If cognitive neuroscience is meant to investigate what makes us human, cultural artifacts and artistic expressions should be at the top of the list of its explananda. Cognitive neuroscience, in tight cooperation and dialogue with the humanities, can shed new light on several theoretical issues related to aesthetics, traditionally dealt with exclusively within the camp of the humanities. A succinct description of embodied simulation theory in relation to aesthetic experience is proposed, and some accomplishments of this bottom-up approach to the experience of visual art and film are illustrated. The notion of “habit” is introduced, it is connected to its potential underlying neural mechanisms, and to the production and reception of human cultural artifacts. Capitalizing upon pragmatism, Pierre Bourdieu, and practice theory, the relationship between body, habit, practice, and rituals and its bearing on the creation of symbolic objects and cultural artifacts is analyzed from a neuropragmatist approach, which emphasizes the procedural and implicit forms of human cognition. The suggested gradual transition from tool-making to symbol-making grants the following: (a) It shows that utilitarian and symbolic behavior are both chapters of the same cognitive technology trajectory; (b) it does not require one to assume that symbol-making is the late externalization of a previously existing inner symbolic thought, because symbolic thought and symbol-making are the co-constructive outcome of the development of shared performative practices and habits; (c) it is fully compatible with the neurobiological characterization of human relational potentialities as instantiated by embodied simulation. It is proposed that through the repetition, combination, and memorization of particular shared behaviors and actions, and their mimetic ritualization, the social group infuses new cultural meanings into reused bodily performances.

Introduction

Our social mental skills enable us to successfully retrieve the mental contents of others. Sometimes we misrepresent them, henceforth misunderstanding others. Most of the time, though, we are pretty good at understanding what is the goal of others’ behaviour, why the goal was set, and on the basis of which previous elements it was set as such. We are doing it effortlessly and continuously during our daily social interactions. How is that accomplished? The dominant view in cognitive science is to put most efforts into clarifying the formal rules structuring a solipsistic mind. Much less investigated is what triggers the sense of social identity that we experience with the multiplicity of ‘other selves’ populating our social world. Is the solipsistic type of analysis inspired by folk-psychology the best explanatory approach? In particular, is it doing full justice to the phenomenal aspects of our social intentional relations?

As human beings, we do not only mentally entertain an ‘objective’ account of the behaviours constituting the social world in which we live. Beyond phenomenally experiencing the external, objective nature of an observed action, and viewing it as something displayed and acted by an external biological object with distinct qualities, we also experience its goal-directedness or intentional character, similarly to when we experience ourselves as the willful conscious agents of our ongoing behaviour. From a first-person perspective, our dynamic social environment appears being populated by volitional agents capable of entertaining, similarly to us, an agentive intentional relation to the world.

Introduction

This chapter is composed of two parts. In the first we review the functional properties of an intriguing class of premotor neurons that we discovered in the monkey premotor cortex: the “mirror neurons.” These neurons discharge both when the monkey performs an action and when it observes another individual making a similar action. The second part is basically speculative. It is based on the hypothesis that there is a very general, evolutionary ancient mechanism, that we will name “resonance” mechanism, through which pictorial descriptions of motor behaviors are matched directly on the observer's motor “representations” of the same behaviors. We will posit that resonance mechanism is a fundamental mechanism at the basis of inter-individual relations including some behaviors commonly described under the heading of “imitation.”

Functional properties of area F5

Motor properties

Area F5 forms the rostral part of inferior area 6 (Matelli et al., 1985). Microstimulation and single-neuron studies showed that F5 contains a hand and a mouth movement representation (Gentilucci et al., 1988; Hepp-Reymond, Husler, Maier, & Qi, 1994; Okano & Tanji, 1987; Rizzolatti et al., 1981; Rizzolatti et al., 1988). Particularly interesting results were obtained when F5 neurons were studied in a semi-naturalistic context (Rizzolatti et al., 1988). Awake monkeys were seated on a primate chair and presented with various objects (geometrical solids, pieces of food of different size and shape). The stimuli were introduced in various spatial locations around the monkey, inside and outside its peripersonal space.