![]() How might reduced mirror neuron activity explain the symptoms of autism? And has there been any progress on this front since 2006? LEHRER: In 2006 your lab published a paper in Nature Neuroscience linking a mirror neuron dysfunction to autism. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing. When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. The way mirror neurons likely let us understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the intentions and emotions associated with those actions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions. The gestures, facial expressions, body postures we make are social signals, ways of communicating with one another. IACOBONI: What do we do when we interact? We use our body to communicate our intentions and our feelings. How might mirror neurons help us understand what someone else is thinking or feeling? LEHRER: Take us inside a social interaction. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on-in other words in our social life. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential? ![]() Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research. His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. ![]() In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action-such as smiling or reaching for a cup-and when we observe someone else performing that same action. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. ![]()
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