Sharon Begley has a piece in Mindful about mirror neurons, and how it turns out we’re not really sure that humans have them after all, mainly because "the most direct test—using electrodes to detect the firing of individual neurons to be sure the same ones fire during observing an action and executing it—is too invasive to be ethically done on healthy volunteers.” There has been one study, in which UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni
piggy-backed on epilepsy surgery, in which such electrodes are temporarily implanted into patients’ brains. Result: certain neurons fired when the patients both observed (on a laptop) and performed grasping actions and facial gestures.
Unfortunately, the study used only 21 patients and has not been independently confirmed. Also, the purported mirror neurons were not where monkeys’ neurons are but, among other places, in regions involved in memory. That raised concerns that the neurons firing during both observation and execution were involved in remembering the action, and thus not true mirror neurons. As a 2013 review put it, research results “cannot yet furnish conclusive proof” that humans have them.
Fortunately, I don’t talk about mirror neurons in my book, and indeed writing the book was a long exercise in learning to back away from relying too heavily on neuroscientific explanations when other evidence or arguments were available. Sure, when you’ve got a weak argument, adding some brain imaging pictures helps it look stronger (this is a popular move in what Stephen Poole memorably called the popular neurobollocks literature, and Ray Tallis calls neuromania); but I felt like relying on neuroscience could also lead in some not-so-useful rhetorical directions, like using neuroscientific arguments as a stalking horse for technological determinism.