With this assumption, many deduced they were witnessing human mirror neurons firing in brain areas analogous to where monkey mirror neurons were found - without differentiating what a human mirror neuron was or distinguishing signals from neighboring visual, motor, and visuomotor neurons. Many researchers assumed human mirror neurons were contained in analogous brain areas mapped to the monkey brain. One group of scientists in 2008 called mirror neuron research fraught with “ circular reasoning.” Researchers had not yet characterized human mirror neuron physiology or confirmed whether mirror neurons existed in humans. However, even at the time, not everyone bought the hype. “Here was something that showed a path to how all these things may have started out with mirror neurons,” said University of California neuroscientist Gregory Hickok, “and then blossomed into everything wonderful and amazing about humans.” The number of scientific papers on mirror neurons accelerated, peaking in 2013, when over 300 papers were published that year alone. This theory had implications for other areas of psychology and neuroscience, including studies of empathy, emotion recognition, autism, and language. Since prehistoric competition favored humans who made more and better inferences about the internal states of others, mentalization could help explain how humans built civilizations. Many scientists believe, then as now, that mentalizing confers an evolutionary advantage to those who do it well, and that humans are the best at mentalizing among the primates. “Here was something that showed a path to how all these things may have started out with mirror neurons,” said University of California neuroscientist Gregory Hickok, “and then blossomed into everything wonderful and amazing about humans.” This simulation, the theory went, reminded the brain of its own intentions behind an action, and therefore the brain could infer the intentions of another person. By firing identically no matter whether an action was being executed or visually perceived, they seemed to create a simulation of the action in the brain. Mentalizing is the process by which people make inferences about the mental states of others, including knowledge, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and desires. They posited mirror neurons may be the source of the human ability to mentalize. In 1998, Vittorio Gallese (one of the scientists on Rizzolatti’s original team) and philosopher Alvin Goldman supported one theory for their function: the simulation theory. “Then different researchers and theoreticians started to wonder, we've got these cells, what are they doing?” “Finding that motor areas are involved in what was previously thought to be a purely perceptual process was a big deal,” says cognitive neuroscientist Caroline Catmur at King’s College London. “Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that have a really interesting property,” says Cecilia Heyes, Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College at Oxford University, “… they fire when an action is performed by the individual owner of the brain and when an action like that is observed performed by somebody else.” They would later be found in the inferior parietal lobules of monkey and human brains, as well as other areas of the motor cortex in humans. This duplicate firing was, and remains, the defining quality of mirror neurons. These neurons were firing no matter whether it was the monkey or the scientist doing the grasping. When the monkeys observed a scientist grasping an object to reset the experiment, some neurons that originally fired during the monkey’s grasp fired again. The scientists wanted to distinguish between neurons that fired while the monkey simply viewed an object from those that fired while the monkey moved to grasp it.ĭuring the experiment, however, something strange happened. In the late 1980s, Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team at the University of Parma were recording the activity of individual cells in the premotor cortex of macaque monkeys - an area of the brain known to activate while a monkey grasped objects. Mirror neurons might yet reveal insights into how social learning shapes the brain, and to what degree. Though the buzz around mirror neurons would fade as the initial hype and promise failed to deliver, their story is not over. These cells, called mirror neurons, appeared in hundreds of scientific studies year after year, as well as in numerous magazine articles, news broadcasts, books, and TED Talks. Nearly 15 years ago, headlines heralded the discovery of " Cells That Read Minds." The news announced the existence of brain cells whose specific job allows primates to copy and predict behavior.
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