Mirror neurons, imitation, and thought transfer
By the way, this nytimes article got me thinking about mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are neurons that respond both when you do a certain thing, but also when you see others doing the same thing.
The article implies that mirror neurons could be important for imitation. I wonder if they could be a system to let your brain literally try to imitate the patterns in another person’s brain? If (and given the possibility of different representations in different brains, I think this is a big “if”) imitative learning turns out to be literally one person’s brain patterns matching a teacher’s brain patterns, then an imitative learning mechanism would be a mechanism for thought “synchronization”.
If you have a set of neurons in your brain that are mirror neurons for task A, and Katy has a set of mirror neurons for task A, and Katy does task A with you watching, then maybe your sets of mirror neurons will fire in roughly the same patterns at the same time. So the mirror neurons would be somewhat like a telephone line between your brain; nearby neurons could cause Katy’s neurons to change their pattern, and presuming that this causes her to change her outward behavior, your mirror neurons would absorb the changed pattern. So neurons next to your mirror neurons could receive a signal from neurons next to Katy’s mirror neurons.
I’d like to note that I don’t know much about mirror neurons, and I certainly don’t know if mirror neurons have the properties necessary to be actually capable of this. Do they influence behavior? Do sets of mirror neurons actually end up matching the patterns of firing of groups of another person’s mirror neurons, or do they just become more likely to fire on an individual level? It seems pretty unlikely that they’d do this.. but it’s neat to think about.
January 10th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
More fact and conjecture on mirror neurons available here and here.
January 10th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
spare psychoflexative and telekawhatzit powers. How might our brains synchronize?
Even if the neural pattern was to be imitated, I would posit that as our brains
undergo some experience dependent wiring the same “pattern” might do different
things in different brains.
cheers,
a
January 10th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
For those of you interested in the mirror system, in addition to great articles by Rizzolati and Arbib that you can find on PubMed, here are two more abstracts, one from SFN2005. The first shows how individuals with autism have an apparently malfunctioning mirror system, and the latter shows how two healthy people tracking each other’s movements literally go into a similar wavelength (i.e., increased fronto-parietal EEG coherence, which is normalized cross-power spectral densities, across subjects):
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 2005 Jul;24(2):190-8. EEG evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders. Oberman LM, Hubbard EM, McCleery JP, Altschuler EL, Ramachandran VS, Pineda JA. Center for Brain and Cognition, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA.
lshenk@psy.ucsd.edu
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are largely characterized by deficits in
imitation, pragmatic language, theory of mind, and empathy. Previous research
has suggested that a dysfunctional mirror neuron system may explain the
pathology observed in ASD. Because EEG oscillations in the mu frequency (8-13
Hz) over sensorimotor cortex are thought to reflect mirror neuron activity, one
method for testing the integrity of this system is to measure mu responsiveness
to actual and observed movement. It has been established that mu power is
reduced (mu suppression) in typically developing individuals both when they
perform actions and when they observe others performing actions, reflecting an
observation/execution system which may play a critical role in the ability to
understand and imitate others’ behaviors. This study investigated whether
individuals with ASD show a dysfunction in this system, given their behavioral
impairments in understanding and responding appropriately to others’ behaviors.
Mu wave suppression was measured in ten high-functioning individuals with ASD
and ten age- and gender-matched control subjects while watching videos of (1) a
moving hand, (2) a bouncing ball, and (3) visual noise, or (4) moving their own
hand. Control subjects showed significant mu suppression to both self and
observed hand movement. The ASD group showed significant mu suppression to
self-performed hand movements but not to observed hand movements. These results
support the hypothesis of a dysfunctional mirror neuron system in
high-functioning individuals with ASD.
E. Tognoli, J. Lagarde, G.C. De Guzman, J.A.S. Kelso. TWO INTERACTING BRAINS: A DUAL−EEG STUDY OF
SOCIAL COORDINATION Program No. 288.20. 2005 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience, 2005. Online
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton, FL, USA
We investigated dynamic patterns of cortical activity underlying a basic form of social interaction, namely the tendency of humans to synchronize their movements when visually in contact with each other. Pairs of subjects performed self−paced finger movements before, during and after visual contact. Visual contact was controlled by a liquid crystal screen. Finger movements were recorded via two goniometers. EEG recordings were obtained using two 60−channel electrode−caps connected to a single EEG system, thereby allowing us to simultaneously sample the EEG of both participants with
millisecond accuracy. With visual information exchange, the movements of some pairs of subjects were more strongly synchronized than others. Within synchronized pairs, a leader~follower relationship was typical, one member of the pair altering frequency and phase to adapt to the movement of the other. Analysis of the brain activity patterns of those subjects supporting synchronization revealed during visual contact: (1) a localized decrease in theta power at frontal locations; (2) a widespread decrease in power in the mu and lower beta ranges (8−16Hz), maximal at parietal locations; (3) a change in lateralization of spectral power in the mu range. Whereas mu power
spectral density was lateralized before and after visual contact, it was symmetrical during visual contact; (4) an amplitude modulation of movement−related cortical potentials appearing maximally over left central locations during visual information exchange; and 5) some pairs of subjects showed idiosyncratic patterns of increased between−brain coherence in frontal and parietal areas These results suggest that the neural signature of social interaction lies in the degree to which changes in power and coherence in fronto−parietal regions correlate with the degree of change an individual undergoes (or is willing to undergo) in order to achieve behavioral coupling. Support Contributed By: National Institute of Mental Health (MH42900).
September 11th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
[...] You’ll recognize the name Sandra Blakeslee from her co-authorship with Jeff Hawkins in On Intelligence and with V.S. Ramachandran in Phantoms in the Brain. This new book continues in the spirit of illustrating the broader significance of surprising findings in neuroscience. It covers a lot of recent neuroscience research, including mirror neurons, place cells and grid cells, the insular cortex and neuroprosthetics. For anyone looking to get the quick picture of these frontier research areas, this book serves as an excellent primer. It does an excellent job of making connections to socially relevant topics such as the secrets of athletic excellence, underlying causes of eating disorders and the modern obsession with plastic surgery. I have come to believe that neuroscience will eventually concrete explanations for the metaphors we use and the spooky phenomena we believe in but science cannot prove. Along those lines, this book does a great job of establishing plausible connections between underlying brain mechanisms and to auras and out-of-body experiences. [...]