Slashdot Mirror
"Mirror cells" May Be Key To Communication
tag writes "New Scientist has an article discussing 'mirror cells' -- neurons that fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing that action. Researches think this explains how we 'judge intentions and feelings' and may 'answer important questions about human evolution, language and culture.' The article links to an essay by one of the researchers."
Definately explains why I flinch when someone gets kicked in the crotch.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Who will be the first to patent Mirror Cells?
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
Gee, I could have done that research!
I guess that explains the appeal in porn.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Applications are endless...user friendly anticipation of commands, targeted ads, digital sentience...
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
Sounds like we figured out empathy. Now tell me how the hell we're supposed to detect replicants.
However,
So, basically, you're against trying to figure things out?
This view makes no sense to me. How is it like botany, might I ask? Perhaps you were unaware that botany means "the study of plants." In any case, what they are doing is trying to conduct beneficial research into the nature of behavior, learning, and consciousness.
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
They say that these mirror cells are *how* we learn from culture, society, peers, experiences, and such, and then *apply* this knowledge to life. It does not create the personality, it allows the personality to interact with the world.
You know that saying, how you always kill the one you love? Well, it works both ways.
I saw back in the mid-eighties in high school. The video instructor (Stan Smith maybe?) claimed that by merely repeatedly watching the "perfect form" displayed by the tennis players on the video (Stan Smith, Billie Jean King, et al.), then slowly practicing that form yourself, you could improve your game dramatically. I forget what he called it but it was something like "neuro-muscular programming" or muscle memory training. Maybe it really works... I didn't really see any improvement though, but it might take a lot more than the measly amount of time & effort I put into it.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
This must be where deja vu comes from.
But deja vu evokes such subtle, inexplicable emotions from the strangest things.
How do these recognition patterns work? I dispute the fact that our recognition is based on something as simple and easily broken down as individual visual moments.
I think there is a uniqueness to everyone's interpretation of the world, and that it is probably a mistake to put so much emphasis on recognition cues picked up from others. I don't want to get mystical here (unless you consider psychology mystical) but the very act of recognition can be fraught with psychological connotations, provoking memories and associations.
People who have sexual fetishes, for instance, get a sexual response to contact with certain items or materials. For them, certain items are associated with things that usually have nothing to do with their original purpose. How could this happen if our communication, and the meaning of things in the outside world, comes entirely from other people?
Goat sex free since 2001
I wonder what this means for people who have large numbers of these types of neurons and can somehow be proven to empathize with certain roles in an interaction. IE, if it can be shown that a person physiologically empathizes more with the attacker than the victim in some sort of altercation, would governments want to use that as a way to discriminate against that person in a court room?
If nobody ever re-invented the wheel, we'd all be pushing around flintstones cars, wouldn't we?
he's trying to restrict abortion, yet he PAID for an ex girlfriend to get one BEFORE it was legal!
So, to recognize an idiot you have to have been one? Makes you think twice about flaming :)
This sounds like a great development for designing more 'interactive' computing. Sure, it's not going to create a robot that I love on a spiritual/emotional level per say, but it has some far reaching applicability towards computer AI. For if a computer can truly 'anticipate' what I'm going to do based on a set of simulated mirror neurons in its neural network computing structure, what's to stop computing speed increasing at the same rate it does today. Androids, helper software 'bots', etc. would all become a reality in a treuer, more natural form than today's complex AI algorithms. They would also run faster as they would not be evaluating millions of lines of code on what to do next, they would just... know!
I'm curious, however, if they are differences in the mirror neuron activation between a real-world event and an event watched on television. If there's a lesser mirroring effect with a two-dimensional image, that might serve to at least partially deflect the arguments against media violence that refer to mirror neurons.
However, if there are cells like this, it would go further in explaining this problem as well as possibly diagnosing it. If these cells are clustered in one area of the brain, it would go a long way to showing that the brain is compartmentalized in that way, vs. being more of a pure neural network kind of idea that others believe.
This discovery may have very severe impacts on the philosophy of mind and discussions of Neuroscience. The problem of "other minds" has long been an issue for the eliminative materialist, and such a cell's discovery gives them something to talk about when a cartesial dualist asks them about it.
There is no functionality provided by these supposed "mirror cells" that can not be explained by the already well documented phenomenon of "conditioned response". If mirror cells really did exist, do you seriously suppose that in over 100 years of electroencephalography no-one would have detected them before? I am confident that this reasearch will be proved to be fundamentally flawed upon deeper investigation.
"The scientists are perpretrating a myth, and a dangerous one at that." Given you are obviously not a scientist, the statement equally applies to you. We know the brain is a bunch of neurons. You're just afraid to think of yourself in that way. Maybe your mirror neurons have failed to produce logic as a reason for others. Are you saying that I could destroy all of your neurons and you would still feel (religious beliefs of an after life are irrelevant).
Susan Blackmore's excellent book, The Meme Machine, proposes the idea that imitation (of specific actions or behaviours) is at the heart of meme replication. The idea is that you see or hear someone humming a certain tune, and that meme hops neatly into your brain; imitation is the key, i.e. your brain now makes you able to hum the same tune, even if you don't do it straight away. The same arguments apply to art, language, music, and trolling on Slashdot :)
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The interesting bit is that her hypothesis has generated testable predictions, including one that specific brain mechanisms would be found that support imitation. It looks like mirror neurons are such a mechanism, supporting her ideas.
Amazon.com has some interesting review comments on this book, see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019286212X
This research would have interesting implications concerning the link between violence on TV and in movies . . .
EXCEPT for the fact that this research seems utterly and completely bogus.
Did anyone else notice how goofy the illustrations that accompanied the article were?
I can think of hundreds of applications this would have in the Porn Industry...
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Now, as far as I can understand, these 'mirror cells' are supposed to behave as if we were experiencing the thing we were watching. Take the aforementioned 'America's funniest home videos'.
So this donkey tries to do some guy in the pooper, I find that pants-peeingly funny, but if I was the one who the donkey was molesting, I'd be a little bit scared and a lot pissed off (and maybe just a wee smidge turned on..). That isn't mirroring my reaction to the occurence, it has a completely different affect.
Or perhaps I'm just missing some huge point of the study.
Brant
Oh, and I don't know if anyone's seen that video, but the best part is that you can hear the cameraman laughing his ass off and the camera shaking as his friend runs for his poor, poor life.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Just because we understand how something is implemented, doesn't mean that it is any less authentic an experience. You probably had a sort of folk-theory about the mechanisms for conscious experience - that there was some non-material substance, a "soul" that somehow recieved material information. That model is pretty shopworn at this point. But just because these experiences are essentially implemented by neurological processes, rather than by effects on a little "homonculus of light," doesn't really change the experience.
For those of us who have studed neuroscience, the 'bunches of neurons firing' are, themselves, beautiful and awe-inspiring.
Does that means I can mirror my brain when it gets /.ed?
The sad thing is that their sole purpose for setting up their labs in the desert is that by chance some reporter would use that headline.
You think their excitement is in regards to the Mirror cells breakthrough? Wrong, they're just happy some f'ing journalist finally wrote "COOL PEOPLE IN THE HOT DESERT."
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
That being said, for a person to resolve that there are mysteries unexplainable without any reason for saying it is POOR judgement. Certainly there is evidence of the unexplainable in Mathematics, where Godel proved the impossiblily of having a complete system of mathematics, but he produced proof of such a problem, and there are concrete examples.
As scientists, humans have probed the smallest parts of matter and seen pretty closely what they ARE. And that is because we have been patient and determined to do so. How many people in the 1800's said that physics was done, that there were no more discoveries to be made? QUITE A FEW.
We can understand all of this about matter, yet our brains are made of matter, and we have trouble turning that glass of science inward on ourselves. But to say that it is impossible, or a bad idea to do so, is silly. The more we understand about ourselves, the better we can survive in our environment, and maybe the longer we will be around to have children and grow exponentially like nanobots eating away at the earth. (just kidding).
If you don't want to explore the mysteries of the mind, then don't. But don't get angry when other people do so with success.
Proof of this phenomenon can be found in the male groin. No, not that way - What I mean is look at the way a room of guys reacts when another guy get kicked in the nuts!
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I find this really rather dismaying. These scientist are attempting to explain the most beautiful parts of our consciousness - love, hate, even consciousness itself - in terms of how a bunch of neurons fire.
Actually, even as a person who believes deeply in a religion that is challenged by this discovery, I find the information quite thrilling and compelling.
I've always thought that true faith invites intellectual curiosity, because if you really believe it, how can you be worried about the facts contradicting it?
When a discovery or observation seems to contradict my philosophy, I try not to dismiss the observation out of hand. I approach it with skepticism, because we should approach everything with skepticism, but once compelling evidence is present, I need to consider a couple possibilites: 1. In some peripheral way, my understanding of the world might not be correct. 2. In some way, my understanding of this new information might not be correct.
Still, this new information should be studied with enthusiasm, with all of my preconceptions on the table, including my religious views... because if I fear having my religion challenged, then my faith might not really be as strong as I thought.
In that regard, scientific findings, even scientific myths (as you called them), can never really be "dangerous" to either of us.
As for the notion that something never will be explained, simply because the presence of "mystery" is important to you... You are free to hold that view, but it seems a bit peculiar to urge humility in the same breath.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
One of my roommates in college must have seen this video. He spent all of his spare time watching tennis. In fact, I don't remember seeing much TV aside from tennis that year...wonder if my game improved? :) Seriously, though, he won many intramural games this way (he said).
The concept reminds me of a method I was taught while learning to play the piano. Pretend you're playing a piece of music perfectly. While you are "hearing" the music in your head, you are also "feeling" the keys under your fingers. The next time you actually play the music on the piano, your technique would be improved as if you had practiced. It seems to work to a certain extent. I find that pretending to play the piano is much more difficult than doing it in reality.
Maybe the effect of "mirror cells" isn't limited to visual input?
I wonder if researchers will be able to one day use this type of recognition paradigm for advanced, intuitive artificial intelligence. I think that it is not too early to begin thinking about making out thinking technology not want to hurt us later on. You just know that are machines are going to want to kill us some day...
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
Firstly, consciousness itself is not necessarily unexplainable. Love and hate are, but this is because they have no meaning outside of our perception. Consciousness (arguably) can be defined in absolute terms of the inputs and outputs of a machine, and can be studied in those terms.
Secondly, you're right that the scientists just move the mystery to another level. No-one knows what an "electric force" is, unless they're a quantum mechanic in which case they don't know what a "photon" is. But I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remarks that understanding biology does not take away from your appreciation of a flower, but rather adds to it. You can appreciate a deeper mystery. Have you never found anything in science to be beautiful?
Having said that, this announcement sounds to me like someone uncovering a single line of code in the Linux kernel and saying that it's responsible for multithreading.
I didn't pay for my operating system either
Ummm...false projection is exactly what they are talking about...muscle preparing to react just as that which they are observing.
There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood.
It seems to me that if there is any kind of logical connection between watching something happen and performing the action itself, you can find the same paths being fired for both. That fails to take into account all the differences in the brain between observation and performance. It seems a natural consequence of the fact that we can recognize activities and learn to imitate.
The article seems to just present this in fluffy language.
Can someone post a ..... hehe :-)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
And exactly what scientific, peer-reviewed journal did this appear in? Did I just miss the citation? If not, who cares...
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Now that we'll have directions for mind-reading (well sometime in the future), does a group of /.ers in one room qualify as a Beowulf cluster?
"I've seen plays that were more exciting than this.
Honest to god... Plays!" Homer Simpson
Sure, why is this curious? The mechanism may be interesting, and full props to the biologists, but isn't this what we expect?
We've long known that humans learn by imitation; the way a neural net (like the brain) knows to compare its action to those it imitates is to compare the neurons that fire... fire the same ones and you've successfully imitated. Fire the wrong ones and you did something wrong.
his announcement sounds to me like someone uncovering a single line of code in the Linux kernel and saying that it's responsible for multithreading.Actually, it sounds more to me like a small step towards the reverse-engineering of the brain, which is really cool, IMHO.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Mom's picking up all my crap. I rule
A husband watches his wife pluck car keys from a table. He shivers:
Time to call the boys for some poker and football, I can hardly wait!
A nurse watches a needle being jabbed into an elderly patient. She flinches:
Dammit!! I hate that old bastard, next time I want to do it.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
When a child sees mom pick up the toy, and smiles, it's because that's what the child has learned before: pick up the toy and have fun.
When you see someone play with a sharp blade, you shiver, because you know what the potential consequence could be. But Tarzan may not experience the same feeling, because he has no idea what the shiny thing is.
When I look at a group of Italians talking, I'm not sure if this is just a normal conversation or if they are having a fight, because they are talking so loud (if not yelling) and articulating wildly. That's because I don't have an Italian background. And maybe, in my cultural background, that would qualify as a fight.
There's a tribe in Africa (forgot the name) where nodding means "no" and shaking head means "yes". So, with a completely different background, you might misinterprete quite a lot of things.
That's why understanding each other, or at learn taking the effort to do so, is so important.
http://www.despair.com/connot.html
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Taking this speculation several steps further: If autism is the failure of these mirror neurons to work properly, what's the effect on individuals in cases where they are super-abundunt? ESP (or more accurately, the appearance of it) anyone?
The real question is whether or not the observed neural firing is actually some genetically hardwired process in the brain, part of the underlying archetecture of consciousness... or whether it is instead merely an emergent and learned behavior.
The fact that a experimentally verifiable pattern can be measured does not necessarily demonstrate whether or not the ability is genetically determined. Put electrodes in the cortex of someone doing advanced calculus, and you will likely see a repeatable firing of certain neurons in correlation to certain mathematical notions., even though the symbolic system of math is entirely a cultural construction.
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I always thought empathy could be the basic notion of ethics. You suffer when you see somebody else suffer, and you feel better when you see somebody else's joy. Therefore when you act to help others, it's actually selfish in a way - you'll feel somewhat better too, not because you're condititioned so by parents and society (Freud's superego) but because of your fundamental biology.
If this is true then humans are in essence good after all. Maybe society is not making us better, maybe it's making us worse.
My thought on what de-ja vu is, is when your mind realizes that the past, present, and the future are all happening at once. Kinda got this thought from Koda, psycom.com
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Yet another bit of paper-thin hype from New Scientist. New Scientist is the Weekly World News of science.
The new part of this is twofold: the discovery of evidence for the presence of mirror neurons in humans, and the realtionship with language. The scientists seem to be saying that mirror neurons provide a common understanding that is the basis of communication and language and empathy, and that I think is interesting -- to see something that had been connected with imitation and learning tied so closely to language.
A great deal of extended phenotypics in humans is grounded in the manipulation of mirror neurons of susceptible populations. Autism, in particular, is symptomatic of genetically recessive populations that are experiencing extended genetic dominance -- autism being a pathological byproduct of the imperfect intervention in social identity mechanisms that normally produce such extended phenotypic social structures as religions, bodies politic, etc.
The inappropriate attention historically given to autism and mirror neurons by the academic establishment is an indirect result of the genetic interest among urban elites in maintaining the extended phenotypic social structures that rely on the manipulation of mirror neuronal responses. Recent defections by Italians and Jews (e.g: Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti and their colleagues at the University of Parma and Hugh Fudenberg), ethnic groups that have historically been the prime beneficiaries of such urbanizing social structures in the West, are being driven by the increasing presence of Dravidians (V.S. Ramachandran and Vijendra K. Singh) whose group is not as dependent on the existing extended phenotypic structures of JudeoChristian civilization, and whose relatedness to the recessive European populations, combined with their own genetic dominance, creates a unique relationship with northern European ethnicities -- the primary victims of autism in the U.S.
Seastead this.
Anyone else here find themselves dodging their heads when playing video games like Doom? When watching others play?
My wife laughs at me when my boys wrestle. I'm twisting and feinting in what I think they should be doing. The bad part is that I don't even realize that I'm doing it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
In A Clockwork Orange, Alex was forced to watch a lot of violence, and the result was that an association was formed (I'm not real clear on how) that made him sick every time the though crossed his mind after that.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
As an AC reply to your post has pointed out, technological improvements help too.
IE, all the theory for Relativity and relativistic effects have been around since Maxwell and Newton, with Newton providing the classical approximations and Maxwell providing the framework for information at the speed of light in 1862, but it wasn't until 1905 that relativity was born from Einstein. Why the 50 year wait?
So the argument 'do you seriously suppose that in over 100 years of eeg no-one would have detected them before?' isn't valid. The lack or proof of mirror cells is not at all tied to how long it took to detect them ^^
Excuse my pathetic attempt to use Einstein and Maxwell in my argument. Just using the example that having all the information available, and actually creating something from it, is not necessarily so simple.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Such things are by their very nature unexplainable and mysterious.
There was a time when the rising and setting of the sun was mysterious and unexplainable. We now take the rotation of the Earth for granted.
I don't understand how it can be dangerous to attempt to explain the world around us, as well as try to explain us. Much of what modern medicine came from is people explaining people. Figuring out how the heart pumps your blood is key in trying to prevent death from a heart attack.
Why should we not try to study the brain in hopes to prevent mental illnesses, alzheimers, as well as maybe even reparing damage caused by outside forces (such as car accidents)?
All you need to do to preserve the mystery of nature is to ignore scientific discoveries. Then it's all still a mystery to you.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
You mean New Psientist?
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ans =
NaN
Unless this is the first time the stimulus was given to the subjects, how do we know that both results are not just the memory of it happening to us? The results given when the stimulus is applied to the subject could be a memory of the last time it happened to the subject - I know I have the same reaction when I see someone get a hypodermic shot as I do just before (rather than as) I get the shot myself. It's certainly empathy, but rather than two events using the same part of the brain, they could both be the same event.
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Nonsense.
A person who is ignorant in science sees a rainbow and says, "Oh, pretty." One with knowledge of physics not only sees the colors, but knows that the view is caused by the refraction of photons produced by the fusion of hydrogen to helium 93 million miles away, light that takes years to work its way out of the sun and minutes to reach us once it escapes, light bent by millions of millions of spherical water lenses - made partly of those same sort of hydrogen atoms - hanging suspended in midair, and that each observer sees their own personal rainbow.
I submit that this is a more wonderous view that that of ignorance.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Language is a good idea of the application of these "mirror" neurons. But basically what these types of neurons seem to do is to relate and create (or at least learn) the physcological concept of having a hand and immediatly being able to use it. It's like when a baby finds its hands for the first time by looking at others and then looking at themself. Instead of firing at random, they now represent discrete concepts -- moving your hand, picking something up, etc.
Deja vu is a neurological phenomenon. There have been many studies on the subject. It is actually a group of neurons firing that produce the sensation. Think of it as a neurological hiccup or a software bug. Some people with memory imparement (usually due to head trauma) experience deja vu very often. If a neurosurgeon cracked open your head and stimulated the region of the brain responsible for the feeling of deja vu, you would experience it.
There are many candidate explanations for autism. A book of some interest is _Thinking in Pictures_ by an autistic woman who has designed the majority of the cattle enclosures currently used in the US. She says her autism prevents her from thinking primarily in language, but that her vivid thought in pictures allows her to see how an environment will look and feel to the cattle, thus her great success in her field. This is not an example of impaired empathy, but of enhanced.
However, she has a lot of trouble with speech tonality, which is how we communicate a lot about our emotive states - she will picture movies that express a certain feeling, and then try to speak with the patterns used by people in those scenes, which she can envision vividly.
The sort of autism she experiences would match with the research showing that we have two major, semi-independant modes of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial. Her verbal ability is impaired (although she can speak quite well by translating out of pictures).
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It's an old fallacy when studying the brain to attribute a specific function to a cell.
In cognitive science this is known as the "grandmother cell". i.e. one neuron is designed to fire when it sees a grandmother.
In truth one neuron is part of a network that does many things. The neurons that are involved with movement are also used to recognize, imagine or remember the same movement. There are no "grandmother" cells and there are no "mirror" cells.
Nature will use the same thing for many different purposes. This is what makes the brain so hard to understand.
It theoried that the 'leap' in human evolution was partially due to the environmental changes that occurred during the
time frame mentioned in the essay (100k-40k years ago). The forthcoming Ice Age was cooling the planet and 'humans', who were surviving for the greater percentage of time in trees,
were forced aground in search of food. While this was necessary, it also exposed them to
various predators (lions, etc) - forcing the humans to travel together, hunt together, and in all likelihood, develop a sophisticated communcations system together.
Perhaps this can lend some insight into why the sudden leap in intellectual evolution didn't occur earlier in our history,
as the article mentioned that our brains have been at approximately the same
intellectual level for the last 250k years.
Of course I am no expert in this field so feel free to disagree
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I'd agree with that. These 'mirror cells' aren't that big a surprise. Computer scientists and all the others interested in such things got the idea that such a system might be how things worked (in part) long ago. The fact that other scientists went out and did a study and figured out that this one theory is at least very close to correct is quite interesting. With each level you peel away you reveal thousands of new questions. That is why science can be so addicting. Once you discover a things real beauty you'll just want more and more and you'll get it if you try.
:)
I'd probably say it's more like someone discovering how operator overloading works and think it's responsible for the multithreading.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"He says mirror neurons and the way they facilitate imitative learning help to explain why we only developed things like tool use, art and mathematics about 40,000 years ago, despite the fact that our brains had reached their full size some 150,000 years earlier. These cultural inventions, he contends, probably popped up accidentally, but they were disseminated quickly because of our amazing, imitative, learning brains--made possible by a more sophisticated version of the monkey mirror neuron system."
Is this why so few people can come up with anything more original than "frist psot" or "hot grits"?
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
So, there is no 3. the doctrinal commitments of my faith are no longer teneble? You will always give your religion's dogma first-tier status over new discoveries?
So, is this the root of copy cat crimes? :-)
There are experiments going back 30 years showing that an infant of a few weeks old is able to make faces - stick out its tongue for instance - in response to seeing its mother make those faces. Which shows that the mirroring is inborn, since this is an infant which has never seen its own face to understand how it corresponds to its mothers.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The question is how we perceive speech. Do we directly process the chirps and hisses and buzzes which make up human speech, mapping those sounds directly to words in our mental dictionaries? Or do we start by reconstructing the gestures in the mouth which produced the sounds we hear, and then look up the words in our mental dictionaries based on those reconstructed gestures?
The finding reported in this article is consistent with the latter view.
The idea is a bit old. Handwriting recognition algorithms actually used it already years ago. Here is how it works:
In order to recognize handwriting human brain simulate the process of writing that is it's trying to imagine "what I would do to create this". That is recognition happening in terms of text creation. That is some neurons "... fire both when you perform an action and when you observe someone else performing that action." (or even just see the result of their performing) Handwriting recognition programs just mimic this process that is they are trying to distinguish letters by recognizing primitive creation movements.
I've learned all this in university about 9 years ago. Here are some additional examples of the same brain phenomena (also 9 years old):
I suspect the EPS people are going to love this.
I can see how we'd have some neurons that fire when we observe someone else doing something. But when we do something, are those neurons firing because we are doing it? Or are they firing because we observe ourselves doing it?
If the former, then these neurons are probably parts of our ability to learn by mimicry. If the latter, then perhaps they are also the crux of self-awareness.
Most animals can learn by mimicry. Evolution would take advantage of such a thing. But if this neural system is involved in mimicry and self-awareness, then perhaps we sorely underestimate the self-awareness of most of the animal kingdom.
--Blair
All you need to do is practice in your head.
I love the way that the neurologists are mapping neural activity to sociology, XOR gates to excel spreadsheets, 100 billion independant computational units working together to generate the macroscopic human condition. This is just getting empathy down to the neural level.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It is those of unearned pride and the paranoia it causes that fear discovery.
I believe intelligence is easy, simple, beautiful, and quite easy to acquire. Humanity is too busy drooling over its greatness (I say it's great because most aspathetics are impostors anyway) to take advantage of reality.
Humanity prefers to marvel at a distance than to know, or it seems you do at least.
It is precisely this humility that splits the world into people who think science is difficult and must kept locked up or they won't be able to profit and those who think science is a joke and completely hate it.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA how FRUSTRATING that is to a teenager and even someone my age(24) looking for access to knowledge when we already have the skills to acquire it and appreciate it.
Existentialism is for responsible existentialists only. Your kind of fear-based logic pisses me off.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
He was given a drug that made him feel sick before the sessions, as is explicitly stated and shown in the movie.
He was told they were vitamins.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
How exciting: they discovered body English. Their next experiment will show that when your bowling ball is headed for the gutter, you lean in the other direction and make encouraging noises.
;-)
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``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
As with many programmers, I too yearn to give my creations the cognitive powers that I myself posses and I do think on this subject often...
Then I become humbled by the majesty of it all.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Why can't this help our efforts to create AI? I'mn sure that this would be possible to implement into a machine.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Nothing more. Neuroscientists are blind people trying to find their way in a vast maze. I pity most of them.
These people still have not understood that representation and computation are what makes the mind tick. Yes, when a subsystem, say which is responsible for assessing motion, is invoked it is highly probable that the same neurons will be excited when the individual or some other individual makes a move. And the only reason for this comes from the fact that it would be unwise to duplicate the same subsystem for perception of yourself and others. I may not have put this point too clearly but the simple argument goes: Assume there is a function I(x) in your brain: it is responsible for "understanding" motion attributed to a species. Say of "apes". Assume further that you are an ape, too.
Now, whenever you do a motion, you track your own motion. Therefore, you have to interpret it. I(x) does that. When some other ape acts in a way that you can detect visually, you apply the same interpretation function I(x) for the other individual. Thus, there is nothing fundamental or novel about the so-called mirror cell. Extend the argument to your liking.
Thanks,
--exa--
Actually, the linked article in Edge makes this point explicitly. The funny and/or interesting part is why this obvioulsy smart fellow should have missed the real point, though:
Following Darwin's lead I suggest that our vocal equipment and our remarkable ability to modulate voice evolved mainly for producing emotional calls and musical sounds during courtship ("croonin a toon."). Once that evolved then the brain -- especially the left hemisphere -- could evolve language.
As he clearly knows from his later paragraphs, the most essential function of these clustered abilities is almost certainly within the mother-child bond!