El problema de las neuronas espejo

Once the go-to explanation for empathy, the evidence that we have them is sketchy at best.

Illustration by Gavin Potenza

By Sharon Begley
In 1992, scientists at Italys University of Parma announced the genuinely exciting discovery that certain neurons
in the premotor cortex of macaques fire under two quite different conditions: when the monkeys execute a
specific action like reaching for food and when they merely observe an experimenter performing that action. Until
then, the textbook wisdom in neuroscience had been that brain cells execute an action or observe onenot both.
The Parma find seemed to show that cells in the motor system fire when I see you make a movement, and
theyre the same ones that fire when I make that movement, according to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni of the
University of California, Los Angeles. We didnt think the brain was organized this way. In 1996, these cells got
their intriguing moniker, reflecting that the neurons mirrored observed behavior by firing as if the observer
were not just seeing the action but also executing it.
It was like a starters pistol had gone off in the neuroscience lounge.
The discovery of mirror neurons would launch a revolution in understanding empathy and cooperation,
predicted one researcher. Mirror neurons were the driving force behind the great leap forward in brain
evolution, claimed another. They will provide a unifying framework and explain a host of mental abilities that
hitherto remained mysterious, asserted a third, calling these cells the neurons that shaped civilization. Other
researchers asserted that mirror neurons spurred the development of language (the human analogue of the
monkeys premotor region is Brocas area, which is involved in producing spoken language) and of theory of
mind, our ability to infer what someone thinks, believes, or feels. Broken mirror neurons were invoked to explain
autism, which is characterized by an inability to intuit others feelings and state of mind. One scholar invoked
mirror neurons to argue for the superiority of face-to-face diplomacy, which, he said, allows negotiators to
transmit information and empathize with each other.
The media piled on. Popular stories have invoked mirror neurons to explain everything from crying at movies to
selfless acts of heroism and why hospital patients feel better when they have visitors.
To some neuroscientists, it was all a bit much. After giving a speech at the University of California, Davis, in 2010,
I had dinner with members of the psychology department, and innocently asked about mirror neurons. From the
collective eye roll, youd think Id asked about creationism. And as the number of scientific papers on mirror
neurons approached 800 in 2012, Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society called them perhaps the
most hyped topic in neuroscience. Psychology professor Morton Ann Gernsbacher of the University of Wisconsin
told me recently, Mirror neuron theory is being used as an explanation for many phenomena in social cognition
without the claims being supported with actual data.
Lets try to separate wheat from chaff.
Do humans have mirror neurons? Given the similarities between our brains and monkeys, we should. But clear
evidence has been hard to come by, mostly because the most direct testusing electrodes to detect the firing of
individual neurons to be sure the same ones fire during observing an action and executing itis too invasive to
be ethically done on healthy volunteers. In 2010, however, Iacoboni and his colleagues piggy-backed on epilepsy
surgery, in which such electrodes are temporarily implanted into patients brains. Result: certain neurons fired

when the patients both observed (on a laptop) and performed grasping actions and facial gestures.
Unfortunately, the study used only 21 patients and has not been independently confirmed. Also, the purported
mirror neurons were not where monkeys neurons are but, among other places, in regions involved in memory.
That raised concerns that the neurons firing during both observation and execution were involved in
remembering the action, and thus not true mirror neurons. As a 2013 review put it, research results cannot yet
furnish conclusive proof that humans have them.
If we do, can mirror neurons cause us to feel other peoples emotions and therefore underlie empathy? Heres the
logic: the mirror circuitry thats activated during both the performance and observation of an action is probably
wired into the circuitry that knows the goal of that action, Iacoboni told me, since actions come with
intentions. Mirror neurons activate meaning or intention circuits from within. Its deeper than cognitive
understanding. Similarly, the circuitry that produces smiles, frowns, or other expressions seems to be connected
to circuits that encode the associated feeling (hence the common experience of feeling a little happier if you
make yourself smile). Since mirror circuitry fires at the sight of someone else making a face, that would trigger
the same feeling circuits as are tripped when we make the face. Presto: A mechanism for inferring what another
person feels.
Skeptics point out, however, that we dont need to perform an action in order to understand why someone is
doing it or what it feels like. I understand my husbands goal when he removes an outlet plate and starts pulling
out wires even though my own motor neurons have never rewired a circuit. Were able to understand many
actions and the goals of those actionswhich weve never executed ourselves, Gernsbacher argued. And
there are people who can decipher the emotion in facial expression without being able to make the expressions
themselves due to brain damage or other disability. That suggests a mirror system, even if we have one, is not
necessary for empathy or theory of mind.
Many scientific papers promise evidence for mirror neuron dysfunction in autism, but only some are confirmed
by other labs. Even fewer use bulletproof methodology. Some of the autism/ mirror-neuron studies, for instance,
used neuroimaging to measure brain activity when people with autism executed movements on their own or
imitated gestures in a picture. The region suspected of harboring human mirror neurons showed less activity,
compared to normally developing participants, during the imitation task.
But its not clear that imitating has much to do with autism, Gernsbacher and other critics point out. Many
studies have found that neither autistic children nor autistic adults have any difficulty understanding the intention
of other peoples actions, as would be predicted by the mirror-neurons/ autism hypothesis, she said. The bulk of
brain imaging studies fail to support it.
Mirror neurons were indeed a paradigm-changing discovery. From the observation that some premotor neurons
fire when action is observed rather than performed, however, it is quite a leap to empathy, autism, and the rest.
Its natural to root for the human brain to have as many cool components as possible, and enticing to think that
one of them offers a simple and elegant answer to the question of what make us human. But even if it turns out
that we dont have these nifty mirror neurons, it doesnt make us any less empathetic. We just lack a simple
neurological explanation for it.
Tomorrows sociologists will have a field day studying how claims about mirror neurons became part of the
popular culture even as neuroscientists became skeptical of the unbridled exuberance. Its a great case study of
how once a scientific notion takes hold in the popular mind, its hard to jam it back into Pandoras box.
Sharon Begley is the senior health and science correspondent at Reuters, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your
Brain, and coauthor with Richard Davidson of The Emotional Life of Your Brain.

http://www.mindful.org/mindful-magazine/begley-mirror-neurons