Attention to Metaphor

The last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed a fundamental scientific discovery: the identification of mirror neurons and, consequently, the development of the Embodied Simulation theory. Neuroscientific data on the mechanism of Embodied Simulation and its role in conceptual and linguistic processing, figurative language included, have stimulated a great deal of research on the embodied nature of conceptual metaphors. However, the very definition of the notions of body and embodiment