Shared Representations Between Other and Self
The common coding theory also states that perception of an action should activate action representations to the degree that the perceived and the represented action are similar. As such, these representations may be shared between individuals. Indeed, the meaning of a given object, action, or social situation may be common to several people and activate corresponding distributed patterns of neural activity in their respective brains. There is an impressive number of behavioral and neurophysiological studies demonstrating that perception and action have a common neuronal coding and that this leads to shared representations between self and others, which can lead to host of phenomena such as emotional contagion, empathy, social facilitation, and understanding others minds.
Read more about this topic: Motor Cognition
Famous quotes containing the word shared:
“Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?”
—Ernest Renan (1823–1892)