If I remember correctly, the existence of mirror neurons is highly contested in the scientific community. But the idea, which is based on certain observations, is that there are neurons in one’s brain whose function is to mimic the behavior of neurons in another.
Basically, researchers found that, in monkeys, certain neurons associated with making certain facial features or with picking up food were fired when they were looking at a monkey making those facial features or picking up food. So, they called these neurons “mirror neurons.”
The funny thing is, though, that if certain neuron firings correspond with feeling certain ways, then of course those neurons would fire when a monkey makes a facial expression, and of course they would fire when another monkey witnesses them, just due to the phenomenon of empathy.
That is, for example, monkey A feels sad, sadness-related neurons fire, and monkey A makes facial expression B. Monkey C sees monkey A’s facial expression and then feels sad, so the corresponding neurons fire in monkey A’s brain. Naturally, they’re the same neurons that monkey C would normally fire when making the same facial expression, because that facial expression corresponds with sadness.
The same logic could be applied in the case of picking up food: monkey C sees monkey A picking up food, and he empathizes with the feeling of eating or having his hunger quenched. Well, monkey A also felt that feeling, obviously, and that feeling could very well have been what caused the neurons to fire that correspond to subsequent neurons firing in the brain of monkey C.
So, what we’re witnessing here is simply empathy, or at least theory of mind, at work; but scientists, in their typical naively reductionistic approach, focus on the neurons themselves that correspondingly fire and call them “mirror neurons,” as if the correspondence in their firing is a blind, simple, and mechanical function of those particular neurons themselves.
In my opinion, there’s a lot to be learned from this. There’s a lesson here: What else might scientists get wrong in their reductionistic naivety?
