Talk:Mirror neuron

IN LIGHT OF NEW EVIDENCE SECTION

I've changed the explicit statement that macaque monkeys do not imitate others of their species in light of new evidence Meehawl 17:55, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Older entries

Does anyone know where the quote from Rizzolatti comes from? All references I can find related to that quote on the Internet just say it's from wikipedia. When did he actually say that? - Bobet 16:02, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I've deleted the paragraph you're referring to. I am a science writer and was working on an article on mirror neurons some two months ago, so I checked it with Rizzolatti (or maybe it was Ferrari, I should look it up in my e-mail). He denied that the finding was serendipitious and that the thing with the banana and the scanner ever happened. Hester van Santen 212.187.63.199 20:22, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

• "Our original aim in the present experiments was to study the activity of FS neurons in a behavioral situation in which we could separate stimulus-associated responses from the activity related to movements. For this purpose a macaque monkey was trained to retrieve objects of different size and shape from a testing box with a variable delay after stimulus presentation. After the initial recording experiments, we incidentally observed that some experimenter's actions, such as picking up the food or placing it inside the testing box, activated a relatively large proportion of FS neurons in the absence of any overt movement of the monkey."

Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, Rizzolatti, 1992. Understanding motor events: a neurophysiological study. Experimental Brain Research, 91, 176-180.

Serendipity (sěr'ən-dĭp'ĭ-tē) n.

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3. An instance of making such a discovery.

Niubrad (talk) 00:00, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

--

Mirror neurons: imitation and limitation

What we know about mirror neurons is their cellular activity under certain circunstances. We do not know their product. Imitation is a behavior of one subject. The imitation syndrom of Lhermitte (1964) is due to lesions and probably correspond to the deshinhibition of a learned inhibition. I believe that it would be wise not passing to fast from one concept to the other.

• Lhermitte, F. (1984) The autonomy of man and the frontal lobe. I and II. Bull. Acad. Nat. Med. 168:224-242

--Gerard.percheron 13:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

On my user page I have written an article about the reservations that might be taken when attributing behavior to any single neuron or nuclei firing. However, it is exciting research, and I did get a chance to see Rizzolatti give a talk at the Salk Institute on 3/07 and he showed a video where a monkey had an electrode implanted into his brain and a researcher would bring a peanut to his mouth and the probe would fire a consistent blip, then the researcher moved the peanut to his mouth but then over to the side of his mouth, and the electrode started to fire but then slowely stopped firing when the monkey realized he was not going to eat the peanut. It was just one of those awesomely simple video's where everyone in the room was just giving the silent WOW. Niubrad 00:31, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would say that adult macaques don't imitate. It has been known for over 50 years, from the work of Imanishi and his colleagues with macaques on the Japanese island of Koshima, that macaques of all ages engage in imitation. Many species of birds, apes, and monkeys (and I would assume other sorts of animals as well) have been observed to engage in imitation. It is clearly not a uniquely human ability; it is an important survival mechanism for many species. July191979 (talk) 02:35, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Autism

The current issue of Scientific American has two articles focusing on this topic. One of them states a theory that the basis of autism is mirror-neuron deficit.
--Jerzy•t 14:11, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I am currently working in a lab that has just recieved funding to study mirror neurons in autism using fMRI, we postulate the same thing you read in Scientific American. Niubrad 01:37, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

And I work in another action understanding lab and we are very skeptical of the idea of a direct link between mirror neurons and autism. It is an appealing idea but the data simply is not strong enough yet.--AFdeCH 15:41, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

The idea may be simplistic, but it deserves enough consideration to either prove or disprove it. If it should be true, the prospect of a simple (fairly) therapeutic option for the treatment of the condition becomes at least conceptually feasible. --Anthony.bradbury 21:40, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is definitely worth testing, but it hasn't been tested fully yet. AFdeCH 21:52, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

At times like these, I wish I didn't live on a sunny island in the middle of the Mediterranean, because there's not a lot of research into ASD taking place here. I could tell you a thing or two about it, because not only do I have Asperger, my little boy has high-functioning autism. So I would love a cure: not for myself, but for my little boy. I believe, without any proof obviously, that autism is caused by a problem with filtering data and turning it into information. Mirror neurons simply don't explain everything that I experience. So more research is indeed needed, but I think that mirror neurons will prove a dead end when it comes to ASD. SeverityOne (talk) 14:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I have AS diagnosed and I belong among those who don't really have much problem with empathy. I do, however, not seem to make connections about other feelings, other than the most obvious signs, as fast as my friends. It takes some time to figure it all out. The way I felt when I read the article is that the problems could lie in the very nature of mirror neurons themselves; not necessarily a deficiency. As people in the autism spectrum have different body language than other people, logically the mirror neurons would not give the right results when it tries to match a non-autistic person's body language with ones own. Similarly, I've heard that people not in the autism spectrum has the very same problem when they try to read our body language. I am no scientist in this field, so what do you think about this possibility? Note that I do not disregard a deficiency, just that there may be more to it. OnionKnight (talk) 13:32, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

One thing that this article really doesn't get into is that to computational neuroscientists like me, it seems very unlikely that mirror neurons are "hard-wired". Instead it seems much more likely that mirror responses are learned. How could this happen? Well, the simplest method would be for babies to learn by watching adults imitate them. It is very common for babies to spontaneously generate emotional expressions, such as a smile, and when this happens, nearby adults, especially the mother, have a strong tendency to smile back. So, what is needed is a mechanism built into the baby's brain that generates emotional expressions, observes the resulting facial changes in nearby adults, and then learns to associate the two things. If you think about it that way, you might see that there are lots of levels on which the mechanism can go astray. Looie496 (talk) 00:03, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

It's overdoing, how about reflex? you don't imitate what isn't worth.. i think that trail is more promising, interesting besides, if that changes macaque stemming neurologics. "the social cel", The archeological argument is not convincing, denying speech in early humans. It is more plausudible (eg.) a stable environmental concept operated until, an influence of moral or ethic character was the cause of major changes (rock-art), thriven by population factors(vertical population expanse). This decision/impact theory is plausible, at least historically, in the sense human societys have reacted diversely , and revolutionary when technological circumstances (firearms, agriculture) rooted their livelyhoods.Otoh., ofcourse its a highly functional and valuable cell-type80.57.242.54 17:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

As a person with Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning type of autism, the SciAm article caught my eye, and I eagerly devoured it. Autism has several components, which can include sensory regulation malfunctions, but the one people seem most concerned about is the social atypicality.

I don't read human body language, and I have a hard time picking up subtle social clues; I also have a mild, undiagnosed prosopagnosia for human faces. Neurotypical people pick up body language on an instinctive level (or so they tell me), and respond on the same instinctive level. I have been asked why I don't smile, why I run funny, and why I have no fashion sense.

I am unlikely to successfully mate with a neurotypical human female, thus passing on my genes, because I evoke no sense of the Protector or the Stable Provider. In a primitive environment, I would not be a survivor. However, in urban/suburban civilization, a person's survival characteristics are different than in the rural or primitive areas. In the city, my brain is more highly prized than my hands.

It should be obvious that not all of the autism puzzle is based on different functioning of mirror neurons; however, it does seem plausible that the "self-absorbtion" that autism is named after is based on not innately recognizing others as "similar to me". --BlueNight 07:37, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

As someone who also has a (not officially undiagnosed) mild form of Asperger, I must say that I find the idea of mirror neurons solely being responsible for autistic spectrum disorders highly suspicious, to say the least. It doesn't explain why people with ASD can't stand triggers, such as touch or noise. To me, a lot of it comes down to a problem filtering information: knowing what's relevant, and what isn't. If I have to leave a room because everybody is talking/yelling at the same time, that is not explained by mirror neurons, because if anything, there should be less neural activity, not an overdose. So whoever is going to do research into this, please be advised that at least one person with an ASD thinks this theory is a lot of rubbish. :) SeverityOne (talk) 14:44, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think those who advocate a connection between mirror neurons and autism-spectrum disorders are saying that malfunctioning mirror neurons are solely responsible for ASDs. They're just saying they play a role, and have found, among other things, that there's a strong relationship between symptom severity and degree of activity deficits in mirror neuron systems in circumstances where they ought to be active. There's a good review article on research examining ASD/mirror neuron associations in Psychological Bulletin in March 2007. July191979 (talk) 02:54, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Mirror neurons in humans

Does anyone have reference to the existence of neurons that isn't from inference?

The section "The mirror neuron system in humans" initial states that existence is unknown, then proceeds on implying that they do indeed exist.

eet_1024 66.53.228.65 02:05, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The previously referenced Scientific American articles that brought it to the cultural consciousness state quite clearly that this was first obvserved in primates with electrodes attached inside their brains. Since such invasive experimentation can't ethically be done to humans, a similar phenomenon was sought, and found, on electroencephalograms. Thus, the existence of the phenomenon inside the human brain is based on inference, but it isn't much of a stretch. --BlueNight 07:45, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, can anyone confirm that Luciano Fadiga was "the first to provide evidence that human beings have a system of mirror neurons analogous to system found in monkeys".[1] Google Scholar results indicate papers he has been involved in are well cited, but the claim of "first" is pretty bold. If he was the first, is it appropriate to mention him in this section of the article? John Vandenberg 04:54, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Observation mirrors action or vice versa

The introduction and several other places imply that the principle function of these neurons is to do and by some auxiliary path they fire for observing too ("as though the observer itself were performing the action"). But I don't see anything to back that up. Maybe they're principally perception neurons and when the animal performs an action, it is essentially observing its own action ("as though the actor itself were observing the action"). Or, what seems more likely, the neurons represent the abstract action, and so naturally fire whether the animal either does or observes the action. If someone knows there's no reason to believe these are fundamentally self-action neurons, please fix the introduction.

Bryan Henderson 23:44, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the neurons probably represent the abstract action. But they are still needed for performing actions. If a person has a stroke damaging the inferior parietal lobule, they have difficulty performing and imitating skilled actions (Buxbaum LJ, Kyle KM, Menon R. On beyond mirror neurons: internal representations subserving imitation and recognition of skilled object-related actions in humans. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 2005 Sep;25(1):226-39) AFdeCH 21:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Precognition neurons?

There's something missing in the description of the grasp-to-eat vs grasp-to-place experiment. It says the neuron fires before the second part (eat/place) of the action happens. How does the monkey's brain know which it's going to be?

Ordinary causality considerations say that as described, the experiment neuron must not be related to eating or placing, since they happen after the neuron fires!

Bryan Henderson 23:44, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

The monkey knew if the object was food, it was going to be eaten. If it was not food, it was going to be placed. AFdeCH 21:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

This article is very poorly written. What is the policy regarding quality of writing vs. content?

Mirror neurons, origins of language, and metaphor

The article points out that human mirror neurons seem to be close to Broca's area, suggesting an involvement in the origins of language, possibly as part of some kind of shared gestural system.

It occurs to me that there is another possible route from mirror neuron to language. The logic of the mirror neuron mechanism seems to be some kind of limited 'represention of the other as oneself'. The logic of metaphor is also a 'representation of one thing as another'. It would be a neat evolutionary twist if a neurological generalization of the mirror neuron mechanism had been a trigger for the development of metaphor - or perhaps of some more general mechanism that subsumes metaphor such as Fauconnier and Turner's 'conceptual blending'. One could in principle test this by looking for metaphor-related neural mechanisms co-located with mirror neuron mechanisms.

Is this plausible neurologically?

JNTM 15:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Metaphorically... yes. Practically... when it comes to hard science you have to take baby steps, looing for the neural correlates of metaphores may be a few decades away; Athough they have been dubbed the empathy neuron by Ramachandran (phantom gonad). We are talking action recognition. As in, "the other as oneself." To borrow one of my collegues observations, its as if the human brain has somehow co-opted the action recognition portion of the brain, assigned a sound to the action, stored it, and produces it in reference to the verb. Like a metaphore, and although it's not exactly Whittman, it's still pretty cool. Niubrad 09:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

New article

The article states that mirror neurons: "are believed to exist in humans and in some birds." and that "The only animal where mirror neurons have been studied individually is the macaque monkey."

I think it may be interesting to point out this article which shows mirror neurons in swamp sparrows and shows electrical recordings from them: Precise auditory–vocal mirroring in neurons for learned vocal communication - Nature. 2008 Jan 17;451(7176):305-10 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nico80 (talk • contribs) 01:49, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Gender differences

There is exactly one study that reports MEG differences in males vs females. However, the sample (10/10) is extremely small, the variance high and the object, a male hand, dubious as to what reaction is provokes in women vs men. Note that there are numerous studies that don't report gender differences. I'd therefore suggest to rephrase the paragraph, as it contains a number of unwarranted assertions (as to empathy etc.). --Simha (talk) 09:56, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Mirror neuron/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Here's a partial review to start with:

• Image:Mirror neuron.jpg lacks a source and a reason for why it's in the public domain. This must be fixed before promotion. (Also, the black arrow is almost invisible, how about modifying the image and uploading a new one with a white arrow after the copyright thing is fixed?)
• The article has a lot of jargon, e.g. "conspecific" in the lead. It's good that this is linked, but words unfamiliar to a lay reader should be avoided wherever possible. How about "of the same species"? Same with unfamiliar concepts like fMRI. The article needs to be combed for jargon and either explain or replace as many instances as possible.
• "no single neurons can be responsible for the phenomenon" single neurons? Single type of neuron? Can this be explained?
• The lead should serve as a stand-alone summary of the article (see WP:LEAD), so it should probably contain info from each of the sections. I got rid of the "introduction" section, so parts of the lead should probably be merged into sections of the article, as the lead is now too long.
• "evidence from fMRI, TMS and EEG and behavioral strongly suggest" unclear.
  • Ah, I didn't realize that this was a grammar error. Thanks for catching it. 69.140.152.55 (talk) 00:24, 14 June 2008 (UTC)
• The second paragraph under "Discovery" doensn't have to do with the discovery.
• Each of the references should be expanded to have author, title, journal, volume, issue, page, and URL if available. You can use the {{cite journal}} template, and check out this awesome tool which will make it a snap.
• Primary sources are not the best for wikipedia; better are review articles or textbooks that cite the primary sources. This article relies heavily on primary sources. At least some of them should be replaced.
• The article uses brain anatomy terms without explaining them (e.g. "mirror neurons are found in the inferior frontal gyrus (region F5) and the inferior parietal lobule."). How about an image illustrating the areas in question?
• Words like "Recent" should be avoided per WP:DATED.
• Short, one-sentence paragraphs should be avoided.
• Is it eye-tracking or eye tracking?
• Numbers and units should be separated with a non-breaking space (&nbsp;) so the units don't show up by themselves on the next line. See WP:NBSP.

I'm going to stop here for now and put the article on hold for a week. I'll continue reviewing once these issues are addressed. If they don't get addressed in time, the article can be resubmitted to GAN at another time. delldot talk 11:08, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Nomination withdrawn because of the image copyright problem noted above. 69.140.152.55 (talk) 01:46, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Computational models and Dinstein

This is getting to be a nice article. I have a question, though, about using the Dinstein article to support the statement, "to date no plausible neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation". I haven't been able to spot where Dinstein et al discuss this, and the statement is at best misleading, since there are tons of computational models of mirror neuron activity in the literature. Of course "plausible" is in the eye of the beholder. looie496 (talk) 18:00, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Individual neurons have been studied

Marco Iacoboni, Itzhak Fried (neurosurgeon), and others at UCLA were able to perform tests on individual neurons in humans. Itzhak Fried performs surgery on epileptic patients to help relieve their seizures and such, and at times he would place individual electrodes with neurons. So, with the patient's permission, Marco Iacoboni and his team were able to study this.

--Heero Kirashami (talk) 04:09, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer, but I can't find any publication of this work. Google Scholar shows a citation of a J Cognitive Neurosci paper, but I can't find any such paper there. Possibly still in press? Looie496 (talk) 20:26, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

I've heard Marco talk about this work at conferences but I don't think it is published yet, and as far as I know they did not find 'typical' mirror neurons in 'typical' mirror neuron brain regions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by AFdeCH (talk • contribs) 13:46, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

In Need of a Criticism Section?

Either the 'Evidence against mirror neurons' section needs to be beefed up a bit...or a more substantial criticism section might help the POV of this article. There are quite of few prominent scientists that remain highly skeptical (e.g., Hickok G, 2008, Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ,21:7, 1229–1243). Or even check out this clip from Morton Gernsbacher --Agyoung2 (talk) 02:35, 28 April 2009 (UTC)