Dancing in Your Head: An Interdisciplinary Review.

The aim of this review is to highlight the most relevant contributions on dance in neuroscientific research. Neuroscience has analyzed the mirror system through neuroimaging techniques, testing its role in imitative learning, in the recognition of other people's emotions and especially in the understanding of the motor behavior of others. This review analyses the literature related to five general areas: (I) breakthrough studies on the mirror system, and subsequent studies on its involvement in the prediction, the execution, the control of movement, and in the process of "embodied simulation" within the intersubjective relationship; (II) research focused on investigating the neural networks in action observation, and the neural correlates of highlighted by comparative studies on different dance styles; (III) studies dealing with the viewer's experience of dance according to specific dance repertoires, which revealed the relevance of choreographic choices for aesthetic appreciation; (IV) studies focused on dance as an aesthetic experience, where both the emotional and the cultural dimension play a significant role, and whose investigation paves the way to further progress both in empirical and in phenomenological research methodologies; (V) collaboration-based experiments, in which neuroscientists and choreographers developed expertise-related questions, especially focusing on the multiple phenomena that underlie motor imagery.

What Happens When I Watch a Ballet and I Am Dyskinetic? A fMRI Case Report in Parkinson Disease.

Background: The identical sets of neurons - the mirror neuron system (MNS) - can be activated by simply observing specific, specific movements, decoded behaviors and even facial expressions performed by other people. The same neurons activated during observation are those recruited during the same movements and actions. Hence the mirror system plays a central role in observing and executing movements.

Survival of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in a population-based registry.

Objective: To evaluate the survival of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in an Italian population and to assess the effects of selected prognostic indicators on survival.

Background: Median survival of ALS patients has been reported to range between 12 and 23 months from diagnosis and between 23 and 36 months from onset of symptoms. Although several negative prognostic factors have been identified, the overall picture still needs clarification.

Emotional and affective disturbances in patients with epilepsy.

We sought to assess whether epilepsy is associated with a higher risk of emotional reactions to frustrating stimuli, aggressive behavior, apathy, and depression, and whether these psychiatric patterns are specific to the epileptic condition. The study population consisted of referral patients 17 years and older with idiopathic or cryptogenic epilepsy (i.e.