- Saturday Night Live Skit
- 1930s Film Poster
- And of course...O Brother, Where Art Thou?, being The Odyssey updated.
And they're still talking about Sophocles, even on the estimable Arts & Letters Daily...
Course Blog for LIBS 7005--Technology, Invention, & Power--at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
What happens in our brain when we use a tool to reach for a distant object? Recent neurophysiological, psychological and neuropsychological research suggests that this extended motor capability is followed by changes in specific neural networks that hold an updated map of body shape and posture (the putative ‘Body Schema’ of classical neurology). These changes are compatible with the notion of the inclusion of tools in the ‘Body Schema’, as if our own effector (e.g. the hand) were elongated to the tip of the tool. In this review we present empirical support for this intriguing idea from both single-neuron recordings in the monkey brain and behavioural performance of normal and brain-damaged humans. These relatively simple neural and behavioural aspects of tool-use shed light on more complex evolutionary and cognitive aspects of body representation and multisensory space coding for action.