Abstract
My research tries to underline the relationship between the artistic and theatrical languages and the neuroscience, in particular starting from the discovery of the MNS Mirror Neuron System (Gallese, Rizzolati), to offer a contribution for an enactive learning (Varela, Thomson 1991). The Embodied Simulation - a common underlying functional mechanism that mediates our capacity to share the meaning of actions, intentions, feelings, and emotions with others, thus grounding our identification with and connectedness to others (Gallese 2009) - tells us that at the basis of the understanding of the world there are the representation of the aim and the sensory-motor involvement, motor and intentional basis of learning, that art and theatre express through pre-linguistic instruments: images and actions. The powerful techniques for monitoring the mind activity through images, like the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), allowed us to directly observe what happens in our brain while we are engaged in different perceptive, executive and cognitive activities. In the last years the educational sciences and the cognitive sciences have intensified their connections to the point of identifying (Fischer, Daniel, Immordino-Yang, Stern, Battro, Koizumi 2007) a unique science MBE, Mind Brain Education science (Tokuhama-Espinoza 2010). This common field concerns the classical themes of learning, memory, attention and language, but also the themes of consciousness and body. The theoretical and empirical research, arisen at the end of the XXth Century, and now developing in cognitive sciences, is causing the change of the research interests from the mind study itself to the study of an ecological mind, of an inter independent mind between body and environment: the focus is the concatenation mind-body-environment, the extended mind. The perspective that moves the interest of this study is the integration of the phenomenological thinking with the cognitive neuroscience, starting from the concepts of Leib and Erlebnis (Husserl, Heidegger). In this perspective, the role of the body in the process of a developing cognition and identity is central (Lakoff 1999). The methodological approach is integrated, and the data analysis mixed; it is quantitative in the collection of life skills and qualitative in a phenomenological perspective for the exploration of individual experiences.