The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition

The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition

Gregory Hickok

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0393089614

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


An essential reconsideration of one of the most far-reaching theories in modern neuroscience and psychology.

In 1992, a group of neuroscientists from Parma, Italy, reported a new class of brain cells discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. These cells, later dubbed mirror neurons, responded equally well during the monkey’s own motor actions, such as grabbing an object, and while the monkey watched someone else perform similar motor actions. Researchers speculated that the neurons allowed the monkey to understand others by simulating their actions in its own brain.

Mirror neurons soon jumped species and took human neuroscience and psychology by storm. In the late 1990s theorists showed how the cells provided an elegantly simple new way to explain the evolution of language, the development of human empathy, and the neural foundation of autism. In the years that followed, a stream of scientific studies implicated mirror neurons in everything from schizophrenia and drug abuse to sexual orientation and contagious yawning.

In The Myth of Mirror Neurons, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reexamines the mirror neuron story and finds that it is built on a tenuous foundation―a pair of codependent assumptions about mirror neuron activity and human understanding. Drawing on a broad range of observations from work on animal behavior, modern neuroimaging, neurological disorders, and more, Hickok argues that the foundational assumptions fall flat in light of the facts. He then explores alternative explanations of mirror neuron function while illuminating crucial questions about human cognition and brain function: Why do humans imitate so prodigiously? How different are the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Why do we have two visual systems? Do we need to be able to talk to understand speech? What’s going wrong in autism? Can humans read minds?

The Myth of Mirror Neurons not only delivers an instructive tale about the course of scientific progress―from discovery to theory to revision―but also provides deep insights into the organization and function of the human brain and the nature of communication and cognition.

7 illustrations

Brain Renaissance: From Vesalius to Modern Neuroscience

Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science

The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

Basic Vision: An Introduction to Visual Perception

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Occasional, much needed general encouragement. I am especially indebted to Steve Pinker who provided practical advice at several stages of the project, including a gripping tutorial on the use of the comma (I still don’t understand them). He also fielded random questions about how the mind works (he wrote the book after all: S. Pinker [1997], Norton), read and commented on portions of the manuscript, and helped with the title. My daughters, Taylor and Ally, provided invaluable help on the.

Neuron review paper5 summed up my impression of the entire enterprise: Quite an interesting read, but I have to say, it’s not exactly the tightest paper I’ve read. Plenty of speculation, hints of circularity, over-generalization, etc. We all agree that mirror neurons are very interesting neural creatures, but the idea that they are the basis for action understanding is darn near incoherent. Having schooled myself on the basics of mirror neurons and having formed a skeptical perspective, I took.

Known. Sometimes the term functional is used quasi-synonymously with physiology. This is the case with functional MRI, which measures a part of the brain’s physiology, namely blood flow patterns, in contrast to anatomical or structural MRI. But brains are more than just anatomy and physiology; they are designed to perform a range of tasks, or functions, like controlling respiration, sleep-wake cycles, perceiving objects visually or auditorily, moving, talking, and remembering, among many others.

As such one might write it off as irrelevant to the neuroscience of higher-level speech-language function. This is a fair concern because one might not expect a lower-level nerve problem to affect more complex linguistic processes in the cerebral cortex. However, we must again wonder whether the use-it-or-lose-it principle might come into play: does the inability to control lower-level aspects of speech impact the functioning of higher-level motor speech centers that are at the center of the.

A complicated mechanism at its base. All it takes is association. The trick is knowing what and when to associate. For this we need to pair Heyes’s associative mechanism with Jones’s higher-order systems that can make use of imitation “intelligently” (in the evolutionary sense). Macaque brains are set up with the machinery to take advantage of information about others’ actions to inform and select sometimes similar, sometimes different actions of their own. Mirror neurons are part of this.

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