21 ms·
You 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 c
by LPTS 18y ago
You 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.
- LPTS 18y agoYeah, you noticed flaws in Ramachandran's thinking. That'd be like me going up to Buckminster Fuller and saying "I don't think those dome things will work because I played with legos as a kid and don't see building it out of legos." Or going up to Einstein and saying "I don't think your special relativity is good because I threw rocks at each other and then away from each other, and I didn't notice it happen." You're a bit out of your league here, is what I mean to say. The point of Ramachandran's writing is to persuade people who know neurology, not to teach it to laypeople who don't have the intellectual integrity to admit they are out of their league.
- 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.