Scientists have discovered that a system in our brain which responds to actions we are watching, such as a dancer's delicate pirouette or a masterful martial arts move, reacts differently if we are also skilled at doing the move. The University College London (UCL) study, published in the latest online edition of Cerebral Cortex, may help in the rehabilitation of people whose motor skills are damaged by stroke, and suggests that athletes and dancers could continue to mentally train while they are physically injured.

In the UCL study, dancers from the Royal Ballet and experts in capoeira - a Brazilian martial arts form - were asked to watch videos of ballet and capoeira movements being performed while their brain activity was measured in a MRI scanner. The same videos were shown to normal volunteers while their brains were scanned.

The UCL team found greater activity in areas of the brain collectively known as the 'mirror system' when the experts viewed movements that they had been trained to perform compared to movements they had not. The same areas in non-expert volunteers brains didn't care what dance style they saw.

While previous studies have found that the system contains mirror neurons or brain cells which fire up both when we perform an action and when we observe it, the new study shows that this system is fine tuned to each person's 'motor repertoire' or range of physical skills. The mirror system was first discovered in animals and has now been identified in humans. It is thought to play a key role in helping us to understand other people's actions, and may also help in learning how to imitate them.

Professor Patrick Haggard of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience says: "We've shown that the mirror system is finely tuned to an individual's skills. A professional ballet dancer's brain will understand a ballet move in a way that a capoiera expert's brain will not. Our findings suggest that once the brain has learned a sk
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Contact: Jenny Gimpel
j.gimpel@ucl.ac.uk
44-207-679-9739
University College London
21-Dec-2004

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