http://mindhacks.com/2006/07/27/reflected-glory-2/ Neuroscience and psychology news and views. Fri, 24 May 2013 17:03:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://mindhacks.com/2006/07/27/reflected-glory-2/#comment-7843 Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:57:58 +0000 http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/reflected-glory-2/#comment-7843 Funny, I thought I was being supportive of the mirror system, just reminding people to be skeptical of what hasn’t yet been empirically demonstrated.
Converging evidence for a mirror system, sure. I’ve got no problem with that. Show me a mirror neuron in a human though? You can’t. But many labs investigating these systems in humans explicitly attribute these cognitive functions to mirror neurons in journal titles and text.
Nobody trashed the whole idea of mirror neural systems outright. I even admitted in my post that I’d be surprised if humans lacked mirror neurons themselves. Anybody who read otherwise in our posts doesn’t even have an undergrad’s concept of skepticism.
PS- Nice summary, Vaughn.

]]> http://mindhacks.com/2006/07/27/reflected-glory-2/#comment-7842 Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:28:38 +0000 http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/reflected-glory-2/#comment-7842 Thank you thank you thank you for the most well reasoned post I’ve seen on this topic lately.
Does some type of mirror-behavior computational unit (single or group) exist? Yes. Does it mean that this is the cure all to every cogsci problem? No. What is means is that another piece of the puzzle is falling into place and there is alot of work to do as far as sorting out what processes this system cooperates with.
Like any other significant finding, people take it out of context in some papers, but trashing the whole idea is downright wrong. How many papers do you see where some rare surface protein in some limited cortical area is discovered, and the discussion goes off on how this will end all mental disease? It happens constantly. Findings are made, people propose grand vision of their significance, other people try to assimilate the new info into their work, and the whole process snowballs. In the end, the fundemental beauty of the scientific method forces the inaccurate data and overstepping claims out. Why is the mirror-neuron system getting such a bad wrap lately? And why do some of these influential sites have posts on par with an undergrad’s mentality of neuroscience?

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