Which comes first – understanding of action language or the action itself? How are our abilities to describe actions linked to our ability to enact them?

In today’s episode of Dancing into Brain Health, our guest is neuroscientist and neurolinguist Dr. Adolfo García whose research is uncovering the neural mechanisms behind motor-language coupling and how this understanding can help individuals who are living with neurodegenerative conditions.

To learn more about Dr. Adolfo Garcia, visit his website: https://adolfogarcia.com.ar/ or follow him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adolfomgarcia/

Read Dr. Garcia’s papers on the neural mechanisms of motor-language coupling: “A moving story: Whole-body motor training selectively improves the appraisal of action meanings in naturalistic narratives” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-12928-w)and “Body into Narrative: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Signatures of Action Text Processing After Ecological Motor Training” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36368604/ as well as this paper on the fast recruitment of motor circuits by action verbs: “How meaning unfolds in neural time: Embodied reactivations can precede multimodal semantic effects during language processing” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31059796/).

Learn more about your host, Magda Kaczmarska, and DanceStream Projects on our website: https://dancestreamprojects.org/or follow us on Instagram: @ dancestream_projects

To engage with our events, meet our partners and browse the latest arts+health research & resources, check out our monthly newsletter, “Dancing into Brain Health”: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7250209162221993986/

This episode of Dancing into Brain Health was edited and produced by Magda Kaczmarska and Hilary Brown-Istrefi. The music for this show is the title cut from the album, Critical Path by Joe Venegoni and Carl Weingarten.