Abstract
Alexithymia, proposed by Sifneos (1972) as a common personal trait in psychosomatic patients, is characterized by difficulty in identifying and describing feeling of the self. On the other hand, alexithymia has been also found in a broad spectrum of psychiatric disorders featured by a dominant disability of recognition of other's mental states or intentions. Furthermore, recent evidences from neuroscience indicate that common neural coding between perception and action occurs in various parts of the monkey brain (Rizzolatti, 2001 for review), and that, in humans, similar brain areas and computational processing are involved during mental representation of both one's own and others' actions and mental-state reasoning (c.f., 'shared representation' by Decety and Sommerville, 2003). These notions inspires us to suppose common (neural) components of representing self and other, and alexithymia could be proposed as a good model of its fault simulation. Using functional MRI, we evaluated whether individuals with alexithymia have impairment in recognizing other's mental states, movements, and in empathizing others etc. Our studies would address a general interesting issue: can a person who can not understand oneself understand others? It also suggests a common neural component for representing self and other. [J Physiol Sci. 2008;58 Suppl:S30]
