It is based on assumptions that mirror neurons are involved in understanding action, imitation and language acquisition, and that people with autism are insensitive to the emotions and intentions of others.
The broken mirror hypothesis has received considerable attention in the mass media, but has been the subject of severe criticism by many autism researchers. In the late 1990s, two groups of researchers independently proposed the so-called broken-mirror hypothesis, which states the social impairments characteristic of autism are caused by defects in the mirror neuron system. The same researcher argues that the discovery of mirror neurons is ' the single most important "unreported" story of the decade', and has even referred to the cells as ' the neurons that shaped civilization', because human culture involves the transfer of complex skills and knowledge from person to person. Given their purported role in social cognition, one prominent neuroscientist has proposed that a defective mirror neuron system is what causes autism, a neurodevelopmental condition characterized primarily by impairments in social interaction and communication. These include understanding the intentions of others, and inferring their mental state from their behaviour (an ability referred to as theory of mind) empathy, or putting oneself 'into another's shoes' self-awareness and the evolution of, and the ability to learn, language. Some researchers argue that they are critical for many aspects of social interactions. In human beings, as in monkeys, mirror neurons are hypothesized to play an important role in imitation and understanding the actions of others. Since these neurons were discovered in monkeys, researchers have speculated that the human brain may also contain mirror neurons. The discovery of mirror neurons was greeted with a great deal of excitement, and some have hailed it as one of the most important discoveries of modern neuroscience. The second proposed function is imitation – or learning to perform an action by observing others. This corresponds to the activity produced by the action itself: in other words, the mirror neuron system transforms the visual information into knowledge of the intention of the others' actions. First, that mirror neurons are involved in understanding the actions of others – observing an action triggers the mirror neuron system to generate a motor representation of it. They also located cells that fire when monkeys observe an action as well as when they hear the sound related to it.īut what does it all mean? The precise role of the mirror neuron system in monkeys is still not known, though the researchers who discovered them believe that they perform two functions. Subsequently, the same team of researchers identified mirror neurons in several other regions of the monkey brain.
By chance, however, the researchers discovered that a few of the same cells also fired weakly when the animals merely observed the researchers putting food into their own mouths, and fired more strongly when they saw other monkeys performing the same action. The cells in question are located in the premotor cortex, a part of the brain involved in planning and executing movements, so the finding was not in itself particularly surprising. These experiments revealed that the activity of certain cells increased when the monkeys performed this action. The researchers, who were studying how the brain controls hand and mouth movements, implanted microelectrodes into the monkeys' brains in order to monitor the activity of single cells while the animals reached for pieces of food and put them into their mouths. Mirror neurons were identified in the brains of macaque monkeys by a team of Italian researchers during experiments performed in the 1990s. Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys, but it's still not clear whether they also exist in the human brain.
They have been linked to many behaviours and abilities, from empathy to learning by imitation, as well as implicated in conditions such as autism. Summary: Mirror neurons are cells that fire during both the execution and observation of a specific action.
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