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Advances in Consciousness Research #68
On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy
In this collective volume the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Entailing a paradigmatic revolution in the intersection of developmental, social and neural sciences, two radical turnabouts are entailed. First, no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects with disembodied minds without windows to each other except as mediated by culture. Supported by a mirror system, specified in this volume by some of the discoverers, modes of participant perception have now been identified which entail embodied simulation and co-movements with others in felt immediacy. Second, no longer can be retained the Piagetian attribution of infant egocentricity. Pioneers who have broken new research grounds in the study of newborns, protoconversation, and early speech perception document in the present volume infant capacity for interpersonal communion, empathic identification, and learning by altercentric participation. Pertinent new findings and results are presented on these topics:
(i) Origins and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy
(ii) Neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity, participant perception, and simulation of mind
(iii) From preverbal sharing and early speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity
(iv) New windows on other-centred movements and moments of meeting in therapy and intervention. (Series B)
(i) Origins and multiple layers of intersubjectivity and empathy
(ii) Neurosocial support of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity, participant perception, and simulation of mind
(iii) From preverbal sharing and early speech perception to meaning acquisition and verbal intersubjectivity
(iv) New windows on other-centred movements and moments of meeting in therapy and intervention. (Series B)
- GenresScience
333 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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June 17, 2017
Stein Bråten announces a “paradigmatic revolution” (p. 2) in developmental psychology, described in seventeen papers from various authors The revolution is the discovery of the human mind’s ability to enter into another person’s experience and participate in it. Intersubjectivity is that empathic connection between at least two sentient beings.
Surprisingly, this volume gives no clear definition of anything like intersubjectivity, only a plethora of examples illustrating sympathy, empathy, language competence, perspective-taking, imitation, cooperation, turn-taking, movement coordination, and understanding of another person’s meaning, intentions or emotions. What do all those things have in common? I venture to say mind reading.
The revolution of this book is not the overthrow of Freud and Piaget, as Bråten believes, but the assertions that mind reading is a scientifically measurable phenomenon, and that the human capacity for it is built-in. The book implicitly adopts a nativist stance, and through consideration of so-called “mirror neurons” dedicated to imitation, argues for the naturalization of mind reading, or intersubjectivity.
For those of us nursed on the milk of behaviorism, the claim of scientific proof for mind reading is shocking. To say it is an inborn faculty is heretical. Even the cognitive revolution of the sixties, which legitimized making inferences from behavioral performance to mental capacity, did not anticipate this.
Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen organize the evidence into three cumulative stages of development. Primary intersubjectivity is seen in infants from birth to a few months old. Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks cite, for example, an early study demonstrating that an infant only 42 minutes after birth can stick out its tongue in imitation of an adult. That suggests some kind of an innate social understanding which seems to entail mind reading.
Pier Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese show a photograph of a one week old macaque monkey doing the same thing, sticking out its tongue in imitation of an adult human’s gesture. It’s a spooky picture. Just how psychologically close are we to these monkeys, anyway?
Other papers involve laboratory experiments and careful observations of phenomena like gaze-following and synchrony and children's development of a "theory of mind," the ability to take another person's point of view. The idea of neurologically built-in intersubjectivity is brought to bear on topics like psychotherapy, autism, child-rearing, sociological structuralism, the recovered memory controversy, and music comprehension.
Ferrari and Gallese describe and elaborate the discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys. These brain neurons discharge when the monkey performs goal-oriented hand actions like grasping an object, but also when observing other monkeys or even humans doing the same. The neurons thus seem to represent, or mirror, in a motor discharge, what the monkey sees. The remarkable thing is that the mirror neurons seem attuned specifically to intentionality. They do not fire, for example, upon just seeing another animal’s hand, whether moving or not. They only fire when the hand engages in a goal-oriented activity, such as lifting a cup to get a raisin. This could be, the authors say, "...at the basis of basic forms of mind reading”
Serious problems with the assertion of scientifically confirmed, innate intersubjectivity are not acknowledged or addressed. One is methodological: operational definitions of intersubjectivity are contaminated. You can tell me how you are feeling, giving me access to your state of mind, but that’s only because we both understand language, for which we must already be intersubjective. It is not possible to demonstrate intersubjectivity without presupposing intersubjectivity.
When an infant sticks out its tongue in imitation, we overlook the fact that imitation entails intersubjectivity. How could it not?
A second conceptual problem arises from neurological reductionism. We cannot accept the implication that mirror neurons cause intersubjectivity because the laws of physics do not allow a material action like neural discharges to cause an immaterial effect, like empathic experience, not even as an epiphenomenal byproduct. Those two domains (of language or of phenomena) are incommensurable.
Another problem has to do with causality. To say that the macaque mirror neurons discharge when the animal sees an intentional act gets the story backward. There are no intentional acts, only movements of body parts in space, unless the observer first presupposes or hypothesizes the other’s intentionality, on the basis of intersubjectivity. So mirror neurons logically cannot be the instantiation of intersubjectivity if they discharge as a consequence of the perception.
The best that can be said about mirror neurons is that they are physiological correlates of certain kinds of intersubjective phenomena. We must leave the question of causality in abeyance. Authors in this volume usually resist the urge to attribute causality to mirror neurons. Yet the pressure to accept the causal explanation of innate intersubjectivity is palpable.
Rather than being representations in the brain that only a homunculus could appreciate, mirror neurons suggest a far more exciting idea, the possibility that we have misunderstood the purpose of the brain. What if we reconceptualized it entirely in terms of intersubjectivity, rather than as a phrenological quilt of body representations, perceptual cell assemblies and motor traces? What if we remapped the brain as if it were part of a whole-body cycle of socially intentioned action and empathy? If that is the nature of the intersubjective animal, as Bråten’s book suggests, the brain should be understood as part of the physical expression of intersubjectivity, mirror neurons just the tip of an iceberg, and the terms in this book’s subtitle reversed.
Conclusion
This stimulating book will be of interest to psychologists, especially child development specialists, and philosophers working in consciousness studies. Although it does not consider a full spectrum of intersubjectivity (virtually nothing from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or psychoanalysis), its controversial assertion that innate intersubjectivity has been scientifically demonstrated compels attention.
Surprisingly, this volume gives no clear definition of anything like intersubjectivity, only a plethora of examples illustrating sympathy, empathy, language competence, perspective-taking, imitation, cooperation, turn-taking, movement coordination, and understanding of another person’s meaning, intentions or emotions. What do all those things have in common? I venture to say mind reading.
The revolution of this book is not the overthrow of Freud and Piaget, as Bråten believes, but the assertions that mind reading is a scientifically measurable phenomenon, and that the human capacity for it is built-in. The book implicitly adopts a nativist stance, and through consideration of so-called “mirror neurons” dedicated to imitation, argues for the naturalization of mind reading, or intersubjectivity.
For those of us nursed on the milk of behaviorism, the claim of scientific proof for mind reading is shocking. To say it is an inborn faculty is heretical. Even the cognitive revolution of the sixties, which legitimized making inferences from behavioral performance to mental capacity, did not anticipate this.
Bråten and Colwyn Trevarthen organize the evidence into three cumulative stages of development. Primary intersubjectivity is seen in infants from birth to a few months old. Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks cite, for example, an early study demonstrating that an infant only 42 minutes after birth can stick out its tongue in imitation of an adult. That suggests some kind of an innate social understanding which seems to entail mind reading.
Pier Ferrari and Vittorio Gallese show a photograph of a one week old macaque monkey doing the same thing, sticking out its tongue in imitation of an adult human’s gesture. It’s a spooky picture. Just how psychologically close are we to these monkeys, anyway?
Other papers involve laboratory experiments and careful observations of phenomena like gaze-following and synchrony and children's development of a "theory of mind," the ability to take another person's point of view. The idea of neurologically built-in intersubjectivity is brought to bear on topics like psychotherapy, autism, child-rearing, sociological structuralism, the recovered memory controversy, and music comprehension.
Ferrari and Gallese describe and elaborate the discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys. These brain neurons discharge when the monkey performs goal-oriented hand actions like grasping an object, but also when observing other monkeys or even humans doing the same. The neurons thus seem to represent, or mirror, in a motor discharge, what the monkey sees. The remarkable thing is that the mirror neurons seem attuned specifically to intentionality. They do not fire, for example, upon just seeing another animal’s hand, whether moving or not. They only fire when the hand engages in a goal-oriented activity, such as lifting a cup to get a raisin. This could be, the authors say, "...at the basis of basic forms of mind reading”
Serious problems with the assertion of scientifically confirmed, innate intersubjectivity are not acknowledged or addressed. One is methodological: operational definitions of intersubjectivity are contaminated. You can tell me how you are feeling, giving me access to your state of mind, but that’s only because we both understand language, for which we must already be intersubjective. It is not possible to demonstrate intersubjectivity without presupposing intersubjectivity.
When an infant sticks out its tongue in imitation, we overlook the fact that imitation entails intersubjectivity. How could it not?
A second conceptual problem arises from neurological reductionism. We cannot accept the implication that mirror neurons cause intersubjectivity because the laws of physics do not allow a material action like neural discharges to cause an immaterial effect, like empathic experience, not even as an epiphenomenal byproduct. Those two domains (of language or of phenomena) are incommensurable.
Another problem has to do with causality. To say that the macaque mirror neurons discharge when the animal sees an intentional act gets the story backward. There are no intentional acts, only movements of body parts in space, unless the observer first presupposes or hypothesizes the other’s intentionality, on the basis of intersubjectivity. So mirror neurons logically cannot be the instantiation of intersubjectivity if they discharge as a consequence of the perception.
The best that can be said about mirror neurons is that they are physiological correlates of certain kinds of intersubjective phenomena. We must leave the question of causality in abeyance. Authors in this volume usually resist the urge to attribute causality to mirror neurons. Yet the pressure to accept the causal explanation of innate intersubjectivity is palpable.
Rather than being representations in the brain that only a homunculus could appreciate, mirror neurons suggest a far more exciting idea, the possibility that we have misunderstood the purpose of the brain. What if we reconceptualized it entirely in terms of intersubjectivity, rather than as a phrenological quilt of body representations, perceptual cell assemblies and motor traces? What if we remapped the brain as if it were part of a whole-body cycle of socially intentioned action and empathy? If that is the nature of the intersubjective animal, as Bråten’s book suggests, the brain should be understood as part of the physical expression of intersubjectivity, mirror neurons just the tip of an iceberg, and the terms in this book’s subtitle reversed.
Conclusion
This stimulating book will be of interest to psychologists, especially child development specialists, and philosophers working in consciousness studies. Although it does not consider a full spectrum of intersubjectivity (virtually nothing from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or psychoanalysis), its controversial assertion that innate intersubjectivity has been scientifically demonstrated compels attention.
September 28, 2016
My rating of the book reflects the fact it did not fit with my reading goals, not so much the book itself.
I want to clarify about the title. Mirror neurons have become established science for primates because of the kinds of experiments we do on primates. However, the existence of mirror neurons in humans has not been established because we don't do those kinds of experiments on people. The authors of the papers in the book work under the hypothesis that humans have mirror neurons and those are relevant to the studies they discuss.
However, for my purposes, the studies in the book are either too distantly related to my interests or are dealing with a point so early in the investigation of matters that I'm interested in that there was little for me to take from it.
I want to clarify about the title. Mirror neurons have become established science for primates because of the kinds of experiments we do on primates. However, the existence of mirror neurons in humans has not been established because we don't do those kinds of experiments on people. The authors of the papers in the book work under the hypothesis that humans have mirror neurons and those are relevant to the studies they discuss.
However, for my purposes, the studies in the book are either too distantly related to my interests or are dealing with a point so early in the investigation of matters that I'm interested in that there was little for me to take from it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews