Mirror Neurons and Intersubjectivel Space

Mirror Neurons and Intersubjectivel Space

Mirror Neurons and the Intersubjective Space
(Edward Hug, edwhug@hotmail.com)
Chapter ___ of Fleury, Khouri & Hug (2008),
Psicodrama e Neurociencia. Sao Paulo: Agora.

Introduction

A simple discovery, made in Italy in the early 90s, is leading to a sweeping paradigm change in the social sciences. This original discovery by Rizzolati, Gallese & Arbib was so simple: when a chimp picks up a peanut, a certain neuron fires in the anterior parietal lobe of its brain. But then, almost by accident, they noticed that the same neuron firing when the chimp saw another chimp picking up a peanut. This seed observation has entered the science of Imitation and conferences are being held and books written (for example Hurley & Chater, 2005). These "mirror neurons" are now seen as the basis of one mammal (including ourselves) "reading" the intentions of another, the basis of "empathy" and “Intersubjectivity”.

The 90s were the Decade of the Brain, with an incredible volume of new neuroscience for which Freud would have given his eye teeth. We may remember that Freud, in his 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, espoused a psychology based upon the physiology of the brain. (See Gamwell & Solms, 2006, for his early neurological drawings.) Twenty five years later, he would still write:

"The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones.... We may expect (physiology and chemistry) to give the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years of questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypothesis". (Freud, 1920, p.60)

But it was not until the last decade of the 20th century that neuroscience had developed to the point that psychology could even use neurological insights. And it has not been until this first decade of the 21st...