Mirror Neurons In The Brain

Your personal comparison to watching football and relating to the action of the game is a great example of mirroring neurons in action! It is interesting how we as individuals become humanly self aware of the reasons behind our behaviors and actions. In fact, “all of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior can ultimately be traced to the activity of neurons” (Wood, Wood, and Boyd, 2014. p.41). Mirror neurons are essential to establishing a human bond through the use of empathy, which may help a person relate to the world.

My short assignment four best demonstrates this outcome. In this assignment, I explored the field of biopsychology, the study of the brain and behavior, by attending a lecture of biopsychology class here at the University of Washington. Dr. Lauren Graham spoke on the topic of the nervous system

Different specialties within the field of psychology are interested in various divisions of the human brain due to its elaborate and multifaceted relationship between behavior and the brain. The brain or encephalon can be divided in to a varying number of divisions that are explored by different specialty groups within the field of psychology including biological psychologists, cognitive neuroscientist, cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists, and general research psychologists. Research performed by different psychology professionals on the brain offers a venue for gaining further understanding of certain conditions such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and

The researchers concluded that this indicated mirror neurons coded not just for action, but the goals of action. Kohler and colleagues (2007) expanded on this idea, showing that some neurons were activated with the mere sound of the result of an intended action (i.e. cracking a peanut). The authors asserted that this indicated that mirror neurons were so tuned to goals that the sound of an action reaching its goal was enough for the macaque to understand the entire action that would have been involved. The results of both studies were said to apply neatly to humans as well. That is, if action understanding is supported by the mirror neuron system of macaques, it is most likely supported by the human mirror neuron system (hMNS). There are two major problems with this view. First, it has been shown that human mirror neurons are much more broadly tuned than monkeys. There is not enough evidence to generalize macaque studies to humans in this way (Hickok 2008). Second, both of these studies fail to acknowledge that the activation of mirror neurons may have been the result, or a byproduct, of understanding rather than the cause. Their activity, then, may only have reflected understanding earlier in processing.

The author focuses on determining whether primates are capable of self-awareness. An article is reviewed and evaluated encompassing different points of view and theories. Learned recognition and self-awareness is compared and discussed.

Since the inception of the idea that mirror neurons can explain the behavior of an individual in the Autism Spectrum, there have been many theories trying to explain the same, one of the established theory is the broken mirror theory which supports the hypothesis that defects in the mirror neuron systems can explain the symptoms associated with Autism disorders. One of the chief supporters of the hypothesis is Ramachandran, V. S. whose TED talk on mirror neurons is one of the reasons for its widespread publicity relating to evolution. Mu waves related to the sensorimotor region is studied and the analysis suggests that EEG could provide a basis for linking mirror neurons to autism [9]. A brief summary of the imaging

The discovery of mirror neurons remains extremely influential within neuroscience, specifically their role in higher-level cognitive empathic functions (Haker, Kawohl, Herwig, & Rossler, 2013). Previous research shows that mirror neurons activate when an action is both performed and observed. Additionally, this phenomenon transfers to emotional responses, showing activation when experiencing an emotion or observing it in other people (e.g. facial expressions, yawning, etc.) (Rizoolatti, Fogass, & Gallese, 2006). Associations also exist between unconscious mimicry (the chameleon effect) and the mirror neuron systems, showing the extent of these mechanisms (Iacoboni, 2009).

A researcher, Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma Italy, conducted a study in the 1990’s studying Macacas. His group studied the motor command neuron from the premotor cortex. The neuron is part of the frontal lobe that is responsible for voluntary movements. Electrodes were hooked up to the brain and the macacas had to perform goal oriented actions.1 When a macaca reached for a peanut, the same exact neuron from another monkey observing them was fired also. This action surprised Giacomo and his colleagues. They found out the neuron is also found in the same regions as the human cortex1. Further research of the mirror neurons were shown to be located in different parts of the brain such as the insular and cingulate cortices. They found out that the neurons at the anterior cingulate cortex are fired when a person is in pain and the same goes for the person who watches them1. It was concluded that mirror neurons are seen to be performing similar functions that is found in autism meaning that if there was a

My work has taken me all over the world. I have lectured in front of His Holiness the Dalia Lama, Pope John II, the King of Thailand, Google University, and London 's Royal Society of Arts. I am the author of numerous books, articles, and text, including, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (Guilford, 1999), in which I first introduced the world to my field of interpersonal neurobiology. This books has since gone on to be applied by different organizations across the globe, such as the U.S Department of Justice, The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, as well as Microsoft and Google. More recently, I have published books focusing on parent child relationships and Mindsight.

In interpersonal empathy, through a relational process in the integral model, a counselor strives to empathically understand the phenomenological experiencing of a client and demonstrate a sensitive attunement to the perceptual field of the individual (Clark, 2010, p. 351). As a way of knowing, interpersonal empathy involves perceiving a client's internal frame of reference and communicating a sense of the private meanings to the person. Through the counseling process, it is possible for a counselor to empathically understand a client on an immediate here-and-now basis and develop a general sense of how the client experiences life from an extended empathic perspective. Compared to objective empathy, from a referential perspective of the integral

The mirror neurons are peculiar brain cells that are located in the premotor cortex. These cells respond equally when individuals perform an action and when they witness another person performing the same action such as playing football or basketball. The presenter in the YouTube vlog argues that the neurons are also referred to as the monkey see-monkey do cells because these neurons were first identified in macaque monkeys in the 19th Century. More, Fishman et al. (2014) argues that when watching an action such as football and performing that action activates the same part of the brain as in the monkey. This makes sense because the mirror neurons elicit the same feelings in human beings

-James Gross: Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory.

The first piece of science relating to my overall theme of Neurophilosophy focuses on the brain’s response

The neuronal substrate of imitative behaviors and empathy has been hypothesized to be the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) (Hadjikhani et al. 2007; Cattaneo & Rizzolatti 2009; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004).This MNS is present in monkeys and humans. While this system has been primarily involved in motor representation and shared emotions among individuals, it might also be traced back to mirror neuron mechanisms (Gallese et al. 2004; Dapretto et al. 2005). Accordingly, activation of the MNS in a task relying on empathic abilities without explicit task-related motor components supports the view that the MNS is not only involved in motor action but also in emotional cognition (Sears et al. 1999; Fecteau et al. 2006; Dapretto et al. 2005). Therefore, hMNS is probably the common substrate for action observation and execution (Lehéricy et al. 2006). Further, the sensory-motor cortex contains neurons that are active during perception and execution (Avenanti et al. 2013), which are a part of an extended MNS (Schulte-Rüther et al. 2007). This is consistent with finding showing that MNS is

Individuals participating in an interaction perceive one another as rational agents who possess beliefs, desires and intentions that might be different than their own. Assumptions made about these mental states are used to interpret and predict behavior. Conferring such attributes to an agent (human, computer, whatever) has been described as adopting an ‘intentional stance’ (Dennet, 1996). Adopting an intentional stance is part of our broader ability to mentalize which involves representing and attributing mental states to oneself and others. Research concerned with understanding the neural system of mentalizing has indentified a network of regions that minimally involve the temporoparietal region (TPJ) and the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) (Abu-Akel and Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). However, it is not completely clear the extent to which humans readily mentalize (or adopt an intentional stance) with other humans or non-humans (e.g., computers). Thus an important goal of this study is to investigate how the neural network associated with adopting an intentional stance is modulated under various interaction conditions in which the interacting partner and the context are varied.