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Because autism involves (most likely) a deficiency in the mirror neurons which do not allow the children to learn from mimicking the social interaction of other
by LPTS 18y ago
Because autism involves (most likely) a deficiency in the mirror neurons which do not allow the children to learn from mimicking the social interaction of others. It's theorized that sometimes these deficient mirror neurons get replaced by other skills and pre-sensory processing, like logic, music, perfect pitch, etc, in the same way that some blind people have phenomenal hearing.
Also it's debilitating for a lot of people, many of whom lack so many mirror neurons they never learn how to communicate.
- xlnt 18y agoAs I understand it, "mirror neurons" are a silly idea. Researchers noticed that people, for example, running, and people observing running, have similar brain activity. Why might that be? Well, they say that certain neurons somehow mimic what one observes. They imply these neurons are somewhat autonomous. But there's another rather obvious possibility: the person running, and the person watching running, were both thinking about running. Their brain activity was similar because they were thinking about the same thing.
- LPTS 18y agoYou don't understand it at all. The idea of mirror neurons is well proven. The only thing left to understand is if the mirror neuron problems result from or cause the autistic spectrum. It's not true that for two people thinking the same thing, their brain scan looks the same, so your intuition is flawed. They are sure mirror neurons exist, and they know where in the brain they are.
- xlnt 18y agoLink to the best web-available paper with evidence that they exist, and some text ruling out alternative explanations, and and I will read it.
- LPTS 18y agoYou don't want to do the study you would need to do to grasp the issue well enough to form a coherent judgement. Reading one paper won't even come close to cutting it. I can give you a list of books on neurology and autism to read. But I don't want to hunt papers on the web, decide on the best ones, read them all and find one to recommend to you, sorry. I'd hunt down VS Ramachandrans recent work if you wanted to find one, but he is more of a theorist then the researcher who proves the theory, so I'm not sure if that's quite what you want.
- xlnt 18y agoAlright I found this, which has various links to more. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran0... Could you give one reason to suppose that mirror neurons are a hardware feature -- a type of neuron -- not a software feature -- a particular strategy/mental-technique for using one's neurons?
- LPTS 18y agoBecause Ramachandran thinks so?
- xlnt 18y agoAn appeal to authority? That's not very persuasive.
- jacobolus 18y agoIt’s persuasive if you fill in the unstated extra bit, which goes something like “… and can explain why in great detail, if you take the trouble to read his writing about it. But such detail is excessive for this comment thread.”
- xlnt 18y agoWell I was just reading some of his writing, but so far I am not persuaded. Further, I have noticed some critical flaws in his writing caused by his lack of understanding of epistemology.
- Tichy 18y agoI am sure they are not. We don't really know how the brain works yet. I am pretty sure the "mirror neurons" are not special neurons, but simply neurons like all the others.
- xlnt 18y agoThis is a good example of failure of the threading model at YC. It's very hard to see, visually, what the parent is. It's just sort of this comment in the middle of nowhere.
- Tichy 18y agoCome on, "mirror neurons" are just bullshit.