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> From: kiddietalk <kiddietalk@...>

> Subject: [ ] Scientific American article How mirror neurons

let us interact with others

>

> Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 7:10 PM

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> Mind Matters - June 9, 2009

>

> Mirroring Behavior

>

> How mirror neurons let us interact with others

>

>

>

> By Lametti

>

>

>

> Eighteen years ago, in a laboratory at the University of

> Parma in Italy, a neuroscientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti

> and his graduate students were recording electrical activity

> from neurons in the brain of a macaque monkey. It was a

> typical study in neurophysiology: needle thin electrodes ran

> into the monkey's head through a small window cut out of

> its skull; the tips of the electrodes were placed within

> individual neurons in a brain region called the premotor

> cortex. At the time, the premotor cortex was known to be

> involved in the planning and initiation of movements, and,

> just as Rizzolatti expected, when the monkey moved its arm

> to grab an object the electrodes signaled that premotor

> neurons were firing. And then, neglecting to turn off their

> equipment, Rizzolatti and his team got lunch.

>

>

>

> What followed lunch that day was a serendipitous discovery.

> One of Rizzolatti's graduate students decided to have an

> ice cream cone for dessert, which he ate in full view of the

> wired-up monkey. To his surprise, the electrodes suddenly

> began to signal a spike in cellular activity in the premotor

> cortex, even though the monkey was motionless.

>

>

>

> After shoveling more food into their mouths, the scientists

> determined that some of the neurons they were recording from

> fired when the monkey made certain movements – like

> bringing a piece of food to its mouth – and when the

> monkey watched someone make similar movements. In other

> words, the neurons were mirroring observed actions: when the

> monkey watched someone perform an action its brain seemed to

> be simulating neural activity as if the monkey was

> performing the action itself. These " mirror

> neurons " , as Rizzolatti later dubbed them, were

> hypothesized to constitute a brain system responsible for

> our ability to understand the actions of others. We know

> about our world because we've interacted with it and

> only by simulating this interaction in our heads can we

> comprehend the behaviour of someone else.

>

>

>

> In 1992, almost a year after the ice cream cone incident,

> Rizzolatti published a short report in a minor neuroscience

> journal describing his discovery of mirror neurons. The

> paper was largely ignored. Then, almost four years later, he

> published a more detailed account of the finding in the

> journal Brain that launched a torrent of research – more

> than 300 papers in the past ten years – into mirror

> neurons and their properties. As he explained to The New

> York Times in an interview, " It took us several years

> to believe what we were seeing. "

>

>

>

> Since Rizzolatti's 1996 paper, studies in primates and

> humans support the idea that mirror neurons help us

> understand observed behaviour. One primate study found that

> mirror neurons were activated simply by the sound of an

> action, like the ripping of paper, while another found that

> the mental representation of actions was enough to cause

> mirror neuron firing. These are important results because

> they demonstrate a mirror neuron response to the meaning of

> an action and not just the observation of one.

>

>

>

> In humans, brain imaging studies of people with autism –

> a deficit characterized by an inability to comprehend

> observed behavior – have shown that autistics have less

> activity in premotor regions during the observation of

> actions than normal subjects. And more recently, in a

> dramatic example of the importance of mirror neurons in our

> understanding of others, apraxia patients with cortical

> damage in mirror neuron areas were shown to have difficulty

> recognizing whether hand gestures, like sticking out a thumb

> to hitch a ride, were performed correctly.

>

>

>

> A new paper by Vittorio Caggiano and colleagues at the

> University of Tubingen in Germany – Rizzolatti is a

> co-author - suggests that mirror neurons might also play a

> role in helping us choose appropriate responses to behaviors

> we observe. Using similar methods to the original mirror

> neuron studies in macaques, the latest paper found that some

> mirror neurons fired when a monkey watched the experimenter

> grasp an object within its reach, while other mirror neurons

> fired when the monkey watched the experimenter grasp an

> object that was out of its reach. These mirror neurons, it

> seemed, responded differently to observed behavior depending

> on how far the behavior occurred from the monkey.

>

>

>

> The authors of the paper then repeated the experiment but

> with an important twist: they placed a neck-high wall in

> front of the monkey, forcing the animal to make an

> intermediate movement – a reach over the wall in this case

> – to grasp any object. In this situation, the mirror

> neurons that responded before only to the observation of an

> action within the monkey's reach completely stopped

> firing. And the mirror neurons that responded only to the

> observation of an action outside of the monkey's reach

> now fired vigorously, no matter where the experimenter

> grasped the object. The mirror neurons were not simply

> encoding the distance of an observed act, they were encoding

> whether the monkey could perform the act without an

> intermediate behavior.

>

>

>

> One can only speculate, of course, as to the behavioral

> consequences of mirror neurons that differentiate between

> actions that can be immediately performed and actions that

> require intermediate behaviors. But an intriguing idea

> proposed by the paper's authors is that such a system

> might help us choose behaviors of our own. If mirror neurons

> help us understand the act of a basketball player making a

> jump shot by simulating neural activity as if we were making

> the jump shot, perhaps, if we don't have a basketball

> within reach, they run simulations of behaviors that might

> allow us to get the ball – calling for a pass or grabbing

> a rebound. Such neural simulations might help us decide how

> best to quickly respond to changing events.

>

>

>

> Determining whether such mirror neurons exist in humans

> will require more research, using indirect methods such as

> functional brain imaging. Even so, this finding suggests how

> mirror neurons might link the understanding of the behavior

> of other people with the production of our own behavior,

> which is a crucial step towards determining the neural

> processes that caused Rizzolatti's graduate student to

> eat an ice cream cone on that fateful day in Italy, eighteen

> years ago.

>

>

>

> Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed

> paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind

> Matters editor Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the

> blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust Was a

> Neuroscientist. His latest book is How We Decide.

>

>

>

> =====

>

>