[Adta] Fwd: DIALOGUES--member's book review

[Ilene Serlin]

> For those of us interested in mirror neurons....

Ilene
> From Bill Adams, Ph.D. (psychology)
>
> Innate Intersubjectivity and the Science of Mind Reading
> A review of
On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy
> by Stein Bråten (Ed.)
> Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. 333 pp. ISBN 978-90-272-5204-3.  
> $149.00
> Reviewed by
>
> William A. Adams
>
> http://members.bainbridge.net/~bill.adams
>
> Stein Bråten announces a “paradigmatic revolution” (p. 2) in  
> developmental psychology, described in 17 chapters from various  
> authors in On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy. 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, 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  
> 1960s, which legitimized making inferences from behavioral  
> performance to mental capacity, did not anticipate this.
> The Evidence for Intersubjectivity
>
> 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 his or her  
> tongue in imitation of an adult. That suggests some kind of an  
> innate social understanding.
>
> 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 if you  
> accept the idea that it demonstrates innate social understanding  
> between individuals. How psychologically close are we to these  
> monkeys, anyway?
> Meltzoff and Brooks also describe a series of elegant experiments  
> in gaze following with human infants of 12 to 18 months. The  
> infants turned their heads to follow the gaze of an adult and then  
> visually inspected the target the adult looked at, but not if the  
> adult's eyes were closed, indicating that the infants followed the  
> adult's visual intentionality, not just the head movement. When the  
> adult wore a blindfold, the infants did not understand its  
> consequence. Sometimes they followed the head turn, sometimes not.  
> But after having their own field of view blocked by a black  
> curtain, they subsequently gaze-followed only when the adult was  
> not blindfolded—demonstrating, it seems, that they generalized  
> from their own experience to a more sophisticated understanding of  
> the adult's mental experience.
> Daniel Stern writes about his now-classic description of synchrony  
> (Stern, 1985), the coordinated interaction between infant and  
> caregiver (typically mother) in face-to-face play. The mother makes  
> baby talk, highly intonated noises, and facial gestures, and the  
> infant responds with smiles, gurgles, and vocalizations. The timing  
> of their coordinated interaction is very tight, like singers in a  
> duet, as they become emotionally attuned. The capacity for such  
> precise interaction is probably inborn, but its exercise teaches  
> the child how to read and express emotions and forms the basis for  
> later social skills, including language acquisition. These “proto- 
> conversations,” as Stern calls them, provide access to other minds.
> In the second developmental stage, intersubjectivity is defined by  
> emotional referencing, when the infant looks to the mother to see  
> if a situation is dangerous or safe, and by what Bråten calls  
> “participant perception,” demonstrated when an infant  
> reciprocates the caregiver's spoon feeding or tries to help the  
> caregiver. Meltzoff and Brooks review studies in which an adult  
> showed 18-month-olds an unsuccessful attempt to pull apart a toy.  
> The toddlers then spontaneously pulled it apart more often than did  
> controls who saw no demonstration. The authors conclude that  
> “infants seemed to `see through' the surface behavior to the  
> underlying goals or intentions of the actor” (p. 161).
> The third level of intersubjectivity is language mediated, when  
> children develop a “theory of mind” to take another's point of  
> view. At this age a child can pretend to be pleased with a  
> disappointing gift. Jokes and symbolic games also demonstrate  
> tertiary intersubjectivity. The development of intersubjectivity  
> thereafter merges with general cognitive development.
> The evidence for intersubjectivity is not news to anyone working in  
> developmental psychology, although the idea that it is inborn is  
> still challenging. The evidence of prelinguistic, preconceptual  
> intersubjectivity in infants argues for innateness, since it is not  
> plausible that infants or nonhuman primates could be logically  
> deducing the state of other minds from behavioral observation.
> Enter Mirror Neurons
>
> Sealing the deal on the nativist argument is a fine chapter by  
> Ferrari and Gallese describing and elaborating on the discovery of  
> mirror neurons (Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2001) in macaque  
> monkeys. These brain neurons discharge when the monkey performs  
> goal-oriented hand actions such as 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, on just seeing another animal's hand, whether moving or  
> not. They fire only when the hand engages in a goal-oriented  
> activity, such as lifting a cup to get a raisin. Ferrari and  
> Gallese write,
>
> Mirror neurons, by matching action observation with action  
> execution, allow understanding of actions made by others… . Every  
> time we observe an action made by another individual, we are able  
> to understand its goal because the observed action is matched on  
> our internal representation of it, which, in turn, is endowed with  
> the knowledge of the goal. (p. 74)
>
> We propose that mirror neurons and mirror-related mechanisms here  
> described may represent the neurobiological grounding for the  
> expression of some forms of primary and secondary  
> intersubjectivity… [and] could be at the basis of basic forms of  
> mind reading. (p. 85)
>
> There is no direct evidence of mirror neurons in humans, since  
> gathering it would involve probing a brain with microelectrodes,  
> but there is indirect evidence from brain-imaging studies. Riitta  
> Hari summarizes some of that work. Areas in the primary motor  
> cortex become active when a person observes another person  
> performing a movement, suggesting a neurological mirroring activity  
> analogous to that found in the monkeys. Other alleged mirroring  
> systems are located in Broca's area, provoking the suggestion that  
> language understanding might originate with mirror neurons. Luciano  
> Fadiga and Laila Craighero state, for example, that
> Mirror neurons represent the neural basis of a mechanism that  
> creates a direct link between the sender of a message and its  
> receiver. By transforming an action done by an individual into a  
> representation of the same action in the motor cortex of the  
> observer, this mechanism creates a direct, non-arbitrary link  
> between two communicating individuals… without any cognitive  
> mediation. (p. 105)
>
> This is an idea compatible with a motor theory of speech perception.
> In several other stimulating chapters, the idea of neurologically  
> built-in intersubjectivity is brought to bear on topics such as  
> psychotherapy, autism, child rearing, sociological structuralism,  
> the recovered memory controversy, and music comprehension. It is  
> clearly a fertile idea. But is it correct?
> Problems With the Revolution
>
> There are serious problems with the assertion of scientifically  
> confirmed, innate intersubjectivity. 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 his or her tongue in imitation, we  
> overlook the fact that imitation entails intersubjectivity. How  
> could it not? The intersubjective capacity of the experimenter is a  
> confound in every experiment demonstrating intersubjectivity.  
> Without it, we would watch Meltzoff's gaze-following infants and be  
> at a loss for explanation. In fact, we would call them head- 
> turning, not gaze-following infants. Instead, we unwittingly build  
> intersubjectivity into the demonstration and then attribute it to  
> the results. I do not for a moment doubt the existence of  
> intersubjectivity, but it has not been scientifically demonstrated.
> 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.
> So could mirror neuron activity just be the phenomenon we call  
> intersubjectivity? That claim involves such a severe distortion of  
> semantics that it is impossible to take it seriously. Should the  
> drug store sympathy card be called a mirror-neuron card? Empathy,  
> as we live it, does not have a neuronal quality, so it doesn't make  
> sense to say the experience is a neural activity. Empathic  
> experience does not obviously reduce to neurology, ontologically or  
> linguistically.
> There is another problem. 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. Ferrari and Gallese prefer a sartorial  
> metaphor, neurological underpinnings, for example. Yet throughout  
> the book there is palpable pressure to accept the causal  
> explanation of innate intersubjectivity.
> The distinguishing characteristic of so-called mirror neurons is  
> that they are afferent and efferent. The 19th-century idea that  
> sensation produces afference and action produces efference suggests  
> to some that mirror neurons form motor representations of  
> perception. But what if they are just neurons that can go either  
> way? Accounts of their representational function may be gratuitous.  
> Maybe they are, literally, only neural correlates of experience.
> 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 cycle  
> really is the nature of the intersubjective animal, as Bråten's  
> book suggests, we should understand the brain as part of the  
> physical expression of intersubjectivity, with mirror neurons just  
> the tip of an iceberg, and reverse the terms in this book's subtitle.
> 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.
>
> References
>
> ·                     Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V.  
> (2001). Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding  
> and imitation of action. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 661–670.
> ·                     Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of  
> the infant. New York: Basic Books.
> PsycCRITIQUES
> 1554-0138
>
> October 24, 2007, Vol. 52, Release 43, Article 2
> © 2007, American Psychological Association
>
>
>



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