.
The researchers predicted that when they gave the subjects a cue that they were about to perform a hard task, only the superior parietal cortex, known for its involvement in spatial attention, and the premotor cortex, known for planning movements, would activate. Then, the prefrontal cortex, known for its role in decision-making, would activate after the stimulus was presented. But they were wrong.
“We found that all of these regions began to activate when the subjects prepared to do the task, even the prefrontal, which is the region that makes the decision on what to do,” said Schumacher. “Activating the decision-making region even before the stimulus is presented seems to allow for a quicker response, it allows the brain to get a running start.”