Miksi ”peilisolu” (”mirror neuron”) on epätosi ja tuhoisa valekäsite

http://ristojkoivula.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/258351-miksi-peilisolu-mirror-neuron-on-epatosi-ja-tuhoisa-valekasite

https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2014/08/smart-reads-gregory-hickoks-myth-mirror-neurons/

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Mirror-Neurons-Neuroscience-Communication/dp/0393089614

 

The Myth of Mirror Neurons:

The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition 1st Edition

by Gregory Hickok (Author)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtEjYs_hLYw

https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2014/08/smart-reads-gregory-hickoks-myth-mirror-neurons/

https://hameemmias.vuodatus.net/lue/2015/10/europuoskaritiedetta-suomen-tieteen-huippuyksikossa-ka-2004

Mirror neurons are a myth and professor Hickok brings a lot of rele- vant questions in tis book that most would find boring as hell unless you have a clever insight and interest in the working of the brain. of course I stull like my theory that the real creature of all humanity and species are of course the brain and flesh and other structures just shell castings. Some brains are more highly developed and more specialized physical properties to accomplish physics on earth and the real mystery of the cosmos can somehow be traced to the brain.

The fact that many scientists were quick to jump on this theory and put blame for everything to altu-sim to altruism dismayed professor Hickok to such an incredible degree that he hard wired a book of this nature to attack the mirror neuron hypothesis. one can just find old episodes of Gilligan’s Island and Hogan’s Heroes to see how easily chimps can be manipulated to act and move about imitating their taller cousins with more complex ahhh brain development. Of course relying your theories from gay caged monkies and gorillas also is bullshit as the complexities of human cognition and brain functions shouldn’t be relied so heavily on the actions of hungry, smaller primates acting out in a confined area in front of researchers, scientists, and professors hungry for state funding and grants to cast their ideas and spells.

http://ristojkoivula.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/257298-opetushallitus-opettaa-kumottua-jarjetonta-peilineurooniteoriaa-opettajille#comment-3890896

Greg Hickok: The myth of mirror neurons

Relational Implicit

January 2015

Gregory Hickok,Ph.D.is Professor of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, Founder, Director Emeritus, and current Fellow of the UCI Center for Cognitive Neuroscience & Engineering, Founder and Director of the Center for Language Science, Fellow of the Center for the Neurobio- logy of Learning & Memory and the Center for Hearing Research, and past Chair of the Research Imaging Center’s Imaging Steering Committee.

Beyond UCI he is the founding President of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Editor-in-Chief of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and author of The Myth of Mirror Neurons:

 

https://relationalimplicit.com/zug/transcripts/Hickok-2015-01.pdf

The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition.

This is part of the Relational Implicit project, edited by Serge Prengel.

For better or worse, this transcript retains the spontaneous, spoken-language quality of the podcast conversation.

 

Serge Prengel: Hi Greg.

Gregory Hickok: Hi there, Serge.

 

Serge: So you wrote a book about mirror neurons and demystifying their role. Maybe we can start with the beginning. What are mirror neurons?

Gregory: Sure. Mirror neurons are cells in the motor cortex or motor system of Macaque monkeys.

They were discovered in the context of doing some basic research on motor control, trying to figure out how Macaque monkeys and, by generalization, humans may code movement plans in terms of object-based coordinates.That is,when you reach for an object you have to take in information about the object’s shape and location and size into account to guide your reach. You pre-shape your hand when reaching for a cup versus a pen, for example. And so Giacomo Rizzolatti from Parma and his group were studying this process in macaques and they had discovered a class of cells in a motor area known as F5 for frontal area number five that seemed to respond or that did respond both during reaching behaviors and during the observation of object shape.

[RJK:  Rizzolattin havaintoja ei ole pystytty toistamaan sellaisenaan makakeilla – eikä millään muilla-kaan lajeilla. Hänen koepöytäkirjana ovat salaisia sosiobiologistikirkon sisimmiltäkin piireiltä, paljasti niiden silloinen jäsen Michael Arbib yli 10 vuotta sitten.

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/Message/FlatMessageIndex/152521?page=1#152521
RK  16.06.2005 01:47:09
176429

Rizzolattin ”peiliSOLUhavaintoja” ei ole pystytty vahvistamaan.

Harmis löysi viestissä 176090 milenkiintoisen linkin sosiobiologistikirkon sisäiseen keskuteluun ”peilisoluista”:

Harmaa.Eminenssi kirjoitti 12.06.2005 (176090)…

>Tällaista keskustelua aiheesta muualla:

>http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/4/pr

 

RK (176097): Antopavlovistikirkon sisäistä jargoonia. Mutta ERITTÄIN MIELENKIINTOISTA heti en-simmäisessä jutussa, että nimenomaan SOLUTASON ilmiöitä (ehdollistuneita tai muita) EI OLE EDES HA- VAITTU muualla kuin Rizzolatti makaki-apinoilla! Ja itse asiassa, kaikki muu tohina huomioiden tuon asian ympärillä SIIHENKÄÄN ”HAVAINTOON” EI TAIDA OLLA KAUHEASTI LUOTTAMISTA! Arbib myös pulputtaa kovasti matkimisesta apinoilla, ja löytää siihen alkeellisilla apinoilla rudimentaarisen ehdottoman (tai leimaus-) refleksinkin, VAIKKA ”IHMISEN PEILISOLUTEORIAN” ISÄT Alvin Goldmann ja Vittorio Gallese kategorisesti ”KIELTÄVÄT” MATKIMISIMIÖIDEN OLEMASOLON apinoilla ja laajemminkin luonnossa ”:

 

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/Message/Message/175827

 

Otetaanpa muutama kommentti tuolta tarkastelun alle.

Michael Arbib: ” 1) Much of the discussion of “mirror neurons” is based on metaphorical discussion of “mirror systems” rather than on analysis of actual neurophysiological data.

Mirror neurons have only been measured in macaque monkeys. Human brain imaging data only provide evidence for mirror systems – i.e., neural regions active both during the execution of a class of actions and during the observation of actions from that class.

A mirror system need not contain mirror neurons, though it is generally assumed that it will. “

 

RK: Kommenttini yllä.

 

“2) My own work with Rizzolatti has suggested an evolutionary path from a mirror system for grasping via a mirror system that supports imitation [not present in more than rudimentary form in monkeys] to a mirror system that can support language [unique to humans]. But this is a theory.

As far as I know, there is no evidence that mirror neurons are involved in language, imitation, or intersubjectivity. Rather, there is suggestive evidence that mirror systems may be related to these functions. “

RK: On olemassa ja tutkittuna myös ihan muita ja parempia selityksiä kielen tunnistamiselle ja oppimisella, jotka eivät TARVITSE YHTÄÄN SE ENEMPÄÄ ainakaan geneettisiä ”PEILISYSTEEMEITÄ” kuin ”-SOLUJAKAAN”: ’

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/Message/Message/162827

Kuten Arbibkin tavallista rehellisempänä sosiobiologistina aiheellisesti mainitsee:

 

” In computer science and engineering,simulation involves the ability to predict a trajectory in quantitative detail. However, if we look at data on mirror neurons, there is no evidence of simulation at such a level of detail. Even worse, to reiterate one of Csibra’s points, many a mirror neuron is only “broadly congruent”. Again, we know there are mirror neurons that fire both when the monkey breaks a peanut and when he hears the sound of a peanut breaking (Kohler et al.,2002). But since the sound gives no information about the manner of breaking, it is unclear what justifies calling this “simulation” rather than just “classification”. If this concern is accepted, one must ask whether the “classification” theory of intersubjectivity loses any essential features of the “simulation” theory. “

 

RK: Olen jossakin hieman erheellisesti maininnut, että ehdollistumis- teorian mukainen mielenteoria kuuluu ”peilisolu/systeemiteoreetikko- jen” kategoriaan ”simulaatioteoriat” (enemmänkin kuin Gold-mannin kategoriaan ”teoriateoriat”, ”theory theories”). Nyt niillä on kuitenkin uusi kategoria ”luokitte-luteoria” (classification theory), johon se vasta istuukin hyvin, esimerkkinä juuri pähkinänkuoren rik-komisprodeduuri, joka aktivoituu myös rikkontuvan pähkinänkuoren aiheuttamasta äänestä,eikä vain sellaisen työn tekemisestä tai katselemisesta! (Itse asiassa siitä on vain yksi kukonaskel symboli-funktioon, että pähkinänkuoren rikkomisääni yhdistetään johonkin kellonkilaukseen, tai SANAAN, joka tuo sen koko ehdollisen refleksin erilaisine variaationeen aktiiviseksi.)

 

” 4) Which leads into the observation that “classification” in the sense of mere “pattern recognition” in no way equals understanding or empathy. “

RK: Arbib erehtyy siinä, että tuo refleksin aktivoituminen toiminnan äänestä ei olenkaan liittyisi YM-MÄRTÄMISEEN: se ei vain liity, vaan se suorastan ON sitä! Mutta EMPATIAAN sen ei todellakaan tarvitse liittyä millään tavalla: yhdistetynä muihin toiminalisiin kuvioihin se ”ymmärtäminen” voi ai-heuttaa esimerkisi reaktion, joka ihmisllä vastaisi osapuilleen seuravaa: ”nyt se p..le löysi kumminkin sen mun piilottamani pähkinän, ja rikkoi sen! Turpiin tulee!”

” In other words, it is not the mirror neuron firing itself that is crucial, but rather activity in a widely distributed neural system of which the mirror neurons are part – and it is not even established that mirror neurons are more significant than quasi-mirror neurons in this regard. ”

RK: “Peilisolusta” pidetään kuitenkin kiinni kuin sika limpusta, vaikka sitä EI TARVITA MIHINKÄÄN, ja HAVAINTOKIN niistä on asetettu kyseenalaiseksi!

Lisäksi kehitellään uusia stiiknafuuliota, kuten ”kvasipeilisoluja” (jotka aktivoituvat havaitessa, mutta eivät tehdessä)!

SENKÖ TÄYTISEEN tarvitaan (vielä lisää) tuollaisia VALEKÄSITTEITÄ, se alkuperäinen ”peilisolun” valekäsite oli fysiologisesti tarpeeton, koska jokainen aivokuoren pinnan solu olisi sen mukaan aina-kin jonkin asian ”peilisolu”, mutta tuo ”kvasipeilisolu” on jo LOOGISESTIKIN saman tason ”käsite” kuin vanhaa lasten vitsiä lainatakseni ”saippuan nimittäminen ´valeoravaksi´”, koska ”saippualla ja oravalla on yhteinen ominaisuus, että molemmat pääsevät puuhun, paitsi saippua”!

 

” 5) We must distinguish what the macaque data from Parma tell us about mirror neurons from what we tend to claim they tell us. “

 

RK: OLOSUHTEET HUOMIOON OTTAEN: terävästi päätelty…: on pi- dettävä erillään se, mitä tulokset kertovat, ja mitä ”me” (=”sosiobio- logistikirkko”) HALUAMME USKOA niiden tarkoittavan! Ei käynyt niin kuin pikku Kallelle, kun USKONNON opettaja kysyi, että ”mikä on ruskea ja karvainen ja hyppii oksalta oksalle”. Kalle vastasi, että ”Ensin tuli vähän muuta mieleen, mutta OLOSUHTEET HUOMIOIDEN vastaan, että se on Jeesus-lapsi”. (Vastaavalla odotusarvojen todennäköisyystasolla ovat ehdollistumisteorian (”orava”) ja ”peilisolutoerian” (”Jeesus-lapsi”) edustamat tulkinnat neurofysiologisista kokeista….)

 

” 6) Csibra suggests that “a plausible counter-hypothesis for the role of MNs would be that they are involved in the prediction or anticipation of subsequent — rather than in the simulation of concurrent — actions of the observed individual.”

RK: MITEN tuo on muka “peilisoluteorian” VASTAhypoteesi? Jos siellä ”peilisolussa” on jokin TOI-MINTA koodattuna, niin sehän on sitä juuri ”toimenpiteiden seurantona”, miten se muuten siellä voisi olla? Mutta helvetin paljon yksinkertaisemmin tuollainen selittyy ehdollistumisteorialla ja ILMAN SO-LUTASON KOODAUSTA, koska kullakin niillä osatoiminnoilla voi olla ja on oma refleksikaarensa SA-MASSA ”PROSESORISSA”, ja niiden välille tarvitaan vain järjestävä yhteys, jotta niistä saadaan ”ko-ko toiminnan refleksikaari” seurantoineen! Tuohon viime mainittuun voi sitten ärsykkenä viitata sana tai vaikka pähkinänkuoren tietynlainen risahdus apinan salavarastolla. Tämä on sitä ehdollisten ref-leksien SYSTEEMISYYTTÄ, että ”ylin” ja ”abstraktein” taso määrää, ja ohjaa hierakisesti niihin alem-piin , perustavampiin, alkupeäisempiin. Sellaista ei esiinny genettisillä erillisillä ehdoTTOMilla reflek-seillä, joissa taas ”alin määrää” . (Esimerkiksi vaikka olisi kuinka herkullisia ruokia ja kuinka kauhea nälkä, mutta sormi pistetään kurkkuun, niin yrjö tulee. ”Vieras esine kurkussa, jota ei voi nielaista” on nimittäin originalinen laukaiseva ärsyke).

 

” 7) Finally, let me note that simulation theorists seldom address the fact that we may be observing others while still going about our own lives. To address this, the simulation theorist must explain how the same neural circuitry could support the simulations of the others at the same time as it supports our own actions, and how it solves the binding problem of keeping the neural representations of agents and actions properly paired as the drama unfolds. “

RK: Tässäkään ei ole ehdollistumisteorian valossa mitään ihmellistä: kaksi eri toimintoa voi hyödyn-tää yhtä aikaa samaa aktivoitua refleksikaarta, siitä on usein vain hyötyä, jos se on muutakin kautta aktiivisena (sanotaan vaikka bändisoitossa tai pariluistelussa, missä on toisella silmällä tai korvalla seurattava naapureiden suoritusta, tuollainen ei oikein automatisoitunesti muuten onnistuisikaan). Mutta jos kaksi henkilöä tekee samaa proseduuria hiukan eri tahtiin ja havainnoi toisiaan, niin sitten voi sekaanusta sattua, esimerkiksi siten, että jäljessä oleva jättää pois jonkin vaiheen ja jatkaa ereh-dykdessä samasta kohdasta missä se toinen suorittaja on. Sillä, ovatko aktivoituvat ilmiöt ”solutason simulaatiota” vai suhteellisesti objektivoitunutta ”toimnnan vakiomallia”, on olennainen merkitys tukinnan kannalta.

Siitä nämä Gergely Csibran kommentit:

” 1. The existence of ”mirror systems” does not tell us anything about simulation. Simulation theories require not only that the same neural substrate be involved in the execution and observation of actions, but also that the actual representations match between these domains.

The claim that mirror neurons ”mirror” actions has implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) been exten-ded to ”mirror systems” by analogy and terminology.As Arbib notes,there is no evidence supporting this claim. “

RK: Ilman “(Rizzolattin_)mätsäystä” ei ole, tai ei tarvita, “peilisoluja- kaan”… Nyt tullaan siihen, mikä olisi luokitteluteorian (joka siis sopii ehdollistumisteorian ja kielellisen ajateluteoriankin kanssa, jos sen ei oleteta olevan keenissä) ja ”simulaatioteorian” ero:

 

” 2. Arbib asks ”whether the ’classification’ theory of intersubjecti- vity loses any essential features of the ’simulation’ theory.” Yes, it does – it loses its main point. If an action is ’classified’ without simu-lation, then it is understood without simulation, and it is no longer ”devoid of meaning” (Rizzolatti et al., 2001), however this meaning is elaborated by further processes.

 

RK: “ Simulaatioteorialla” voi pyyhkäistä tiettyä paikkaa ”luokittelu- teorian” hyväksi,ja saman tien ”auto- maattisella mielenlukemisella”. Jos esiintyy ”simuloivaa mielenlukemista” se on yhteisen harjoittelun tulos jossakin useamman henkilön työ- tmv. prosessissa. Ja se koskee pelkästään sitä tiettyä, yh-teistä suoritusta edellyttävää prosessia. Seuraavat pykälää kovempien ”peisoluteorian” kannatajien ”krritiset kommentit” näistä osin kerettiläisistä huomiosta ovat mielenkintoista paljastavaa luettavaa ”peilisolutoerian” kannalta…

Pätkäisen tähän tällä kertaa, ja palaan niihin tuonnempana, inshallah… RK ]

 

Gregory Hickok: ” The idea that they were exploring was that these were cells that were taking ob-ject shape information and using that to select from a vocabulary of appropriate grasps, the approp-riate grasp gesture for reaching that object. So they were studying this population of cells and as they were swapping the objects in and out of the display case during the experiment they noticed that some of the cells that they were recording from started responding to the experimenter’s own actions. These were cells that responded when the monkey generated movements and as well as when they were observing the experimenter making similar movements. This is basically the response properties of mirror neurons; They respond both during action-execution and also action-observation. That was the basic discovery and the context in which it was made.

The big question became “What are doing?

What’s going on with these cells such as they respond to actions, as well as execution of actions?”

 

Serge: Okay. So from discovering that these very specific cells are activated during action and also during observation of action came the leap that they are responsible for more than that.

 

Gregory: That’s correct. So, in trying to figure out what they were doing, the most obvious interpre-tation or function that these cells could be supporting is direct imitation. So if you have a cell, for example, that responds both during observation and execution you might imagine that that cell allows the animal to directly imitate the actions that it is observing.

That was considered briefly early on after mirror neurons were dis- covered, but that possibility was ultimately rejected on the basis of the observation that the Macaques don’t seem to imitate like that. They don’t do direct imitation like humans do.

And so that was discarded as a possible interpretation of these cells and they looking for other pos-sible interpretations. There was a theory that had been around since the 1950’s in the speech do-main, my area of research, called the motor theory of speech perception, which held that when we perceive speech sounds, the goal of perceiving speech sound computationally, is not to recover its acoustic form but to recover the gesture of the speaker. That is, the motor plan that generated the sound that you’re listening to. It was very much a motor theory of perception, and mirror neurons kind of looked like that. They were responding during the observation of actions.

The Parma researchers considered the hypothesis that maybe these cells were responsible for action understanding, that’s how the monkeys understand others actions, and the method they proposed was one of simulation.

The logic kind of goes like this: When the monkey generates an action, say a reaching action towards something, it knows what it’s doing, it knows its intentions behind the movement. When it observes another animal generating an action, if it can simulate those movements in its own motor system, then by the same token it will be able to understand other people’s actions. And so you simulate to allow understanding. That’s the basic idea.

 

[RJK: Tämä virheellinen päättely kantaa sisällään ensinnäkin olemuk- seltaan LOOGISTA Damasion virhettä (joka palautuu ennen Pavlovin ehdollistumisteoriaa esitettyyn James-Lange-teoriaan), jonka mukaan ”tietoisuus on kuudes aisti, joka aistii muiden aistien aistimuksia”: tietoisuus (tietoinen tajunta) siis SEURAISI NEUROTOIMINTAA eikä aiheuttaisi sitä.

Virhe on nimenomaan looginen siksi, että ”Uusi Kuudes Aisti(n)” SI- SÄLTÄÄ PILKULLEEN SAMAT ONTOLOGISET JA MUUT ONGELMAT KUIN NE VIISI ”VANHAAKIN” AISTIA, EIKÄ SE SIIS RATKAISE TUTKIMUSONGELMIA, vaan pelkästään siirtelee niitä toiseen, entistäkin ratkaisemattomampaan paikkaan.

https://hameemmias.vuodatus.net/lue/2014/08/yhteenvedon-paikka-antonio-damasion-biologismista-2004
Yhteenvedon paikka Antonio Damasion biologismista… (2004)

 

 

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/Message/FlatMessageIndex/136367?page=1#136367

” Aamulehdessä 14.03.04 oli Tampereen teknillisen yliopiston fysii- kan dosentin Jouko Niemisen arvostelu portugalilaissyntyisen mutta nykyisin USA:ssa tutkijana ja kirjailija-na vaikuttavan Antonio Damasion kirjasta ”Spinozaa etsimässä – ilo ja suru ja tuntevat aivot”.

 

Dosentti Joko Nieminen

Kirjoittaja edustaa juuri sitä kohderyhmää tyypillisimmillään, jolle esi- merkiksi Antonio Damasion, Steven Pinkerin tai vaikkapa vain suoma- laisen sosiologin Ullica Segerstråhlen, näiden ”Euroo-passa vainottujen”, mutta sitten USA:ssa ”tieteellisen” uran luoneiden, kirjoittelu on tarkoitettu…

Omana yhteenvetonani toistan ne moneen kertaan tälläkin palstalla esiintyneet syyt, joiden takia Da-masion tietoisuusteoria EI OLE tie- teellisten periaatteiden mukainen pätevä teoria, eikä se siten nykyisen tieteellisen maailmankuvan mukaan voi olla myöskään tosi teoria, ainakaan kokonaisuutena. (Yksittäisiä oikeita oivalluksia tai havaintoja siihen saattaa sisältyä.)

 

1. Damasion teoria tietoisuudesta ”kuudentena aistina”, joka (ikään kuin ulkoisena havaitsijana) aistii muiden aistinten tuottaman datan käsittelyä aivoissa, eli että ”havainnoimme havainto-jamme”,on karkeasti LOOGISESTI virheellinen teoria, joka EI SELITÄ MITÄÄN, vaan siirtää pelkästään tietoisuuden ongel-man uuteen paikkaan,sillä aivan sama ongelma liittyy tuon ”muita aisteja havainnoivan aistin” tietoisuuspuoleen kuin niiden alkuperäistenkin aistien!

 

Ja pahempaa: jos alun perin oli JOKIN MAHDOLLISUUS havainnoida korrelaatiota esimerkiksi aisti-miin tulevien ulkoisten signaalien ja esimerkiksi aivokuoren aktivaatiotason välillä, ja yrittää niistä ve-tää johtopäätöksiä, niin nyt PERIAATTEELLINENKIN kokeellinen tsekkausmahdollisuus on men-nyttä, kun ilmeisesti kyse olisi ”aivoalueiden välisistä” havaintokorrelaatiosta, joista emme edes tiedä, mitkä alueet ovat kyseessä (emme varsinkaan se uuden ”aistimen” osalta)!

Tuo karkea virhe on puhtaasti looginen ja filosofinen, sen havaitse- miseen ei tarvita MINKÄÄNLAISIA neuro- eikä muun psykologian tietoja. Se on tuossa suhteessa vähän niin kuin karkea mate-maattinen määrittelyvirhe minkä tahansa konkreettisen ”teorian” premisseissä: tutkimusongelmia ei ratkaista, vaan ne kasataan eräälaiseen (”kantilaiseen”) ”das Ding an sich”-pisteeseen, jossa niitä EI PERIAATEESSAKAAN voida tutkia eikä ratkaista.

 

Olli Lagerspetz: Onko tietoisuus elimistön organisaatiotaso?

https://netn.fi/sites/www.netn.fi/files/netn991-02.pdf

Kritiikki pätee myös Damasion niin ikään olettamiin ”(aineettomiin) mielen karttoihin”, jollaisiin kuu-lemma aistimuksessa kaiken aikaa ”kehon kulloistakin tilaa (”lihaa”, ”fyiikkaa”)verrataan”: ei siinä to-dellakaan RATKAISTA ideaalisen ongelmaa, vaan siirretään se pllkästään toiseen, vieläkin vaikeam-min tutkittavaan paikkaan (aivan kuten ”Jumalakin” selittää selitämätöntä vieläkin selittämättömämmällä”)!

2. Damasio nojautuu ns.James-Lange hypoteesiin,jonka mukaan ”tunne on havainto elimistön tilasta”. Hypoteesi on vakuuttavasti osoitettu vääräksi, sillä tunteella on aina KOHDE, ja sen ytimessä on tuota kohdetta koskeva tieto, jolla sitten sattuu olemaan jonkinlainen biokemi-allinen ”glorifionti” tai päin vastoin ”aversifionti”, vastenmielistävä tuntemus.

On ollut ainakin sata vuotta tunnettu tosiasia, että tuollainen glori- fiointi tai aversifiointi voidaan saada aikaan kemiallisestikin esimer- kiksi huumeilla tai sähköisestikin laukaisemalla vaikka nauru (tai orkku) selkäytimstä, mutta Damasio esittää tällaiset omina uusina ”mullistavina” tuloksinaan, jotka ”todista-vat”, että muka ”ensin on reaktio” ja sitten vasta tunne, vaikka (sinänsä olemuksellisesti ehdollistu-mislakien mukaisesti kahdensuuntainen) prosessi on noissa esimerkeissä nimenomaisesti pistämällä pistetty pelaamaan tavanomaiseen nähden päinvastaiseen suuntaan!

Damasio on sekoitanut ”tunteen” ”tuntumaan” (esimerkiksi voimis- telijan oman jalan asennosta), joka on todellakin aistimus elimistön tilasta, mutta jolla ei sitten ole paljoa tekemistä ilojen ja vihojen ja rakkauksien varsinaisen olemuksen kanssa.

Ohessa tunnetun englantilais-amerikkalaisen filosofin Colin McGinnin niittaus niin James-Lange-teorialle kuin itse Damasion kirjallekin:

keskustelu.skepsis.fi/html/KeskusteluViesti.asp?ViestiID=117041

 

3. Damasio esiintyy niin kuin ei olisi ikinä kuullut mitään ns. kor- keimpien psyykkisten toiminto-jen nykyaikaisen tieteellisen maailmankuvan mukaisesta selittämisestä kielellisen ajatteluto-rian avulla eikä myöskään sen biologisena perustana olevasta EHDOLLISTEN REFLEKSIEN järjestelmästä.

Hänen teoriansa kuuluu siis ns.anti-Pavlov-teorioiden kategoriaan, jotka ovat nykyisen tieteellisen ihmiskuvan mukaan humpuukia, sillä ehdollistumislait on kyllä miljoonaan kertaan osoitettu kokeellisesti todellisiksi ja sivuuttamattomiksi esimerkiksi juuri tietoisuusilmiöiden selittämisessä.

http://keskustelu.skepsis.fi/Message/Message/361268

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/books/fear-factor.html?pagewanted=all

 

Mutta sitten kirjoituksen yksityiskohtaiseen analyysiin (kirjoitan sen saman tien nettiin kuin tiedostoonkin, ja nyt voitte sitten oikaista virheet, jos osaatte…):

 

Jouko Nieminen:

Tunteiden biologiassa humanismi kohtaa luonnontieteet

2004-03-14

Antonio Damasio: Spinozaa etsimässä – ilo suru ja tuntevat aivot

 

Ja lopuksi: tutkiessaan tuota ”toisten tiedostamisen mallintamista” ihmisapinoilla, silloinen peilisolu-mies Michael Tomasello todisti, että NIIN EI OLE: vain ihmisellä on jaettu intentio (johon siis tuolla peilisolulörötyksessäkin ”lähteenä” täysin väärin tietysti viitataan!

 

Tämä olisi pitänyt arvata jo seuraavasta seikasta: APINOILLA EI OLE SILMÄNVALKUAISIA! Ne ni-menomaan EIVÄT NÄE, minne naapuri katsoo! SIITÄ on ollut NIILLE ENEMÄÄN EVOLUTIONAA-RISTA HYÖTYÄ, siis ”aikeiden salaamisesta”, kuin niiden paljastamisesta kuten ihmisillä! Simapans-si pystyy kääntämään katsettaan 120 astetta päätään liikuttamatta ilman että ulospäin näkyy mitään ilman erikoislaitteita, jollaisilla Tomasello tutki niiden katseiden suuntaa.

MILLOIN ne valkuaiset ilmaantuivat, onnistuneen jaetun intuition ehdoton edellytys?

Tässä yksi, taiteilijan teoria:

http://jatkumo.net/index.php?topic=2096.msg175234#…

Tämän kuvan taiteilija on mitä suurimmalla todennäköisyydellä olet- tanut Ardipithcus ramiduksella (kuva), oletetulla vesiapinalla, olleen jaettu intentio (vaikka sillä edelleen mitä todennäköisimmin ei olut sialiinimutaatiota päätellen ”pienistä” aivoista).Ardipitehecuksen seuraaja oli (luultavasti) Austra- lopithecus Africanus, ensimmäinen juokseva ihmisapina ja ensimmäinen ihmisen tapaan juokseva laji, täysin kuivanmaan elävä. (Jos sillä ei ollut sialiinimutaatiota, se juoksi paljon lujempaa kuin kuin jos oli. Periaatteessa ihminen olisi saatanut olla myös noiden risteytys: ne olivat kuitenkin lähisukulaisia.)

 

” Serge: So, in a way, the part in there is not just that its possible to simulate in order to understand, the question and some of what you discuss in your book is about the nature of understanding.

Is how we understand sayings based on basically imitating the movement?

And so it raises the question of how we know what we know, and how we understand what we understand, and how we attach meaning to things.

 

Gregory: That’s exactly right. The big problem with this idea is that the movements themselves contain meaningful information, or that by observing or simulating the actions it will automatically tell us what the meaning of those actions is.

If you think about it for a little while,it’s obvious that it’s not the case and there’s several reasons why if we look closely. For example, if I reach for a pitcher and tip it over so that it pours water out into a cup that action can mean many different things depending on the context. So if there’s no water in the pitcher, it’s just a tilting motion, it doesn’t really do anything, it’s not pouring. If there’s water in there then we can think of it as pouring. If we think about it from the perspective of the cup then it’s filling. The movements are identical, so you can generate very similar or identical motor patters and achieve the same goal.

The movements really don’t define the meaning, they’re actually quite ambiguous. It really depends on the context and a lot of the mirror neuron experiments demonstrated this, that the same movement that the monkey observed gave rise to mirror neuron activity not depending on the movement but depending on the context, and that’s in the mirror neuron literature. It’s not the movements themselves that are defining it.

 

Serge: So the interesting part then is that it is more complex, that the movement itself is one source of information and the processing involves many sources of information.

 

Gregory: Right. In order to understand something you need all this additional context and the movement is only a small part of it. It may be that, perceptually, it’s an important part to process that movement, but it doesn’t mean that simulating that movement in your own body is going to tell you much of anything.

We know empirically that in individuals that don’t have the ability to move, they seem to be able to understand the world quite well. We all can understand action that we have never performed previously, say a reverse slamdunk in a basketball game for example. Not many of us can do that, but we can understand it quite well. Other animals that have movements that we can’t possibly generate we can still understand, so flying or slithering or things like that. And there’s good evolutionary reasons why we would want to understand the actions of other animals, because sometimes they’re predators and we want to know what they’re up to. Sometimes they’re prey, and we want to predict what they might do so that we can catch them better. There’s lots of reasons why we should have neural systems that allow us to understand the actions of others without having to simulate these actions.

 

Serge: So, in other words what you’re saying is that mirror neurons are certainly a source of information, but they’re not the source and certainly not the source of meaning.

 

Gregory: Well, not quite. The way I view mirror neurons is they’re es- sentially important for motor control just like these cells in F5 are important for using sensory information about object shape to guide action selection. I see mirror neurons as doing exactly the same thing. Instead of object shape they’re using action, they’re using dynamic information about movement in order to guide responses. Generally, you can understand that the actions of other animals or people are important for selecting our own actions. If I thrust my hand out towards you when we first meet you’ll likely respond with a similar gesture to shake hands. If I do something else like throw a punch, you’re going to want to select a different action, a blocking or ducking action for example. Presumably, this is very important in the monkey world as well, and I think it’s that action selection function that mirror neurons are actually doing. I think the understanding is coming from different circuits, it’s coming from sensory circuits that are involved in recognizing actions, connecting them to meaning, integrating them with context, and all sorts of things. The involvement of the motor system is just to select actions that are appropriate to the understanding we get from other systems.

 

Serge: So is there maybe a hierarchy there of some things, some si- tuations where there’s more instinctual reactions, and some cases where there’s more involved, more processed reactions?

 

Gregory: Certainly it’s the case that we have reflex-like responses. Like I said, if I threw a punch at you, reflexively you would want to duck, or block,or do something like that. I think one way to think about it is in terms of general brain organization into what’s often been referred to as dorsal and ventral streams, sensory streams.The dorsal stream is thought to be involved in sensory-motor in-tegration. This is a parietal-frontal circuit that is taking sensory information and is using that to guide actions and that can be thought of as more of a reflexive, online, immediate system. That’s the sys-tem that mirror neurons are apart of. And then there’s a ventral stream circuit that’s more involved in recognizing what is going in the sensory environment. You can think of it as taking sensory infor-mation and trying to link it up to medial-temporal lobe structures involved in memory, episodic memory, all sorts of things like that.

So you can think of it as hierarchical in the sense that you have in some sense a lower level motor circuit that can respond reflexively taking information from a more cognitive or higher level concep-tual system that’s involved in recognizing, attaching meaning, attaching emotional relevance to information that’s in the environment. I think it is kind of helpful to think about organization of these circuits in terms of that kind of hierarchy and placing mirror neurons and other sensory motor circuits within one stream. It’s not particularly involved in recognition, but it’s involved in taking action.

 

Serge: And involved in taking action, but there is a difference any- way in the action that’s being taken in terms of the context. So that’s where you would make the difference, say, between the action you take at first and the action you take once more you’ve had time to process at a higher level?

 

Gregory: Yeah, certainly it’s the case that some things are very refle- xive. I mean, generally you can think of the nervous system as being layers of control, so at the lowest level you have things like spinal reflexes which will get triggered automatically, but on top of that you have other circuits that are built to modulate that low-level reflexive response, because we don’t want to always respond reflexively. Sometimes, depending on the situation, we may not want to release that hot pan knowing that it might make more of a mess, knowing that if we drop it than if we quickly set it down or do something else. So yes, it’s always the case that we have some sort of higher level of control over these things.

We can decide after observing an action and understanding it whether we want to respond to it or not. And, of course, there are degrees of how reflexive our responses are. But I think the important thing is that mirror neurons are essentially in a motor control circuit, that they are not the basis for understanding, they’re kind of the endpoint for understanding.

They respond after the understanding takes place, which is very much characteristic of the way that these cells respond in monkeys. So, for example, in one experiment the researchers placed an object behind a screen so that the monkey couldn’t see it anymore and then reached for it and mirror neurons fired.

It is interesting that mirror neurons will not fire if the experimenter is reaching for nothing or just pantomiming a reach. That object has to be there in order for that to happen. It doesn’t physically have to be there in the sense that you could put it behind a screen that is physically in view, you can put it behind a screen, the monkey knows it’s there, and it will respond to it even though it can’t see it.

So Serge: I just want to interrupt you here, because as you’re talking you’re clarifying something for me. When you first said, at the beginning of your answer that something comes first, in a way takes me in a little bit of a loop. I think of the word understanding as referring to more conceptual, abstract understanding, as if in a way rational thinking preceded action. And as you’re talking more about this it’s actually something different that’s coming up. It is not understanding as some kind of abstract reasoning, but as having a context so that reaching is not a gesture in and of itself, but that is reaching for something. And it’s that mix of a gesture, and a goal, and a total context that is what you call understanding. Is that what you’re talking about?

 

Gregory: Yeah, I mean if we go back to the experiments that show when mirror neurons fire and when they don’t, they will fire if there is an object to be grasped. They won’t fire is there’s not an object to be grasped, and that’s going to depend on the context, the non-motoric context. And so there’s got to be some level of understanding of what the goal of that actual action is going to be before the mirror neurons will even fire. The typical interpretation out there in terms of mirror neu-rons is that they fire to tell you what the goal is. If they have to know what the goal is in order to fire then some level of understanding needs to be taking place before this circuit gets recruited. And so yes, I do think that there is some sort of a contextual understanding of what the goal of a reach is and what actions that might map onto in the monkey before these cells will actually fire.

 

Serge: So then in a way even at the level of something relatively basic like mirror neurons we’re still in a system where it’s not just sensory is pure stimulus and pure stimulus gives the reaction. Even in that case we have a more complex process where we are attaching context and processing information before the reaction happens.

 

Gregory: Sure, yeah, and just think of your everyday life. If we were completely reflexive, every cup, every object that you looked at you would reflexively reach for. Or, anyone who reached out for something or did something, you would mirror it or perform a similar action.

 

Serge: When you say this, actually it’s an interesting point. One of these reasons that the concept of mirror neurons caught on so well with psychotherapists is that in our everyday life seeing clients we catch ourselves “mirroring” the movements, the hand gestures, the body language, the moving of hands, the moving of legs of our clients, and vice versa. So in that way, it’s very tempting to jump into it and say “Oh, this must be mirror neurons.”

 

Gregory: Yes, that is a documented phenomenon, it’s known as the Chameleon Effect, and it’s something that I discuss in the book in the chapter on imitation. Humans do it. Macaques don’t do it, which is kind of interesting because Macaques have mirror neurons and they have the system that presumably would allow this, and yet they don’t do it.

[RK: Siis makaienkaan ”peilineuroneista” (että ne eivät ole esimerkiksi VIEREISIÄ jonkin tikapuumallisen refleksikaaren mielessä) EI OLE LOPULTAKAAN NÄYTTÖÄ…

Hickok painottaa nyt sitä, että VAIKKA OLISI, niillä, niiden luonnonhistoriallisilla jatkeilla, EI olisi tekemistä uhmisentajunnan kanssa.]

And so it’s something beyond mirror neurons that’s actually allowing this ability.

What’s it for?

It seems to serve a social function.

These sorts of things have been demonstrated experimentally in work that has people perform an irrelevant task in the company of a confederate to the experiment who’s generating some behaviors. When the confederate scratches their head the experimental subject will tend to scratch their head. The interpretation of this Chameleon Effect is that it is serving a social function to essentially provide social acceptance, or provide in-group status, or something like that. It’s interesting that humans tend not to imitate or mirror people that they don’t like or don’t identify with, so it is a kind of unconscious imitation, mirroring if you want to call it that, but it is not a dumb process, it’s not a reflexive process.

Presumably what’s happening, as is the case with other kinds of mirroring or motor control, is that there is some sort of higher-level circuit that is controlling or enabling this process to take place. It’s that process that we want to understand to know what’s happening with this kind of Chameleon Effect mirroring.

We need to think about what this higher-level circuit is doing such that it can activate the lower-level mirror-like circuit.

 

Serge: Right. And so, the image of mirror is the same that, say, can be used in contemplative ap-proaches to life; that wish that our minds were like a mirror that simply reflects the world as it is, and with some training and skill we can eliminate what gets in the way of that and have the purity of out-side experience. What you’re reinforcing and what you’re saying is that actually everything in our brain is designed to interpret experience as opposed to reflect it.

 

Gregory: Well, if we look to perceptual science,perceptual neuroscience – you’re talking about things that are way beyond my ability to comprehend myself, fairly abstract things – but if we ground those things in perceptual science, we know as a matter of fact that we don’t simply perceive or resonate with the world. Our brain actively constructs a representation of what the world looks like. If that’s true, even at the perceptual level, even in perceiving cups and things like that, if you scale up to human experience or more complicated situations, that with more force is a construction of our mind in terms of how it interprets the world.

Serge: And so,in a way,how does this bring us,in terms of concept of how we know what we know, how we conceptualize what we experience, and that whole concept and discussion you have in the book about embodied experience, embodied cognition? On the one hand, you know, there is it seems like we must have evolved in way that we developed abilities to deal with the world that were more complex, but based on simpler processes. On the other hand, such possible mechanisms as mirror neurons appear flawed as explanations of it.

Gregory: Yeah,the embodied cognition movement is an interesting thing.I think there are parts of it that are quite accurate and that are reasonable, so one of the things I like about it is that the move-ment tries to take complicated cognitive processes, and cognitive is kind of a loaded term as I talk about in the book, but complicated processes like categorization, or problem sol- ving, or decision making, things like that, try to think about how these might be done in terms of lower level circuits and sensory-motor circuits. I think that’s an interesting research direction to take. Where I think the program has gone wrong is this notion of simulating. Basically the idea is the way we think about, say, cats or dogs or something, is we simulate the sensory expe- rience, and that’s often taken as an explanation of how it’s done. “Oh, we just simulate it, the concept of cat in our sensory-motor systems, or whatever,” and that’s actually how we understand it, but this doesn’t tell us much at all.

Simulation is just a term for, basically, information processing, and what we really want to do is figure out what happens in the initial process. So to say that we simulate our experiences with cats in order to understand them, that’s fine, but then we want to know “What is this experience with cats?” How is it coded in our sensory-motor systems or whatever, to give rise to our un- derstanding in the first place? To say that we simulate it doesn’t really help, it kind of renames the problem, essentially.

Serge: Just like calling it a process, essentially.

Gregory: Yeah, that’s right. And so the embodied program is interes- ting, I but I think as a replace-ment for traditional cognitive psychology it has failed. It doesn’t really change much of anything except to look for lower level processes in the brain, which themselves are quite abstract in terms of trying to explain some of these higher-level behaviors.

Serge: So the flaw, as you see it, is that it tries to provide an explanation for what happens, but in a way that doesn’t match the information we have about how it happens.

Gregory: That’s right. There’s lot’s of empirical evidence that I dis- cuss in the book showing that essentially you don’t need a motor system in order to understand actions. I go through that in the speech case, which is a domain that mirror neurons were first generalized to in humans. Speech was really the human connection between monkey mirror neurons and what’s happening in humans because we have a lot more data on that. There was this motor theory about speech perception that was out there; incidentally, that theory was rejected by speech and language scientists before mirror neurons were discovered, so it’s kind of a poor analogy to use to help interpret mirror neurons since the theory was essentially dead. But, there’s evidence, for example,of individuals with cerebral palsy who can’t control their speech muscles. They had never spoken yet could nonetheless understand speech quite well. There’s examples from people who can’t move and can understand actions quite well, for example in apraxia or congenital disorders like cerebral palsy, or ALS, or other things like that there are examples of people who can’t generate emotional facial expressions. This is Mobius Syndrome.They can nonetheless understand emotional facial expressions as well as anybody else.

So there’s example after example like this that show that you don’t need the ability to move in order to understand, so this explanation is just empirically false.

 

Serge: Right, right. So, it’s not necessarily that we are replicating the movement in order to under-stand it, but that maybe the information about movement is accessed by that part of our brain, our mind, that processes information that processes representations and influences our pre-motor information?

 

Gregory: Yeah, I mean there’s another area that isn’t discussed much in the mirror neuron literature that’s ben discovered in Macaque monkeys as well as in humans, posterior (spoken at 28:30) supe-rior temporal sulcus, which seems to respond quite well to the perception of all sorts of movements, eye gaze, and all sorts of interesting interactions between eye gaze and observed movements, and this sort of thing. This region is probably the hub for understanding actions. In humans it’s involved in biological motion perception, so it’s a big candidate for an area that’s processing this sort of infor-mation and relating it to contextual information, to long-term memories, to all these sortsof things. For actions that are recognized in this way and that are appropriate for generating a response, be-cause not everything we observe is selected for response, then this information can be the sensory-motor parietal-motor parietal-frontal circuits can then be mapped onto motor circuits for action selection that may or may not be mirror related. So, if I thrust my hand out to shake your hand then you’re going to generate a mirror movement, but if, like I said, throw a punch, you don’t want to ge-nerate a mirror movement in that case. And so, I see these mirror neurons as part of a much broa-der sensory-motor circuit only some of which are coding mirror-like movements. There are plenty of others that code anti-mirror movements, and those were actually discovered alongside mirror neu-rons in Macaque monkeys in the original experiments, but these were not discussed theoretically.

 

Serge: Great. So Greg,is there something else you might want to say to conclude this conversation?

 

Gregory: Well,there’s one other topic that I dealt with in the book that might be of interest, and that’s autism, because the Broken Mirror Theory of Autism is quite popular, and like many theories of autism it assumes that something is broken, that these individuals have a lack of empathy, or an inability to empathize or read other people’s minds, things like that.

Hitsi että tämän kiinalaisen niitin teksti on kiinaksi. Niin sitä pitää. Omille oikeaa tietoa, muut pitäkööt tunkkinsa!

Advances in Psychological Science    2016, Vol. 24 Issue (6) : 958-973     DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1042.2016.00958

The myth of broken mirror theory of autism: Origins, problems and prospects

PAN Wei¹; CHEN Wei^2,3; WANG Yin⁴; SHAN Chun-lei⁵

(¹ School of Rehabilitation Science, Nanjing Normal University of Spe- cial Education, Nanjing 210038, China) (² Center for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310028, China) (³ Department of Psychology, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000, China) (⁴ School of Psychology, New York University, New York 10003, USA) (⁵ School of Rehabilitation Science, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai 201203, China
http://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/EN/10.3724/SP.J.1042.2016.00958#1

Autism are characterized by difficulties in reciprocal social inter- action, verbal and non-verbal communication, and repetitive activities and narrow interests. A core diagnostic criterion of autism is abnormal implicit social cognition. Based on the assumption that mirror neuron system is the unified neural basis of implicit social processes, the “broken mirror” theory attributes most social deficits in autism to impairments in mirror neuron system, leading to the issues with social skills, imitation, empathy, and theory of mind seen in people with autism. However, after a decade of extensive examination and verification, this theory has been facing increasing challenges from behavioral, neuroscientific and clinical research. This paper outlines literatures examining the unified role of mirror neuron system for implicit social cognition, and systematically review studies testing a global dysfunction of the mirror system in autism. We conclude that mirror neuron system plays a sufficient but not necessary role for implicit social cognition and very few evidence supports that an all-or-nothing problem with the mirror neuron system can underlie autism. The implications and future research directions are also discussed.

Keywords autism      mirror neurons      broken mirror theory      social cognition      action imitation      social responding

Corresponding Authors: CHEN Wei, E-mail: anti-monist@163.com WANG Yin, E-mail: slzwy@msn.com

Issue Date: 15 June 2016

***

https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2013/aug/23/mirror-neurons

” Reflecting on mirror neurons

The discovery of mirror neurons has been touted as one of the most important of modern neuroscience, but what exactly are these cells, and should you believe the hype?

Mo Costandi

@mocost

Fri 23 Aug 2013 19.20 BST First published on Fri 23 Aug 2013 19.20 BST

Mirror neurons have been used to explain everything from language acquisition to autism. Photograph: Alamy

HIckok: ” But, there’s another possibility in that they’re hypersensi- tive and that can lead to avoidance behavior, which can then affect their ability when you assess them to show empathy. This is not because they can’t do it, but because they’re avoiding it.

Serge: They’re flooded and therefore avoided.

Gregory: Exactly. So there’s lots of reasons to think that a mirror neu- ron hypothesis and even just a deficit hypothesis for autism is valid and there’s lots of data suggesting that we should be conside-ring alternative possibilities. So that’s another thing that was discussed that may be of some interest to people.

Serge: Great, great. Well, thanks Greg.

Gregory: Sure, thank you.

This conversation was transcribed by Michael Fiorini. ”