Much Ado About Mirror Neurons
Fewer “discoveries” in neuroscience have garnered more undue hype than that of mirror neurons. Discovered by some Italians in the late 90’s, mirror neurons were hailed as some major discovery. Here is an excerpt from an article written earlier this year by New York Times writer, Sandra Blakeslee: Flabbergasted? Get serious, Sandra!! Mirror neurons, which are found predominantly in premotor cortex, are obviously involved with motor imagery, which we perform both when we watch others performing actions and also when we perform the same actions. There’s no mystery here, and nothing surprising. In fact, when I first heard about mirror neurons some years back, I thought, “So what, big deal!”. The existence of mirror neurons should have come as no surprise. The Italian researchers, by disingenuously choosing to call these neurons “mirror neurons”, set the stage for the hype that was to follow and for misinterpretations galore. Just for kicks, try googling for “mirror neurons” and you’ll get 173,000 results, whereas googling for “cortical column” only returns 27,800 results. Why is that? The cortical column is a much older, more established, and more surprising discovery than mirror neurons, yet the internet is rife with the mirror neuron literature, as if this were some important discovery. I have even met people who believe that mirror neurons are involved with telepathy and supernatural abilities! This is a direct consequence of all the excessive media hype which surrounds mirror neurons. This hype is complete nonsense. It is just adding more noise and obscures what is truly profound about the brain. Shame on you, media specialists and science writers, for propagating this nonsense! You do the field of neuroscience a great disservice by turning it into a circus of stupidity and disinformation. If you are unable to report on neuroscience discoveries competently, then you should have the moral sense to choose not to report on them at all. Are the Italian researchers also at fault for allowing this mirror neuron nonsense to explode out of proportions? Yes, but seriously, people should know not to believe everything other people tell them, and this includes scientists who seek their own advantage at the cost of truth and the greater benefit to all. The Italian researchers were either 1) deluded into believing they had made some great discovery, or more likely, 2) were just trying to garner public and media attention to their work regardless of the merit of said work. Their work clearly does not merit the media attention it has received, and it is the fault of both the researchers who falsely pump up their results into “great discoveries” and of the media and science-tech writers who don’t have the intellectual acumen to assess the significance of neuroscientific results.