Cerebral asymmetry: motoring on

I argue that the phylogenetic and neurobiological bases for cerebral asymmetry in humans are likely to be found in motor systems rather than in perceptual systems. Current genetic models of human laterality suggest that a `dextral' allele might be responsible for right-handedness and left-cerebral dominance for speech in the majority of humans. The linking of handedness with language lateralization might reflect the early evolution of language as predominantly a system of manual gestures, perhaps switching to a mainly vocal system only with the emergence of Homo sapiens. So-called `mirror neurons' in the prefrontal cortex of the monkey, which fire both when the animal makes a grasping response and when it sees the same response performed by others, might be part of a circuit that is the precursor to language circuits in the brain. This circuit appears to be bilateral in monkeys, but left-hemispheric in humans.