Related: Schrödinger’s One Mind :: Non-local mind bibliography

The theory of mind presumes that we can only imagine that others have a mind because we have no direct access to the mind of another. In the late 1980s, this theory seemed to be fortified by experimental data describing a population of brain cells (named by researchers “mirror neurons”) – becoming active when a monkey watched another animal act – where first described.

Mirror neurons or, in humans, mirror brain areas, are those that act similarly whether a subject of experiment perform an action or sees how the same act is performed by another being. Recently, the experiments were extended to analyze emphatic reactions (Seeing someone is in pain, seeing the faces of people in pain, seeing hands or feet in painful situations). Click to see the picture 1 and picture 2.

The enthusiasts see in these facts many hopes: to pinpoint in the brain’s hardware the processes of understanding, altruism, decision making, to finally grasp what’s wrong in the brain of the autistic, etc. The skeptics call for stricter analysis and interpretation. The major problem with mirror neurons, they say are: the lack of evidence that these neurons relate, as implicated, to understanding or language, different anatomical representation in monkeys and humans and between understanding and acting in both, and some other discrepancies that are very technical.

Sources

C Keysers, JH. Kaas, V Gazzola. Somatosensation in social perception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, v 11, 2010: 417

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