Mirror neurons fire in the same pattern when you do an action and when you watch the same action happen. Some people's mirror neurons appear to be more active and thus leading to a better empathic ability, i.e. the ability to read the emotional state of others and act correspondingly. People with autism often don't possess this ability, which probably is connected to the malfunctioning of mirror neurons (New Scientist 2529:22). This theory is now supported by an experiment led by Peter Enticott, Monash University (Australia), where "[...] 20 healthy adults [...] had to decide if paired images of faces were the same person. In another, they had to decide if both faces were showing the same emotion. In a separate task, volunteers watched video clips of thumb movement, a hand grasping a pen and a hand while writing, while the activity in the primary motor cortex of the brain, which contains mirror neurons, was recorded." (New Scientist: 2008)
The result showed a clear correlation between the mirror neuron activity and the judging of people's emotions but no correlation between the ability to recognise faces. Read more about mirror neurons on Shared Symbolic Storage.
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Small additions:
As far as I know you cannot prove the explicit existence of mirror neurons in the human brain. It is likely that they exist as we know from various tests which I won't discuss here.
To assume that mirror neurons are linked to empathy is complex and must be discussed. Scientists assume that mirror neurons are located in the frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe [1], but the empathy related regions of the brain are the anterior insula and inferior frontal cortex. Nevertheless, studies have shown that empathic people have a higher activity in both regions in the brain. Of course further studies must be made and it is quite clear - I think - that more functions and regions of our complex brain are related to empathy.
[1] Marco Iacoboni, Roger P. Woods, Marcel Brass, Harold Bekkering, John C. Mazziotta, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation, Science 286:5449 (1999)
[2] Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh and Keysers, Current Biology, 2006. The paper can be found here: http://www.bcn-nic.nl/txt/people/publications/gazzola2006sound.pdf
An interesting site about mirror neurons and mythbusting mirror neurons article both provided by Shared Symbolical Storage
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2 comments:
Very nice post!
However, to me it seems that mirror neurons don't tell the whole story:
Gergely Csibra, for example argues, that mirror neurons already" receive highly interpreted ("well understood") input about observed actions."
Marc Jeannerod and Pierre Jacob conclude that:
"The motor properties of the mirror system are well designed for representing an agent’s motor intention involved in an object-oriented action, not for representing an agent’s prior intention, let alone his social (and his communicative) intentions." And that there are a lot of perceptual mechanisms kicked off by seeing others performign axtions that don't have anything tot do witht he mirror neuron system.
for a very engaging and interesting discussion ont he topic, see: http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror
psychologist Allison Gopknik also tries to debunk the mirror neuron theory and lay open its misconceptions in this Slate piece:
http://www.slate.com/id/2165123/pagenum/all/
As far as I know you cannot prove the explicit existence of mirror neurons in the human brain. It is likely that they exist as we know from various tests which I won't discuss here.
To assume that mirror neurons are linked to empathy is complex and must be discussed. Scientists assume that mirror neurons are located in the frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe [1], but the empathy related regions of the brain are the anterior insula and inferior frontal cortex. Nevertheless, studies have shown that empathic people have a higher activity in both regions in the brain. Of course further studies must be made and it is quite clear - I think - that more functions and regions of our complex brain are related to empathy.
[1] Marco Iacoboni, Roger P. Woods, Marcel Brass, Harold Bekkering, John C. Mazziotta, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation, Science 286:5449 (1999)
[2] Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh and Keysers, Current Biology, 2006. The paper can be found here: http://www.bcn-nic.nl/txt/people/publications/gazzola2006sound.pdf
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