If you Google “mirror neurons,” one of the top results currently comes from a website Brainfacts.org that reports on an experiment measuring the activity of these neurons in monkeys, where it was apparently found that they fire when seeing someone else perform an activity of reaching food.  It has been hypothesized that mirror neurons are at the heart of our understanding of other people’s actions and emotions. Some have suggested that mirror neurons are the basis for social neuroscience.  Great things have been claimed for these neurons. Yet in a recent review article, “What we Currently Know about Mirror Neurons,” Kilner and Lemon emphasize how little has been confirmed and how much more work needs to be done.  In a critical article a few years ago, Gregory Hickok expressed strong reservations about the use of the evidence from monkeys  as a way of understanding action.   In his new book, Hickok takes an even more skeptical stance, arguing that the theories placing mirror neurons at the center of our knowledge of action and empathy are not just not fully proven so far, but are likely to be wrong. Mirror neurons clearly play some role, but he doubts that they have the central explanatory role that many promise for them.

Hickok’s arguments are detailed and require plenty of attention. It will be difficult for non-experts to assess them adequately.  It is notable that Hickok is a Professor in Social Sciences at UC Irvine, which helps lend his ideas credibility. He is a well-published researcher who gets grants, and so he understands the material well. His book covers a lot of ground.  It has ten chapters and two appendices. He covers not only a lot of cognitive and social science, but also includes discussion of autism, arguing that there’s no good evidence that mirror neurons or defects in them are key to understanding the social difficulties of people with autism. Although Hickok works hard to make the details of the debates understandable to a general readership, probably most readers will either end up reading some chapters of special interest carefully and neglecting others, or else skimming the book. It is probably going to most useful to those going into the field, such as graduate school, and those who are practicing neuropsychologists.

The lesson that most of can take from the book is that all the enthusiasm over mirror neurons that has filled so much of psychology and psychology journalism is certainly premature, and may not amount to much. Time and again we see neuroscientists claim they have found answers to central issues about the mind, but on closer inspection it turns out that they have at best a few promising hypotheses that are compatible with some rather crude data.  We have seen this time and again, going back to the start of phrenology. Our need to believe that we have solved the mysteries of human existence through technology, or whatever pushes us to credulity, makes us buy into these hypotheses. Hickok’s book reminds us that much of neuroscience is speculative, and while enormously interesting, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York