Comments on Existence is Wonderful: Mirror Neurons, Autism, Empathy, and Bias

Hi Anne,

You might be interested in this po...

2007-08-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

Hi Anne,

You might be interested in this post here, which also discusses the mirror neuron system as part of an hypothesized neurological explanation of autism.

You might also find this paper by Hamilton to be interesting, as a follow-on to the other Hamilton paper that you cited.

Thank you for your thorough and informative discus...

2007-07-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

Thank you for your thorough and informative discussion of these issues.

Thanks so much for this----I am still meditating o...

2007-05-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much for this----I am still meditating on my response!

Excellent post, very thorough and detailed. I'd a...

2007-05-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Excellent post, very thorough and detailed. I'd also like to see a study of brain activity in autistics observing each other; there's certainly some sort of nonverbal communication going on, but as far as I know, no one has investigated it.

Professor Morton Ann Gernsbacher, the president of the Association for Psychological Science, often discusses faulty assumptions and scientific racism. Here's a link to an article on autistic participation in research -- it seems very relevant to your post.

I agree (that both models are overly reductionisti...

2007-05-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

I agree (that both models are overly reductionistic), which is part of the reason I wrote this post. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, and a lot of the mirror neuron writings on autism seem to be coming to a lot of premature and simplistic conclusions, which are then socially reinforced through media and stereotyping.

As far as my own mental modeling system: it's weird writing about all this, because when I first learned of my own variant wiring, I actually thought that it WAS just a deficit on my part, that my difficulties "reading people" had to do with missing some sort of apparatus that most people had.

But then I got to thinking about it, and realized that a lot of my social issues in the past have been due to people misunderstanding *me* as much as they have been due to my misunderstanding others. While I don't doubt that people ARE able to vicariously share in the emotions of others through empathic mechanisms, and that there may very well be some sort of mental "simulating" going on, what stands out to me as a result of experience is the realization that the simulations are so frequently *wrong* when those involved are insufficiently similar.

What I think tends to happen a lot is that what gets mistaken for "empathy" is actually a kind of projection - people look at the facial expressions and movements of others and simulate how THEY would probably feel if they were making those same movements. This is fine so long as the "others" are similar enough so as to make the projection valid, but when the others are dissimilar, then the patterning breaks down.

I really have to wonder if we'd end up seeing "mirror neuron" activity in two autistics observing each other (or what kind of brain activity in general would show up under those circumstances). In my own personal experiences dealing with a few others on the spectrum, it has definitely seemed as if there's a lot more "shared context" than I experience with the general populace.

This sounds insanely prematurely reductive - like,...

2007-05-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

This sounds insanely prematurely reductive - like, why can't theory theory and simulation theory both be partially true? It certainly seems to me that I use both.