![]() “Their original claim was that mirror neurons provide the mechanism for attaching meaning to actions like hand and speech gestures. “Iacoboni and the other 'action understanding' supporters are conflating two logically independent questions,” Hickok explains. And both of these claims, according to Hickok, remain unsupported by hard evidence. What the “action understanding” school originally claimed, Hickok says, was that mirror neurons provide the neural mechanism for attaching meanings to motor actions – but in recent years, many of those same researchers have been leaning away from that claim, and toward the contention that mirror neurons themselves actually encode the meanings of actions. The question of whether mirror neurons allow us to understand movement gestures, Hickok explains, is only one of the “action understanding” school's unsupported claims – researchers who argue for a mirror neuron-centric model of speech comprehension also bear the burden of proving their claim that the motor system is involved in representing the meaning of action-related language. Though Hickok doesn't dispute the existence of mirror neurons, he's highly skeptical about their supposed central role in empathy, speech, autism and understanding – and he's spent the past 10 years publishing research regarding those doubts. One of the first scientists to question the “action understanding” hypothesis was UC Irvine's Greg Hickok. But this kingdom's borders have fallen under relentless attack since its very earliest days. On this hypothesis rests a kingdom: If it's true, Iacoboni may be right that we can treat autism and speech disorders by repairing the human mirror neuron system. This realization led the discoverers of mirror neurons to put forth what they call the “action understanding” hypothesis - that mirror neurons are the neural basis for our ability to understand others' actions. They seem specially tuned to respond to actions with clear goals – whether those actions are perceived through sight, sound, or any other sensory pathway. They don't respond to pantomimes, or to meaningless gestures, or to random animal sounds. There's something strange about the range of actions mirror neurons respond to. Their insights paint a more subtle, nuanced picture of mirror neurons' role than anyone originally suspected. In the wake of the Summit, I caught up with some of the world's top mirror neuron experts, and asked them to bring me up to date on their latest findings, debates, and discussions. September 2012 marked the first-ever Mirror Neurons: New Frontiers Summit in Erice, Sicily, where researchers championing all sides of the debate gathered to share their findings and hash out their differences. We could be ignoring potential cures by focusing on a hypothesis that's grown too popular for its own good.Īnd through it all, the mirror neuron field continues to attract new inquisitive minds. If it turns out that mirror neurons play only auxiliary roles – and not central ones – in action understanding, as many opponents of these claims contend, we may be looking in entirely the wrong place for causes of autism and speech disorders. For instance, UCLA's Marco Iacoboni and others have put forth what Iacoboni called the “broken mirror hypothesis” of autism – the idea that malfunctioning mirror neurons are likely responsible for the lack of empathy and theory of mind found in severely autistic people.Įver since these theories' earliest days, though, sharp criticism has descended on the claims they make. Some doctors even say they've discovered new treatments for mental disorders by reexamining diseases through the mirror neuron lens. ![]() Since most of us think of goals as more abstract than movements, mirror neurons confront us with the distinct possibility that those everyday categories may be missing crucial pieces of the puzzle – thus, some scientists propose that mirror neurons might be involved in feelings of empathy, while others think these cells may play central roles in human abilities like speech. ![]() Over the next few decades, this “action understanding” theory of mirror neurons blossomed into a wide range of promising speculations. In short, even though these “mirror neurons” were part of the brain's motor system, they seemed to be correlated not with specific movements, but with specific goals. In the early 1990s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma made a surprising discovery: Certain groups of neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys fired not only when a monkey performed an action – grabbing an apple out of a box, for instance – but also when the monkey watched someone else performing that action and even when the monkey heard someone performing the action in another room.
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