Invasive Recording of Local Field Potentials during Observation, Imagination, and Execution of Movements in Epilepsy Patients

The existence of neurons with “mirror” properties in humans was demonstrated in an invasive study in epilepsy patients only in 2010, after almost 15 years of research into the mirror neuron system (MNS). The difficulty of studying the MNS in humans comes from the limited number of methods for assessment of activity in structures, such as EEG and fMRI. We report here studies recording activity in subcortical brain structures using invasive electrodes during different motor tasks in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. The characteristics of local field potentials (LFP) were obtained for the left and right frontal and temporal areas. LFP signal power was significantly greater on performance of socially colored tasks in the left frontal electrode, which may be evidence of neuronal connections between the MNS and the basal ganglia system, which monitor and inhibit undesirable motor actions on perception and take part in the process of motor associative learning. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.