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
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
So, to recognize an idiot you have to have been one? Makes you think twice about flaming :)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There's a tribe in Europe, as well. They call themselves Bulgarians :-)
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.
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 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.
So, is this the root of copy cat crimes? :-)
All you need to do is practice in your head.