Michael Graziano
Michael Steven Anthony Graziano (born May 22, 1967[1]) is an American scientist and novelist who is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University.
He has proposed the "attention schema" theory, an explanation of how, and for what adaptive advantage, brains attribute the property of awareness to themselves.
[7][8][9][10][11] Each multisensory neuron responded to a touch within a specific "tactile receptive field" on the body surface.
[7] Some neurons also responded mnemonically, becoming active when a part of the body moved through space and approached the remembered location of an object in the dark.
Electrical stimulation of these multisensory neurons almost always evoked a complex, coordinated movement that resembled a flinching, blocking, or protecting action.
[16] Chemical enhancement of these neurons produced a "super flincher" state in which any mild stimulus, such as an object gently moved toward the face, evoked a full-blown flinching reaction.
Stimulation of another site always caused the grip to open, the palm to face away from the body, and the arm to extend, as if the monkey were reaching to grasp an object.
In Graziano's proposal, many of the complexities of the motor cortex, such as its overlapping maps of the body and its multiple areas with somewhat different mixtures of properties, may be a result of representing the many parts of the movement repertoire each with its own specialized computational requirements.
Other researchers have since found a similar, ethological organization to motor cortical regions in monkeys, prosimians, cats, and rats.
[23] Varying the initial position of the forelimb does not change the muscle synergies evoked by microstimulation of a motor cortical point.
The evoked movement trajectory is most natural when the forelimb lays pendant ~ perpendicular to the ground (i.e., in equilibrium with the gravitational force).
The paths of the paw are curved with changes and reversals of direction and the passive influence of the gravitational force on the movements is obvious.
Graziano[44][45] proposed that specialized machinery in the brain computes the feature of awareness and attributes it to other people in a social context.
[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53] These regions include, among other areas, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) bilaterally but with a strong emphasis on the right hemisphere.
Second, when these same regions of cortex are damaged, people suffer from a catastrophic disruption of their own awareness of events and objects around them.
The clinical syndrome of hemispatial neglect, or loss of awareness of one side of space, is particularly profound after damage to the TPJ or STS in the right hemisphere.
[54][55] The conjunction of these two previous findings led to the suggestion that awareness may be a computed feature constructed by an expert system in the brain, that at least partly overlaps the TPJ and STS.
