Hi, everybody. This is our Brain Science Facebook Live session number two. I hope that you will

submit your comments and ideas. I want to remind you that I've got a trip to Australia planned for May of 2019, and I hope you'll join me.

If you want to know more about the trip, go to brainsciencepodcast.com forward slash Australia 2019, and you can see the details about the trip, including

how much it costs. And if you want a more detailed it itinerary, you can send me email

at Brain Science Podcast at gmail.com. So what I want to talk about today is peripersonal neurons.

In episode 142, I talked about a book called The Spaces Between Us, which was written by Michael

Gratziano, who's also been on the show in the past.

Last month I showed the book, but I don't remember what I did with it, so I apologize for that.

Anyway, we first explored this whole idea of peripersonal neurons and peripersonal space back in episode 21 and 23,

when we discussed Sandra Blake's book, The Body Has a Mind of its

Own, How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do Almost Everything Better.

So that was the first time that I had talked about, that famous experiment that shows that

when a monkey is taught to use a rake to reach for food,

it then incorporates the rake into its body map temporarily.

And we think that something like this goes on when we're driving a car and we somehow know where the car is,

or something that's easier to imagine just using a baseball bat or a

tool or tennis racket. So in episode 142, Michael Gratziano introduced us to the idea of peripersonal

neurons. These are the neurons that have been found in several areas of the brain,

and they were found in areas of the brain that they used to think were purely motor,

but they actually respond to visual stimuli, specifically objects that are approaching near to the body.

He describes these neurons as acting sort of like a bubble wrap,

so that if you visualize the bubbles as the receptive feels of the neurons, then there's going to be

...