This commentary aims to find the right description of the pre-reflective brain mechanisms underlying our phenomenal experience of being a subject bound to a physical body (bodily self) and basic cognitive, perceptual, and subjective aspects related to interaction with other individuals (social cognition). I will focus on the proposal by Gallese and Cuccio that embodied simulation, in terms of m...

Objectives: One important issue in sport and exercise psychology is to determine to what extent sports and exercise can help to increase self-esteem, and what the underlying mechanism might be. Based on the exercise and self-esteem model (EXSEM) and on findings from the sociometer theory, the mediating effect of physical self-concept and perceived social acceptance on the longitudinal relations...

The spindle is a fusiform bipolar-microtubule array that is responsible for chromosome segregation during mitosis. Focused poles are an essential feature of spindles in vertebrate somatic cells, and pole focusing has been shown to occur through a centrosome-independent self-organization mechanism where microtubule motors cross-link and focus microtubule minus ends. Most of our understanding of ...

For many years controversy has surrounded the so-called "negative compatibility effect" (NCE), a surprising phenomenon whereby responses to a target stimulus are delayed when the target is preceded by an unconscious, response-compatible prime. According to proponents of the "self-inhibition" hypothesis, the NCE occurs when a low-level self-inhibitory mechanism supresses early motor activations ...

Taking the perspective of somebody else (Theory of Mind; ToM) is an essential human ability depending on a large cerebral network comprising prefrontal and temporo-parietal regions. Recently, ToM was suggested to consist of two processes: (1) self-perspective inhibition and (2) belief reasoning. Moreover, it has been hypothesized that self-perspective inhibition may build upon basic motor respo...

Many motor commands in the nervous system are associated with corollary discharges which alter the excitability in both sensory and motor systems. These discharges may assist in the distinction between self-generated and externally produced movements; they also allow (or represent) monitoring of the motor commands before the effector response has occurred. Here, I hypothesize that this mechanis...

Today, often ankle’s active prosthesis is used for transtibial amputated people’s walking, because these prostheses have some advantages such as increasing power and decreasing metabolism. In most of active prosthesis in order to create a movement or increase the force at the push-off, electrical actuators are used like a motor. In cases where a higher-power motor is necessary, the capacity, we...

A rigorous numerical test of a hypothetical mechanism of a molecular motor should model explicitly the diffusive motion of the motor's degrees of freedom as well as the transition rates between the motor's chemical states. We present such a Brownian dynamics, mechanochemcial model of the coarse-grain structure of the dimeric, linear motor myosin V. Compared with run-length data, our model provi...

All eukaryotic cells rely on the active self-organization of protein filaments to form a responsive intracellular cytoskeleton. The necessity of motility and reaction to stimuli additionally requires pathways that quickly and reversibly change cytoskeletal organization. While thermally driven order-disorder transitions are, from the viewpoint of physics, the most obvious method for controlling ...