Phenom Cogn Sci (2012) 11:385–401

DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9243-x

Movement and mirror neurons: a challenging

and choice conversation

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Published online: 2 December 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This paper raises fundamental questions about the claims of art historian
David Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in their article "Motion,
Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience." It does so from several
perspectives, all of them rooted in the dynamic realities of movement. It shows
on the basis of neuroscientific research how connectivity and pruning are of
unmistakable import in the interneuronal dynamic patternings in the human brain
from birth onward. In effect, it shows that mirror neurons are contingent on
morphology and corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic experience. Accordingly, it
poses and answers the overlooked but seminally important question of how mirror
neurons come to be. The original neuromuscular research of Parma neuroscientists
and the findings of Marc Jeannerod concerning kinesthesia support the answer that
the "underpinnings" of visual art appreciation are themselves underpinned. An
abbreviated phenomenological analysis of movement and its implications
regarding the fact that the making of all art is quintessentially contingent on
movement, hence a dynamic enterprise, further bolster the given answer as does a
brief review of an empirical phenomenological analysis of the natural dynamic
congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the paper shows that
movement and life are of a piece in the creation and appreciation of art as in
everyday life.

Keywords Developmental neuronal brain dynamics . Morphology . Corporeal-kinetic

tactile-kinesthetic invariants . Aesthetic experience . Dance . Kinesthesia . Emotions

A shorter version of this paper was presented in May 2011 as an invited lecture in a four-speaker series on
the topic “Observer Effects: Conversations between Art and Science,” a series sponsored by the
Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I thank Emily Bercir,
Director of the Center, and Hèlène Listerlin, Dance Coordinator of the Center, for their invitation to take
part in the series, and Linnda Caporael, Professor of Science and Technology, for invigorating discussions
and for her kind and generous hospitality during my visit at the Institute.
M. Sheets-Johnstone (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1295, USA
e-mail: msj@uoregon.edu
386 M. Sheets-Johnstone

In their 2007 article titled “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic

Experience” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, art historian David Freedberg and
neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese state that their purpose, is to “challenge the primacy
of cognition in responses to art” and to propose instead that “a crucial element of
esthetic response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms encompassing
the simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation, and that these
mechanisms are universal” (p. 197). With respect to these “embodied mechanisms”
of simulation, they clarify that they are “concentrat[ing] on two components of
esthetic experience that are involved in contemplating visual works of art (as well
as other images that do not necessarily fall into this category),” namely, (1) “the
relationship between embodied empathetic feelings in the observer and the
representational content of the works in terms of the actions, intentions, objects,
emotions and sensations depicted in a given painting or sculpture,” and (2), “the
relationship between embodied empathetic feelings in the observer and the quality
of the work in terms of the visible traces of the artist’s creative gestures, such as
vigorous modeling in clay or paint, fast brushwork and signs of the movement of
the hand more generally” (p. 199). What they initially designate as “embodied
mechanisms” of simulation are, of course, mirror neurons, and the two components
of aesthetic experience that interest them are the traditional aesthetic categories:
form and content. In short, though Freedberg and Gallese do not put the
components of aesthetic experience that interest them in such terms, their claim
is that mirror neurons in an observer play a decisive role in his/her appreciation of
both the form and the content of a visual work of art. Thus, they state, “The
discovery of mirror neurons illuminates the neural underpinnings of the frequent
but hitherto unexplained feeling of physical reaction often in apparent imitation of
the actions represented within a work of art or suggested by the implied
movements involved in its making.” It is notable that they find not only the
“physical reaction” of observers explainable in terms of mirror neurons but the
emotional reaction of observers as well. In particular, they posit a close neuronal
relationship between movement and emotions, affirming that, “mirror neurons also
offer the possibility of a clearer understanding of the relationship between
responses to the perception of movement within paintings, sculpture and
architecture… and the emotions such works provoke” (ibid.).
In what follows, I will raise questions about their claims from several
perspectives, all of them rooted in movement, that is to say, rooted in the dynamic
realities of animate life. I will start out first, however, with a general claim of my
own that is supported by empirical observations of various scientists, and this in
order to provide grounds for my questions. I should perhaps mention in advance that
I am not the only one to raise questions about Freedberg and Gallese’s claims. In
their article titled “Mirror and Canonical Neurons Are Not Constitutive of Esthetic
Responses,” philosophers Roberto Casati and Alessandro Pignocchi state that
Freedberg and Gallese’s proposal “is… open to the charge of irrelevance to the
issues of aesthetic experience and of what constitutes artworks. Already the choice
of artworks [that they discuss], such as the Michelangelo, Goya, Caravaggio and
Pollock… is open to objection: all the works are both famous, so as to suggest and
emphasize the importance of this issue for art; and mostly gory, so as better to nail
the empathic point” (Casati and Pignocchi 2007, p. 410).
Movement and mirror neurons 387

Mirror neurons are the neurological corollaries of corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic

invariants. If there were no such thing as corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants,
there would be no mirror neurons, for there would be no fundamental corporeal-kinetic
commonalities among individual humans that would undergird mirror neurons, and in
turn undergird the proposal that mirror neurons “underpin” understandings of the goal-
oriented movement of others—“the goal-oriented movement of others” being the initial
claim of neuroscientists at the University of Parma—much less underpin empathy,
social cognition, the origin of language, works of art, and so on, all such claims being
made later on the basis of successive research programs on mirror neurons. Corporeal-
kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants derive from human morphology, a morphology that
by definition is species-specific, though species-overlapping movement patterns such as
reaching, scratching, sitting, standing, lying down, kissing, walking, and throwing exist
and attest to corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic evolutionary continuities.
Human morphology develops in species-specific ways both in the womb as we grow
from embryo to fetus and post-natally as we grow from infancy through childhood into
adulthood. Neurons develop and parcellate in the course of infancy. In their recent
second edition of Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive
Neuroscience in which they cite Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s
research on neuronal development, cognitive neuroscientists Bernard J. Baars and
Nicole M. Gage state, “[T]ens of billions of neurons sprout as the fetus grows, each
new cell following its own pathway to make up the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral
neurons,” “peripheral neurons” undoubtedly referring to all neurons throughout the
living body, some of which connect to and from neurons in brain and spinal cord,
neurons such as those found in “human biological motion,” i.e., neurons in muscles,
tendons, and joints (Baars and Gage 2010, pp. 516, 171, respectively). They point out
that “when a baby is born, it will have more nerve cells than it will ever again have in
its entire lifetime” and this because “neurons are constantly being pruned, if they make
unstable or unproductive connections” (ibid., 516). Moreover Baars and Gage point
out that “Once the fetus begins to use its senses and learn, around the beginning of the
third trimester of pregnancy” [I underscore the fact that Baars and Gage speak of a
fetus beginning to sense and learn; see also Furuhjelm et al. (1977) on the earlier
movement capabilities of fetuses, movement capabilities such as kicking, sucking,
waving, turning around, and so on; Windle (1971) on the prenatal development of
kinesthesia, in particular, on neural receptors in muscles that provide a sense of
movement and position; and Piontelli’s (1987) comments on “the richness and the
complexity of movements one could observe [in the fetus] since the early stages” and
on “the freedom of movement each fetus could enjoy in the amniotic fluid,” pp. 455,
456, respectively], the production of new neurons slows down, but “new synaptic
connections keep sprouting in the trillions” (ibid; italics in original.). They conclude
by stating that “The connectivity pattern of the brain is the key to its working” and that
“synaptic growth and selective pruning continues throughout life” (ibid.). Their later
observation that “Brain development begins with zero synapses and ends with a
thousand trillion connections” (ibid., p. 217) brings strikingly to the fore the
fundamental import of connectivity and pruning, and with it, not just the unmistakable
import of interneuronal dynamic patternings in the brain, but the unmistakable import
388 M. Sheets-Johnstone

of life itself in the form of experience that shapes connectivity and pruning, experience
in which movement—animation—plays a quintessentially central role.1
Edelman’s own writings are equally striking. In the context of recognizing the fact
that “[t]he network of the brain is created by cellular movement during development
and by the extension and connection of increasing numbers of neurons” (Edelman
1992, p. 25), Edelman points out with respect to pruning that “in some regions of the
developing nervous system up to 70% of the neurons die before the structure of that
region is completed!” and that “[i]n general, … uniquely specified connections
cannot exist” (ibid., p. 17). After telling us that there are 10 billion neurons—not
counting glia cells—in the cerebral cortex and that “[e]ach nerve cell receives
connections from other nerve cells at sites called synapses,” he comments, “But here
is an astonishing fact—there are about 1 million billion connections in the cortical
sheet. If you were to count them, one connection (or synapse) per second, you would
finish counting some thirty-two million years after you began” (ibid.). He goes on to
point out that “[i]f we consider how connections might be variously combined, the
number would be hyperastronomical—on the order of ten followed by millions of
zeros” (ibid.). A further observation of his concerns precisely the pointed absence of
genetic determinism: synaptic connections among neurons are not prespecified in
any precise way by our genes (ibid., p. 23). The brain is indeed a dynamic self-
organizing system, as coordination dynamics researcher and writer and Pierre de
Fermat laureate J. A. Scott Kelso and his colleagues have shown over the past
30 years and more (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006). The enormous
sprouting of neuronal cells and their pruning in the course of fetal development, their
synaptic growth and pruning in the course of life, and the sheer number of possible
synaptic connections that might be made attest without question to the brain’s
foundational internal dynamics. Thus, however spatially fixed and permanent the
anatomical parts of the brain, its neurology in a living sense in a living being is
definitely on the move and not bound to spatially fixed and permanent pathways.

II

A pressing question thus arises from the start with respect to mirror neurons, an
elementary question that to my knowledge has never been asked. The question arises

1
To address a reviewer’s concern as to how scientific studies presented in Section I relate to “how we
learn to move ourselves in the course of our infancy”: If synaptic connections are not prespecified in any
precise way by our genes, then synaptic growth and selective pruning are necessarily connected with
experience, precisely as Baars and Gage implicitly indicate when they write of a fetus beginning to use its
senses and to learn around the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. As references to researchers
of earlier prenatal development show, that early sensing and learning center quintessentially on movement.
Obviously, that sensing and learning continue when a fetus is actually born: it comes into the world
moving; it is not only not stillborn, but continues to move and in the process, learns on the basis of
inchoate reaching movements to reach effectively and to grasp whatever object is attracting it; it learns to
turn over in its crib; it learns to crawl and to walk; and so on. Moreover as Baars and Gage point out,
synaptic growth and selective pruning is a life-long process, a process that, as concerns movement,
depends precisely upon the degree to which movement informs one’s individual life and the degree to
which it is curtailed, that is, the degree to which one suffers “[t]he heart-ache and the thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1).
Movement and mirror neurons 389

from a simple inductively grounded observation and a surmise therefrom: we are not
born with mirror neurons; they are surely not within the tens of billions of neurons
that sprout in fetal growth nor are they later prespecified genetically. The pressing
question—how do mirror neurons come to be?—centers precisely on the origination
of mirror neurons. Insofar as we are not born with mirror neurons, and furthermore,
insofar as we all, in addition to sensing and learning as fetuses, learn our bodies and
learn to move ourselves in the course of our infancy and early childhood, a learning I
discuss at length in The Primacy of Movement (Sheets-Johnstone 1999a/expanded
2nd ed. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, chapter V), it would seem incontrovertible that the
mirroring capacity of certain neurons derives basically from kinesthetic experiences
of one’s own moving body, that is, from one’s own movement experiences. In effect,
mirroring is basically the mirroring of another’s moving body on the basis of the
actual and possible movements of one’s own moving body.
Kinesthetic experiences of one’s own moving body are commonly marginalized in
adult human life—what Darwin in one instance with respect to infants refers to as “the
after life” of adult humans (Darwin 1965 [1872], p. 13)—but their marginalization does
not completely occlude their experienced dynamics. If it did, not only would we never
be capable of forming everyday habits such as washing our face, dressing ourselves,
speaking, typing, much less playing a Bach prelude, but we would never—to use the
standard notion of “the background”—realize that “something went wrong” (for more
on this topic, see Sheets-Johnstone 2011) Kinesthesia is a fundamental, essential
sensory modality. It is truly amazing that in this twenty-first century, we humans still
believe we have only five senses; that is, that we fail to recognize and duly
acknowledge kinesthesia, the sense we have of our own movement and its spatio-
temporal-energic dynamics, as in swinging a golf club, opening our arms and hugging
a friend, running to catch a bus, threading a needle, and so on.
Bolstering the foundational significance of kinesthetic experience is the low-key
but seminally significant statement of well-known neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod.
Interestingly enough, the statement occurs in the context of his discussion of what he
terms “[the] longstanding controversy about the respective roles of the two main
first-person cues in conscious knowledge of one’s actions” and the anchorage of that
controversy in the classic debate between Wilhelm Wundt and William James
(Jeannerod 2006, p. 56). Wundt claimed that our knowledge “is based on a priori
efferent information of a central origin,” James that our knowledge is “based on a
posteriori information from sensory organs” (ibid.). Jeannerod points out that the
controversy is irresolvable experimentally, even by way of experimental research
dealing with pathologically afflicted individuals, and this because kinesthesia is an
ongoing, insuppressible faculty. He states explicitly, “There are no reliable methods
for suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement”
(ibid.). “Information” terminology aside, Jeannerod’s declarative finding speaks
reams about the foundational ongoing reality and significance of kinesthesia, reams
that should certainly lead investigators to take seriously the challenge of
understanding the insuppressible living dynamics of kinesthetic experience. A
similar awakening should readily follow Jeannerod’s question of “whether we
consciously monitor our own actions and how we eventually become aware of
them,” and of his answer: “we remain unaware of most of our actions, unless an
unpredicted event interrupts their course and brings them to consciousness” (ibid.,
390 M. Sheets-Johnstone

pp. 58–59), that is, unless, as mentioned earlier, “something goes wrong.” Clearly—
and particularly in light of the insuppressibility of kinesthesia—we do not have to
wait until something untoward occurs that awakens us into awareness and deters us
from continuing on our way. On the contrary, precisely because movement is a
dynamic happening and because the dynamics of our everyday movement are
commonly habitual and thus within our everyday repertoire of what phenomenol-
ogy’s founder Edmund Husserl terms our “I cans” (see, for example, Husserl 1980,
pp. 106–12; Husserl 1989, pp. 13–15, 159–160, 228–31, 266–82, 340–43; Husserl
1970, pp. 106–108, 161, 217, 331–32; Husserl 1973, 97), we can consult them any
time we wish in the course moving. In short, and as I have elsewhere shown (Sheets-
Johnstone 1999a/expanded 2nd ed. Sheets-Johnstone 2011), any time we care to pay
attention to our own movement—our own so-called “action”—there it is. Not only
this, but when we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves as infants
and young children (ibid.), we did so by attending to our own movement and in the
process forged an untold number of dynamic patterns that became habitual. Familiar
dynamics—brushing one’s teeth, tying a knot, buttering one’s toast, writing one’s
name, pulling weeds, sweeping, typing, waltzing, reciting a nursery rhyme, and so
on—are woven into our bodies and played out along the lines of our bodies; they
are, to use famed Russian neuropsychiatrist Alexsandr Romanovich Luria’s eloquent
and exactingly descriptive phrase “kinesthetic/kinetic melodies” in both a neurolog-
ical and experiential sense (Luria 1966, 1973). Indeed, were someone else to brush
our teeth, we would immediately recognize that someone else was brushing our
teeth, not just because we were not holding the toothbrush ourselves and not only
because we could actually see someone in front of us holding and moving our
toothbrush, but because we would feel a foreign dynamics inside our mouth. In sum,
when we turn attention to our own coordinated dynamics (Kelso 1995; Kelso and
Engstrøm 2006), we recognize kinesthetic melodies; they bear the stamp of our own
qualitatively felt movement patterns, what I have termed our own familiar synergies
of meaningful movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, b, 2012a).
Precisely in this context, it is notable and indeed of considerable interest to point
out that in their initial experimental research to determine whether mirror neurons
exist in humans, Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese—the major neuroscientists at
Parma—did not utilize PET scan studies to determine neuronal activity in human
brains; they utilized neuromuscular studies. They quite breezily pass over that fact in
their special 2006 neuroscience article in Scientific American titled “Mirrors in the
Mind” that gives a background history and summary of their findings to date. In
particular, in describing their first experiments with human subjects in which the aim
was to determine “whether a mirror neuron system also exists in humans,” they state,
“As volunteers observed an experimenter grasping objects or performing meaning-
less arm gestures, for example, increased neural activation in their hand and arm
muscles that would be involved in the same movements suggested a mirror neuron
response in the motor areas of their brains” (Rizzolatti et al. 2006, p. 58). The
suggestion of “a mirror neuron response in the motor areas of their brains” and in
consequence of a mirror neuron system in the human brain is clearly what is of
moment to them. Accordingly, they pass over the kinesthetically interesting finding
because of their desire to identify “the exact brain areas” that are activated when
volunteers observe what they term “motor acts” (ibid.).
Movement and mirror neurons 391

The classic debate between Wundt and James is of course of continuing interest in
this context for if kinesthesia is insuppressible, and if “increased neuromuscular
activation” occurs in observing the grasping movement and meaningless gestures of
others, one can surely wonder precisely how such activation is related to mirror neurons
in the brain, even whether, for example, such activation sets off mirror neurons, a fact
that resonates with James’s position regarding afferent knowledge of one’s own
actions. Most importantly, “increased neuromuscular activation” supports and even
validates the general thesis that mirror neurons are the neurological corollaries of
corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants, or in other words, that the kinestheti-
cally orchestrated coordinated dynamics of one’s own movement are the ground floor
of “embodied simulation,” that is, the ground floor of what the Parma group describes
as our capacity to comprehend the “motor acts” of others on the basis of our “mirror
neurons.” In short, mirroring depends on, is contingent on, our own kinesthetically
experienced human capacities and possibilities of movement.

III

Further validation of the kinesthetic origin of mirror neurons lies in infant psychiatrist
Daniel Stern’s descriptions of experiences of the “core self,” and of “affect attunement”
(Stern 1985). With respect to the former, Stern states, “In order for the infant to have
any formed sense of self, there must ultimately be some organization that is sensed as
a reference point. The first such organization concerns the body: its coherence, its
actions, its inner feeling states, and the memory of all these” (Stern 1985, p. 46).
Accordingly, the constituents of the core self include the experience of self-agency,
self-coherence, self-affectivity, and self-history, all such experiences being rooted in
the body. Stern’s descriptions of these bodily constituents implicitly show them to be
rooted through and through in movement and the tactile-kinesthetic body (see Sheets-
Johnstone 2009a, 2011, especially 252–271, for a full discussion). In turn, Stern’s term
“affect attunement” both aptly and exactingly describes dynamic interpersonal
exchanges between infants and their mothers, exchanges in which the dynamics of
an infant’s movements, including at times vocalizations, are dynamically matched by
its mother. Stern specifically points out that the dynamics are not imitated or mirrored,
but are qualitatively analogous in a kinetic-affective sense. He in fact explicitly rejects
characterizing the dynamic exchange as mirroring on the grounds that the label
“mirroring” lacks “fidelity” to what is actually happening and suggests “complete
temporal synchrony” (ibid., p. 144). I would add that the term and the very concept of
“mirroring” fails to hone in on and capture not simply the intermodal dynamics of
affect attunement, as Stern indicates by the term “fidelity,” but fails basically to
identify the kinetically expressed dynamics of affect attunement, that is, the basic
dynamic congruency of movement and affect that substantively grounds the
interpersonal experience (Sheets-Johnstone 2009b, 2011). I will specify dynamic
congruency in finer terms in Section IV. For now, suffice to say that affect attunement
is a matter of matching the dynamics of another person’s affective feelings, and as
Stern points out, it is most commonly intermodal (Stern 1985, p. 148).
To hone in on the question of the origin of mirror neurons in terms of the
dynamics of the core self and of interpersonal attunements as exemplified by Stern
392 M. Sheets-Johnstone

has actually required a shifting of gears, namely, a straightforward move from a

developing fetal neurology as discussed in Section I to a developmental postnatal
ontogeny. Clearly, and as indicated previously, learning one’s body and learning to
move oneself are learnings in infancy and early childhood that are foundational to
the everyday movement patterns that define the lives of all adult humans. We can
rightfully assume that that all such ontogenetical learnings—learning to walk,
learning to speak, learning to write, learning to manipulate forks and spoons,
learning to calculate distances, learning to navigate directionally, learning to temper
the intensity of one’s movement in performing a delicate task, and so on—build up
new synaptic patterns in the brain, patterns that are themes with variations depending
on circumstances. Some learning capacities and possibilities may be, and
undoubtedly are, differentially honed by way of culture.2 Moreover they may be
differentially honed by way of later individual somatic practices such as those
developed in Feldenkrais training (Feldenkrais 1972; Ginsburg 2010) and in Body–
Mind Centering (Cohen 2008; Miller et al. 2011). Differential honing notwithstand-
ing, if connectivity is the key to the brain’s working, if synapses are key functional
aspects of brains that are open to variation and that can be newly created, then surely
we should realize that adhering to a simple brain neuronal system/function or
module/function relationship cannot do justice to the literally animated and changing
realities of life itself. As noted earlier: the brain is a dynamic and dynamically
organized organ (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006; Edelman 1992). It does not
adhere to that nineteenth century adage of sea captain Frederick Marryat who
proclaimed “a place for everything and everything in its place” (Marryat 1842), an
adage later taken up by writers on household matters (Beeton 1861) and on thrift
(Smiles 1875). The critical point is aptly made by way of analogy to any common
everyday movement such as reaching, walking, pulling, stirring, waving, and so on.
Reaching is not simply an arm movement any more than walking is simply a leg
movement. Whatever the movement, the whole body is involved in its realization,
not only by way of holding or stabilizing, but by way of the movement’s very
unfolding in which, as Luria finely recognized, there is a sequence of innervations
and denervations: a dynamic neuromuscular pattern unfolds. Just such internally

2
For a perspicuous account of what it means experientially to comprehend cultural differences, see dance
anthropologist Sally Ann Ness’s descriptive analysis of “what the act of performing a choreographed
movement can mean in an ‘other’ culture—that is to say, in a society whose organizing principles, social
institutions, and value systems are profoundly unfamiliar or exotic relative to one’s own,” and her fine-
grained exemplification of how, in order to have that comprehension, “a person must have some idea of
what performing any choreographed movement can mean at all” (Ness 1992, p. 2). Ness in fact clarifies
further the centrality of kinesthesia to this enterprise when she adds, “There must be some appreciation of
how getting oneself physically through a choreographic moment can affect a human being, and how it can
affect one’s own cultural understanding” (ibid.). Her description of her own experience in a repertory class
in which she learned a section of a dance by the Bill Evans Dance Company offers ample insights into
more and more refined kinesthetic experiences, experiences that at one point she terms “the dynamic
mentality of one’s neuromusculature” (ibid., p. 4).
Dancer and teacher Adriana Pegorer highlights the centrality of kinesthesia from a quite different
cultural perspective. Pegorer teaches tango to visually impaired people. She writes that all the “glittering
drama of courtship that this form of movement entails—with women in high heels and provocative dresses
and the dominant attitudes of their male partners—is often what draws people in.” She goes on to
emphasize, however, that “if all that [‘that’ meaning all visual trappings] is removed it’s the kinesthetic
sense of the dance, its essential aroma, which still remains” (Pegorer 2010, p. 36).
Movement and mirror neurons 393

modulated neuromuscular unfoldings are precisely what led Luria to speak of

“complex sequential activity”—writing one’s name, calculating a sum—as kinetic/
kinaesthetic melodies. In a word, kinetic/kinaesthetic melodies unfold dynamically
in moving bodies by way of dynamically unfolding neuromuscular innervations and
denervations and correlatively in brains by way of dynamically unfolding synaptic
connections. The dynamic unfoldings are the bedrock of our experience of “complex
sequential activity.”
In light of the foregoing considerations of what we might call the developmental
dynamics of brain life and their variations in terms of circumstances, differential cultural
honings, and possibly later somatic practices, and of what was said earlier about the
insuppressibility of kinesthetic experience, we can ask the following questions: do we not
first have to be effective and efficient movers in the world prior to the formation of mirror
neurons and a mirror neuron system? Do we not first have to be kinesthetically aware of
our own “physical reactions” and affectively aware not simply of “emotional reactions”
but aware in a tactile-kinesthetically enlightened way about emotions, that is, do we not
first have to be aware of the natural dynamic congruency of movement and emotions in
everyday life? To ask such questions is not to say that there is anything doubtful or
wayward about mirror neurons nor that their discovery is less than glorious. To ask such
questions is only to point out the runaway use of mirror neurons to explain at rock-bottom
the experiential intricacies of our appreciation and understanding of form and content in
visual art. Clearly, the connectivity of the brain leads us not only to wonder about the
synaptic relationships of mirror neurons—where do their impulses go?—but about the
origin of mirror neurons to begin with. Such wonderings point us unmistakably in the
direction not of action, but of movement, and similarly, not in the direction of motors
but of movement, for in the most basic sense, we are not acting bodies or mechanical
bodies but living moving bodies. We are indeed, as indicated, first challenged to learn
our bodies and learn to move ourselves—all without an owner’s manual or instruction
from others. Moreover, we should note specifically that whatever experiences we have
in later years with respect to art and with respect to social cognitions, we do not feel the
firing of our mirror neurons. We feel the dynamics of our tactile-kinesthetic/affective
bodies. On this basis, there is no question but that mirror neurons develop on the basis
of our tactile-kinesthetic/affective lives; they are rooted in tactile-kinesthetic/affective
realities. We feel and have felt our own tongues before we stick them out in response to
an experimenter, as in the infant research studies of psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and
M. Keith Moore (Meltzoff and Moore 1977, 1983, 1995; see also Furuhjelm et al.
(1977) on fetal movement; see also Piontelli 1987). However marginalized in our adult
lives, our tactile-kinesthetic/affective bodies are the foundation of our everyday
reachings, liftings, pushings, pullings, walkings, runnings, scratchings, stretchings,
explorations, hesitations, and more.
When we duly take life-long neuronal formations, prunings, and connectivity into
account, the pressing question of origin can clearly not be responsibly skirted. To
make “mechanisms” in the form of mirror neurons the “underpinnings” of visual art
appreciation, the site of embodied simulations, is to reduce our response to both the
form and content of visual works of art to particular neuronal firings in the brain. It
is precisely to overlook the “underpinnings” of those “underpinnings” in real-life
tactile-kinesthetic experiences together with the invariants of human morphology
that make those experiences possible.
394 M. Sheets-Johnstone

IV

The test case for assaying the claim that mirror neurons “underpin” our aesthetic
appreciation of visual form and content is dance. Let me first assure any reader that
this “test case claim” is not being made in order to back Freedberg and Gallese into a
corner. In other words, although Freedberg and Gallese are focused in the very title
of their article on motion, emotion, and empathy in aesthetic experience, I am not
intending to hold them to the claim that “motion, emotion and empathy” in the
aesthetic experience of dance is reducible to mirror neurons, in effect, that we have
an ongoing embodied simulated experience not only of the incredible technical
expertise of the dancers on stage but the incredible dynamic complexities of the
dance itself. Furthermore, I am not saying that the test case is dance because my own
art background is in dance—as choreographer and performer, professor of dance and
dance scholar. I am saying it for two quite different reasons: first, because movement
is actually foundational to all of the arts—to playing an instrument, to painting, to
acting, to sculpting, to dance, to opera, and to architectural design and building; and
second, because our “physical reactions,” as Freedberg and Gallese term “the felt
activation of… muscles,” (p. 197) and our “emotional reactions” to a work of art as
well, are rooted in movement, not only in our own natural ability to move, but in our
natural disposition to be moved to move, and in our experiencing other animate
beings moving and being moved to move.3 Accordingly, we are going to shift gears
further, that is, move beyond what have been basically ontogenetical considerations
to phenomenological ones. I will give a quite summary phenomenological account
of the qualitative structure of movement, move from there to a consideration of the
dynamic realities of kinesthesia together with their various distortions and neglect,
then to finer understandings of the dynamic congruency of emotion and movement,
and finally, to conclusions concerning conversations between art and science.
The dynamics of movement are grounded in its qualitative structure (Sheets-
Johnstone 1966 [1979–1980]).4 Its qualitative structure has four basic dimensions:
tensional quality, linear quality, areal quality, and projectional quality. Tensional
quality is apparent in the force or intensity of any movement; linear quality has two

3
For a descriptive analysis and account of how trust, for example, moves us to move and in fact how “[l]a
peur se déplace dans le corps et le fait se déplacer autrement que ne le fait la confiance,” see Sheets-
Johnstone 2006a.
4
To address a reviewer’s concern that I prioritize a phenomenological analysis, I should note that, while I
am familiar with Labananalysis as a system of movement analysis, a system that combines Labanotation
and Effort/Shape, that is, both the “‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘when’ of movement” and the “how” or
qualitative dimension of movement (for a lucid account of Labananalysis, see Youngerman 1984), I am
not such an analyst myself. I have, however, been told by people who are analysts that the qualitative
structure of movement as derived from phenomenological analysis is complementary to that provided by
Labananalysis. The complementarity is not surprising: effort and shape are distilled terms encompassing
or suggesting tensional and projectional qualities on the one hand, and linear and areal qualities on the
other. What a phenomenological analysis provides is a first-person descriptive account of the experience
of self-movement; Labananalysis provides a more objective account of movement, that is, an account of
the experience of movement from a third-person point of view. It is of interest to note too that there are
two further major movement notational systems: Benesh Movement Notation and Eshkol-Wachmann
Notation, and that the latter system has been profitably used by ethologists in the study of certain
mammalian display behaviors and of kinetic fighting patterns of wolves (see Golani 1976; Moran et al.
1981, respectively).
Movement and mirror neurons 395

dimensions: linear design, which has to do with the contours of the body, and linear
pattern, which has to do with the paths traced by movement. Like linear quality,
areal quality has two dimensions: areal design has to do with the expansiveness or
contractiveness of the body; areal pattern with the extensiveness or intensiveness of
movement. Projectional quality is apparent in the manner in which force is released.
Basically, there are four different possibilities: sustained, abrupt, ballistic, and
collapsing movement. I should emphasize that the qualities in here as a whole in any
animate movement whatsoever; in other words, no quality exists separately. Indeed,
the overall qualitative character of any movement—jagged, expansive, intense,
explosive, and so on—is a composite of all the qualities. Consider a sneeze, for
example. A sneeze can be attenuated and end abruptly; it can be staccato all the way
along, with no resolution; it can involve the body minimally in terms of linear and
areal qualities or carry one off first into a jerky backward movement, then into a
forward rushing movement; it can be moderately or forcefully intense; and so on.
Try sneezing; pretend to sneeze; explore the dynamics of a sneeze—in fact explore
the dynamics of many sneezes, and you will come to realize the myriad possibilities
inherent in this readily familiar and recognizable “act,” as it is likely to be called,
possibilities that are in truth inherent in what is not an act, but in what is a quite
particular rippling-through-the-body kinetic dynamic that is utterly spontaneous and
unbidden. Being qualitatively distinct, each sneeze is a unique kinetically unfolding
dynamic, a kinesthetically felt whole-body happening. Sneezes can in fact be
enlightening not only with respect to wholly natural bodily dynamics but with
respect to the relationship between those bodily dynamics and the natural rhythms of
breath—inhaling and exhaling. Though we easily pass over the qualitative dynamic
of our own movement—that is, pass over kinesthetic experience—as noted earlier,
any time we care to pay attention to it, there it is.
The qualitative dynamics of movement are obviously central and foundational to
the aesthetic creation and realization of a dance. As a formed and performed art,
dance is grounded in the qualitative intricacies, complexities, and possibilities of
human movement. Kinesthesia is in turn a sensory modality basic to the art of
choreography and the art of dancing. An important fact attaches to this truth.
Kinesthetic experience is not a matter of sensations, but a matter precisely of
dynamics. Though a diversity of people, including even dancers, choreographers,
and teachers of dance, speak of kinesthetic sensations, they mislead by their inexact
verbal translation of the experience of movement. Sensations are spatially pointillist
and temporally punctual—an itch, a jolt, a flash of light, a shove, and so on (Sheets-
Johnstone 2006b, 2010a, 2011 [expanded 2nd ed. of 1999a], 2012b). Certainly, a
dancer may find that changing the placement of her foot or the position of her torso,
as the choreographer specifies, evokes a different postural sensation. But that
postural experience is precisely the point. To experience sensations with respect to
bodily positions is not the same as experiencing the dynamics of movement (cf.
Gallagher and Cole 1998, e.g., p. 134, “I can tell you where my legs are even with
my eyes closed.” For a full discussion of the confusion, see Sheets-Johnstone 2003,
2009a, Chapter X; Sheets-Johnstone 2005). When we move, we feel the dynamics of
our movement kinesthetically; we feel the dynamics of an unfolding form. We can
and do sense movement dynamics visually on myriad occasions in everyday life, as
when we see someone rushing toward us. We furthermore sense movement
396 M. Sheets-Johnstone

dynamics visually when we recognize someone by the style of his or her walk.5 And
of course we sense movement dynamics visually when we see dancers dancing. Our
visual sensing of movement dynamics is grounded in our awareness that our own
movement has an inside and an outside, not simply in terms of the fact that it is both
personally experienced and publicly visible, but in terms of the fact that, through
kinesthesia, we experience directly our ability both to feel and to perceive our own
movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2010b). To perceive our own movement as a three-
dimensional happening, for example, that is, as a spatial happening, is anchored in
kinesthetic experience, as when we are working to perfect the arc of a golf swing or
to modify the amplitude of a tour jeté. Indeed, there would be no space, no concept
of space or of being “in space,” no objective “out there” short of movement to begin
with. When we are at a dance concert, we readily perceive the dynamics of
movement before us, the kinetic melodies that dancers are experiencing kinesthet-
ically and constituting by their very movement. Consider well-known dance critic
Arlene Croce’s fine-grained description of Merce Cunningham’s dancing, a
description that readily indicates and indeed captures the clarity of “outside”
dynamics precisely as viewed by someone in the audience:
Cuningham’s hands are like chords of music: full articulation flows straight to the
electric extremities. He really does seem to have more in his little finger than most
dancers have in their whole bodies. And the diversity and specificity of nuance of
which his body is capable, after more than 35 years of professional dancing, are
amazing. His performing this season has been limited mostly to quiet solos of
great tension and delicacy, though I recall vividly one burst of allegro when he
danced against the group in a different rhythm. The solo I [earlier] mentioned is
called Loops; another is just called Solo but is commonly referred to as “the
animal solo” because of a passage in which Cunningham seems to turn by
degrees into a furry beast. No obviously representational gestures are made.
Cunningham seems to get inside the animal and reproduce its senses in different
states of consciousness. Nor does he lose his humanity; he could be an old man
or a dreaming baby (Croce 1979, p. 49; italics in original).
The curious neglect of the sensory modality of kinesthesia is apparent not only in
our everyday adult lives, but across a broad spectrum of today’s academic
disciplines: neuroscience, biological science, psychology, physiology, philosophy,
music, even sports. Its neglect is strikingly if implicitly apparent in the third edition
of a scientific textbook on movement titled The Scientific Bases of Human
Movement. Though the authors—neurophysiologists Barbara Gowitzke and Morris
Milner—state that their concern is with reflexive patterns, their remarks concerning
voluntary movement are telling. After acknowledging that “[v]oluntary movement
requires a foundation of automatic responses which assure a proper combination of
mobility and stability of body parts”, they state: “The voluntary contribution to
movement is almost entirely limited to initiation, regulation of speed, force, range,
and direction, and termination of the movement” (Gowitzke and Milner 1988: 256).
Granted their focus is on neurophysiology, the seemingly minor role attributed to

5
Our own walk has a certain style too, of course, precisely one that others may readily recognize, but of
which we ourselves are commonly unaware.
Movement and mirror neurons 397

volition is nonetheless astonishing: “limitations” are not only integral to the very
nature of voluntary movement but of indisputably sizable import to the mover, and
not only with respect to the qualitative structure of movement itself—to what
Gowitzke and Milner term “speed, force, range, and direction”—but to the very
initiation and termination of movement. Initiation and termination aside, the
phenomenological analysis of movement that illuminates the spatio-temporal-
energic qualities constituting the dynamics of movement demonstrates incontrovert-
ibly the experiential import of the “voluntary contribution” (Sheets-Johnstone 1966,
2009a, 2011). What becomes evident through that analysis is not just a realization of
the complex qualitative structure of movement, but seminal realizations of received
ignorance about movement that deflect us from an awareness of its qualitative
structure. It awakens us, in other words, to an awareness of what movement is not. It
should be noted that the charge of received ignorance is meant pejoratively not
toward individuals but toward habits of thought that pass for received wisdom. In
particular, it is meant to call attention to the habit of not questioning common
understandings of movement and common ways of thinking about movement,
understandings and ways that fail to recognize much less capture the dynamics of the
phenomenon and that indeed perseverate misconceptions about the very foundation
of animate life.
To refer to movement as a “motor act” or in terms of “motor programs” and
“motor representations,” as Freedberg and Gallese do (Freedberg and Gallese 2007,
e.g., pp. 200, 202), is wayward, a disfiguring way of referring to movement.
Animate beings are not motors, and though it is common to call their internal parts
and internal workings “mechanisms,” that term too does a disservice. Animate
beings are dynamic through and through: internal parts such as hearts, livers,
spleens, stomachs, diaphragms, bladders, lungs—along with the brain—are dynamic
organs; muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and more function in dynamically
coordinated ways with these dynamic organs. A motorology and its mechanics do
not do justice to these coordinated dynamics (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm
2006). As I have shown in answering the pressing question of where motor neurons
come from, Freedberg and Gallese’s motoric underpinnings are themselves under-
pinned: they owe their existence to kinesthetic experience. In a deeper historical
sense, they owe their existence to species-specific morphologies and their related
tactile-kinesthetic invariants. Mirror neurons are in effect neuronal offshoots,
developmental descendants of another neuronal system, the neuromuscular system
that develops on the basis of our learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves,
that is, on the basis of kinesthetically informed dynamic patterns of self-movement.
Today’s exclusively tethered brain science would do well to acknowledge and even
devote concentrated attention to the sensory modality of kinesthesia and the dynamic
patterns of self-movement it makes possible. Such acknowledgement and attention
constitute precisely the grounds on which phenomenological investigations are of
critical importance. They lead us directly to investigate “the things themselves”
(Husserl 1983, p. 35; see also Socrates on “the things themselves” in Plato’s
Cratylus 439A; for a discussion of the concordance, see Sheets-Johnstone 2011,
expanded 2nd ed. of Sheets-Johnstone 2009a), in the present instance, to both the
creation and appreciation of a work of art. As pointed out earlier, the creation of any
work of art is movement-dependent—not in a simple-minded sense, but in a highly
398 M. Sheets-Johnstone

articulate sense. Kinetic/kinesthetic melodies inform its creation. In the art of dance,
the melodies are one with the dance itself. In the art of painting, the melodies are
more distant, but not on that account imperceptible. To transform a surface is, after
all, to bring forth something where before there was nothing. Moreover the
transformative power of the lines, strokes, and dots on a canvas are there not just for
the artist creating a painting. They are there for the viewer in the completed painting.
The qualitative kinetic dynamics that form the painting are indeed palpable. A
creative tactile-kinesthetic process has left its mark. We might recall noted art critic
and historian Bernard Berenson’s writings on the tactile values of painting, that is,
the tactile character of the visible. Berenson in fact wrote that the essential qualities of
artistic vision are a matter of touch and movement (Berenson 1962; see also Sheets-
Johnstone 1990, Chapter 9, “On the Origin and Significance of Paleolithic Cave Art”).
The currently popular term “embodiment” and its derivatives are similarly
wayward, deflecting us away from the realities of animate movement. Freedberg and
Gallese’s “embodied simulation” follows along the popular lines of embodiment.
When they write that embodied simulation via mirror neurons is the source of
“[a]utomatic empathetic responses,” “enabl[ing] the direct experiential understand-
ing” of a work of art (Freedberg and Gallese 2007, p. 202), we can only ask:
“Automatic empathetic responses?” “Direct experiential understanding?” Clearly, the
complexity of aesthetic experience is short-changed by reductionist “embodied”
explanations as are the experiential learnings that necessarily precede any bona fide
aesthetic experience, experiential learnings in the form of active artistic involve-
ments: going to museums and seeing paintings, going to concerts and listening to
music, going to the theater and seeing dances and plays, even painting, playing an
instrument, or dancing and acting oneself. In short, empathetic responses and direct
experiential understanding of a work of art rest on something far more complex than
“embodied simulation.”
In today’s neuroscience and cognitive science and philosophy, virtually nothing
remains un-embodied, not even movement! (Varela and Depraz 2005; Gibbs 2006). The
relationship between movement and emotions is taken for granted in this enterprising
lexical move. It clearly need not be. In his article “Action and Emotion in
Development of Cultural Intelligence: Why Infants Have Feelings Like Ours,” infant
psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen defines emotions “as manners of moving, and of
responding to movement” (Trevarthen 2005, p. 63). He emphasizes the sensitivity of
infants to “animacy” (ibid., p. 80), and more broadly, the way in which animal bodies
are “motivated with intrinsic rhythm and intensity in the ‘vitality’ or ‘sentic forms’ of
emotions,” stressing in this context the dynamic temporal dimension of emotion and
movement (ibid., p. 64). In an article titled “Emotions and Movement: A Beginning
Empirical-Phenomenological Analysis of Their Relationship” (Sheets-Johnstone
1999b, 2009a, Chapter VIII), I elucidated the relationship in terms of “the things
themselves,” beginning with the studies of neuropsychiatrist Edmund Jacobson whose
fundamental experimental finding was that what happens in a brain does not happen
apart from muscular innervations (Jacobson 1967, 1970, 1973). I consulted the studies
of psychiatrist Nina Bull, studies that showed that “a basic neuromuscular sequence is
essential to the production of affect,” that there is thus a generative as well as
expressive relationship between movement and emotion Bull (1951). In my
phenomenological analysis, I showed how a dynamic congruency exists between
Movement and mirror neurons 399

emotion and movement. In putting all the research together, I showed how emotions
move us and move us to move, not only how fear moves us to move, but how joy
moves us in ways different from anger and moves us to move in ways different from
anger, and so on, thus how emotions are quintessentially linked to kinetic/tactile-
kinesthetic bodies (see also Sheets-Johnstone 2006a, b). Among my conclusions was
the fact that “what feels and is moved to move is not a brain but a living organism”
(Sheets-Johnstone 1999b, p. 274, Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, Chapter VIII, p. 214). To
recognize the dynamic congruency of movement and emotion is thus to recognize an
essential fact: an ongoing kinetic form is dynamically congruent with the form of an
ongoing affective feeling. A particular kinetic form of an emotion is not identical with
the emotion but dynamically congruent with it. Precisely because there is a formal
congruency, we can separate out the emotion from the movement. We can thus both
feign and mime an emotion: we can go through the motions of a particular feeling and
we can inhibit the motions of a particular feeling. The dual possibilities attest
unmistakably to a fundamental dynamic congruency, a natural binding of affective and
tactile-kinesthetic bodies. They attest indirectly to the fact that we recognize the
kinetics of emotion on the basis of our own affective/tactile-kinesthetic experiences of
emotion. Our tactile-kinesthetic/affective bodies, of which our brains are an internal
part, are alive to the world about them, both the natural world and the social world.
They experience those worlds. They are us.

In sum, movement underlies the creation and performance or exhibition of any art
form. All such creations and their performances or exhibitions are dynamic in nature
precisely because they emanate from movement: they are made from, or of,
movement. Accordingly, a veritably enlightening conversation between art and
science will be found not in a reductionism to the brain but in an exploration of
dynamics inside and out, a natural, engaged-in-the-world dynamics. Certainly,
movement is difficult to study. Who in fact wants to study movement? It won’t stay
still! That is precisely its foundational attraction, in the literal sense of attracting us
from the very beginning of our lives, as infant psychiatrist René Spitz long ago
recognized (Spitz 1983).
Movement and life are indeed of a piece, in the creation and appreciation of art as
in everyday life. The challenge of a conversation between art and science rests on a
recognition of that basic fact. Such a conversation is the conversation of choice
because it is the preeminent and authentic conversation to undertake.

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