Dr. X. offers a brief intro to "mirror neurons" in response to a NYT piece on Mimicry, Persuasion, and Building Rapport.
"Mirroring" is about our mental reflection, or replication, of the behavior of others, usually of our own species or tribe.
Whenever neuroscience finds something which might connect the brain with the mind, folks in my line of work get excited and tend to over-react, as if needy of validation. As Dr X says:
...recently, there has been a backlash against the overselling of mirror neurons, it is clear that researchers who are studying the role of interactional synchronization (and desynchronization) are onto something very powerful. Gallese wrote an interesting paper connecting this research with a number of psychoanalytic and clinical constructs including "unconscious communication, projective identification, attunement, empathy, autism, therapeutic action, and transference-countertransference interactions."
As a Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, I have always been fascinated with the neurosciences even though I hated Neuroanatomy in med school. (I think I have some LD when it comes to 3-D mental imaging.)
The good Doctor links to a Gallese scientific essay on mirroring and interpersonal attunement, which may or may not be an over-interpretation of the neuroscience.
In the end, though, the neurosciences offer me nothing in understanding the human mind and human behavior, and probably never will because when we talk about brain and mind we are talking about different levels of organization. The neural operations are assumed, so, when I talk with a person, I am going to be more interested in where they decide to drive their car than in how the carburetor of their car works and, if I see a play, more interested in expression than I am in the physiology of the actors' vocal cords.
Early in his explorations of the human mind and soul, Freud had great hopes of correlating his discoveries with neuroscience. He was, after all, a Neurologist, not a Psychiatrist. I think that, were he alive today, he would still find such correlations difficult.
Editor: The Alan Parsons Project with I Am A Mirror (lyrics here). Echoes of I Am A Camera:
