That’s smart! When I started graduate school in psychology in 2013, mirror neurons felt like, colloquially, “hot shit”, but within a few years, people had started to cringe quite dramatically whenever the phrase was used. I think your reasoning in (3) is spot on.
Your example leads to fun questions like, “how do I recognize juggling”, including “what stimuli activate the concept of juggling when I do it” vs “what stimuli activate the concept of juggling when I see you do it”?, and intuitively, nothing there seems to require that those be the same neurons, except the concept of juggling itself.
Empirically I would probably expect to see a substantial overlap in motor and/or somatosensory areas. One could imagine the activation pathway there is something like
visual cortex [see juggling]->temporal cortex [concept of juggling]->motor cortex[intuitions of moving arms]
And we’d also expect to see some kind of direct “I see you move your arm in x formation”->”I activate my own processes related to moving my arm in x formation” that bypasses the temporal cortex altogether.
And we could probably come up with more pathways that all cumulatively produce “mirror neural activity” which activates both when I see you do a thing and when I do that same thing. Maybe that’s a better concept/name?
That’s smart! When I started graduate school in psychology in 2013, mirror neurons felt like, colloquially, “hot shit”, but within a few years, people had started to cringe quite dramatically whenever the phrase was used. I think your reasoning in (3) is spot on.
Your example leads to fun questions like, “how do I recognize juggling”, including “what stimuli activate the concept of juggling when I do it” vs “what stimuli activate the concept of juggling when I see you do it”?
, and intuitively, nothing there seems to require that those be the same neurons, except the concept of juggling itself.Empirically I would probably expect to see a substantial overlap in motor and/or somatosensory areas. One could imagine the activation pathway there is something like
visual cortex [see juggling]->temporal cortex [concept of juggling]->motor cortex[intuitions of moving arms]
And we’d also expect to see some kind of direct “I see you move your arm in x formation”->”I activate my own processes related to moving my arm in x formation” that bypasses the temporal cortex altogether.
And we could probably come up with more pathways that all cumulatively produce “mirror neural activity” which activates both when I see you do a thing and when I do that same thing. Maybe that’s a better concept/name?