Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-7nlkj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-27T20:28:38.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

I Feel Your Pain: Embodied Knowledges and Situated Neurons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Victoria Pitts‐Taylor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The widely touted discovery of mirror neurons has generated intense scientific interest in the neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Social neuroscientists have claimed that mirror neurons, located in brain regions associated with motor action, facial recognition, and somatosensory processing, allow us to automatically grasp other people's intentions and emotions. Despite controversies, mirror neuron research is animating materialist, affective, and embodied accounts of intersubjectivity. My view is that mirror neurons raise issues that are directly relevant to feminism and cultural studies, but interventions are needed for the work to be compatible with nonreductionist critical thought. In this article I critique the dominant neuroscientific account of mirror neurons, called embodied simulation theory. I draw from feminist epistemologies as well as alternative interpretations of mirror neurons in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to consider mirroring as situated, embodied perception.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Fall 2013 , pp. 852 - 869
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Please see the online version of this article for supplementary notes. These offer more expansive discussion of many of the points made here.

References

Alaimo, Stacey, and Hekman, Susan. 2008. Introduction. In Material feminisms, ed. Alaimo, Stacey and Hekman, Susan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Asberg, Cecilia, and Birke, Lynda. 2010. Biology is a feminist issue: Interview with Lynda Birke. European Journal of Women's Studies 17 (4): 413–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jane, and Connolly, William. 2002. Contesting nature/culture: The creative character of thinking. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (1): 148–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bluhm, Robyn, Jaap Jacobson, Anne, and Lene Maibom, Heidi, eds. 2012. Neurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminism and cognitive science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Catmur, Caroline, Walsh, Vincent, and Heyes, Cecelia. 2007. Sensorimotor learning configures the mirror neuron system. Current Biology 17 (17): 1527–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheah, Pheng. 1996. Mattering. Diacritics 26 (1): 108–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choudhury, Suparna, and Slaby, Jan. 2012. Introduction: Critical neuroscience—between lifeworld and laboratory. In Critical neuroscience: A handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience, ed. Choudhury, Suparna and Slaby, Jan. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clark, Andy. 1997. Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Andy. 2008a. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Andy. 2008b. Pressing the flesh: A tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1): 37–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colebrook, Claire. 2008. On not becoming man: The materialist politics of unactualized potential. In Material feminisms, ed. Alaimo, Stacey and Hekman, Susan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Connolly, William. 2010. A world of becoming. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connolly, William. 2011. The complexity of intention. Critical Inquiry 37 (4): 791–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coole, Diana, and Frost, Samantha. 2010. Introducing the new materialisms. In New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics, ed. Frost, Samantha and Coole, Diana. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coplan, Amy. 2010. Feeling without thinking: Lessons from the ancients on emotion and virtue‐acquisition. Metaphilosophy 41 (1–2): 132–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Damasio, Antonio, and Meyer, Kasper. 2008. Behind the looking glass. Nature 454: 167–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fecteau, Shirley, Maria Tormos, Jose, Gangitano, Massimo, Theoret, Hugo, and Pascual‐Leone, Alvaro. 2010. Modulation of cortical motor outputs by the symbolic meaning of visual stimuli. European Journal of Neuroscience 32 (1): 172–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fogassi, Leonardo, Francesco Ferrari, Pier, Gesierich, Benno, Rozzi, Stefano, Chersi, Fabian, and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 2005. Parietal lobe: From action organization to intention understanding. Science 308: 662–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallagher, Shaun. 2007. Simulation trouble. Social Neuroscience 2 (3–4): 353–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallagher, Shaun. 2008. Inference or interaction: Social cognition without precursors. Philosophical Explorations 11 (3): 163–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio. 2001. The “shared manifold” hypothesis: From mirror neurons to empathy. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5–7): 33–50.Google Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio. 2003. The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology 36 (4): 171–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio. 2009. Mirror neurons, embodied simulation, and the neural basis of social identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 19 (5): 519–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio, Fadiga, Luciano, Fogassi, Leonardo, and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 1996. Action recognition in the premotor cortex. Brain 119 (part 2): 593–609.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio, and Goldman, Alvin. 1998. Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind‐reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2 (12): 493–501.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio, Keysers, Christian, and Rizzolatti, Giacomo. 2004. A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (9): 396–403.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio, and Lakoff, George. 2005. The brain's concepts: The role of the sensory‐motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22 (3–4): 455–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gallese, Vittorio, Rochat, Magali, Sinigaglia, Corrado, and Cossu, Giuseppe. 2009. Motor cognition and its role in the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding. Developmental Psychology 45 (1): 103–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garbarini, Francesca, and Adenzato, Mauro. 2004. At the root of embodied cognition: Cognitive science meets neurophysiology. Brain and Cognition 56: 100–06.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garland‐Thompson, Rosemarie. 2011. Misfits: A feminist materialist disability concept. Hypatia 26 (3): 591–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 1992. In defense of the simulation theory. Mind & Language 7: 104–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 2009a. Mirroring, simulating and mindreading. Mind & Language 24 (2): 235–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, Alvin. 2009b. Replies to Perner and Brandl, Saxe, Vignemont, and Carruthers. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 144 (3): 477–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Robert M. 2009. Folk psychology as mental simulation. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), ed. Zalta, Edward N.http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/folkpsych-simulation/ (accessed May 6, 2013).Google Scholar
Grafton, Scott T. 2009. Embodied cognition and the simulation of action to understand others. The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009: Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1156: 97–117.Google ScholarPubMed
Green, Adam. 2009. Mirror neurons, simulation, and Goldman. History & Philosophy of Psychology 11 (2): 1–11.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Antonia F., Brindley, R. M., and Frith, U. 2007. Imitation and action understanding in autistic spectrum disorders: How valid is the hypothesis of a deficit in the mirror neuron system? Neuropsychologia 45: 1859–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hein, Grit, and Singer, Tania. 2008. I feel how you feel but not always: The empathic brain and its modulation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18: 153–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hemmings, Clare. 2005. Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural Studies 19 (5): 548–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyes, Cecelia. 2010a. Mesmerizing mirror neurons. NeuroImage 51: 789–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyes, Cecelia. 2010b. Where do mirror neurons come from? Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 34: 575–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickok, Gregory. 2009. Eight problems for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21 (7): 1229–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iacoboni, Marco. 2009. Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons. Annual Review of Psychology 60: 653–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iacoboni, Marco, Molnar‐Szakacs, I., Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta, J. C., and Rizzolatti, G. 2005. Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system. PLoS Biology 3 (3): 79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jacob, Pierre. 2009. A philosopher's reflections on the discovery of mirror neurons. Topics in Cognitive Science 1: 570–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jacobson, Anne Jaap. 2012. Seeing as social phenomenon: Feminist theory and the cognitive sciences. In Neurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminism and cognitive science, ed. Bluhm, Robyn, Jaap Jacobson, Anne and Lene Maibom, Heidi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Jordan‐Young, Rebecca. 2011. Brain storm: Flaws in the science of sex difference. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keen, Suzanne. 2006. A theory of narrative empathy. Narrative 14 (3): 207–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keysers, Christian, Kaas, Jon H., and Gazzola, Valeria. 2010. Somatosensation in social perception. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11: 417–28.Google ScholarPubMed
Kirby, Vicki. 2011. Quantum anthropologies: Life at large. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krause, Rainer. 2010. An update on primary identification, introjection, and empathy. International Forum of Psychoanalysis 19: 138–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Ledoux, Joesph. 1996. The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Leighton, Jane, Bird, Geoffrey, Charman, Tony, and Heyes, Cecelia. 2008. Weak imitative performance is not due to a functional “mirroring” deficit in adults with autism spectrum disorders. Neuropsychologia 46: 1041–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leys, Ruth. 2011. The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longino, Helen. 2010. Feminist epistemology at Hypatia's 25th anniversary. Hypatia 25 (4): 733–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Emily. 2010. Self‐making and the brain. Subjectivity 3 (4): 366–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meynell, Letitia. 2012. The politics of pictured reality: Locating the object from nowhere in fMRI. In Neurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminism and cognitive science, ed. Bluhm, Robyn, Jaap Jacobson, Anne and Lene Maibom, Heidi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Mukamel, Roy, Ekstrom, Arne, Kaplan, Jonas, Iacoboni, Marco, and Fried, Itzhak. 2010. Single‐neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions. Current Biology 20 (8): 750–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, Katherine, Henseler, Sarah, and Plesa, Daniela. 2000. Entering a community of minds: “Theory of mind” from a feminist standpoint. In Toward a feminist developmental psychology, ed. Miller, Patricia H. and Kofsky Scholnick, Ellin. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Noe, Alva. 2004. Action in perception. Boston: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Oyama, Susan. 2000. Evolution's eye: A systems view of the biology–culture divide. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papoulias, Constantina, and Callard, Felicity. 2010. Biology's gift: Interrogating the turn to affect. Body & Society 16 (1): 29–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pineda, Jaime A. 2008. Sensorimotor cortex as a critical component of an “extended” mirror neuron system: Does it solve the development, correspondence, and control problems in mirroring? Behavioral and Brain Functions 4 (47): n.p.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Preston, Stephanie, Bechara, Antoine, Damasio, Hanna, Grabowski, Thomas, Brent Stansfield, R., Mehta, Sonya, and Damasio, Antonio. 2007. The neural substrates of cognitive empathy. Social Neuroscience 2 (3–4): 254–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prinz, Jesse. 2004. Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ravven, Heidi Morrison. 2003. Spinoza's anticipation of affective neuroscience. Consciousness and Emotion 4 (2): 256–90.Google Scholar
Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Sinigaglia, Corrado. 2008. (Letters) Further reflections on how we interpret the actions of others. Nature 455 (2): 589.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Deboleena. 2008. Asking different questions: Feminist practices for the natural sciences. Hypatia 23 (4): 134–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scully, Jackie Leach. 2008. Disability bioethics: Moral bodies, moral differences. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Semin, Gun, and Smith, Eliot. 2002. Interfaces of social psychology with situated and embodied cognition. Cognitive Systems Research 3: 385–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Tania, Seymour, Ben, O'Doherty, John, Kaube, Holger, Dolan, Raymond J., and Frith, Chris D. 2004. Empathy for pain involves the affective but not the sensory components of pain. Science 303 (5661): 1157–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Tania, Seymour, Ben, O'Doherty, John P., Klaas, Stephan, Dolan, Raymond J., and Frith, Chris D. 2006. Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature 439: 466–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Tania, and Lamm, Claus. 2009. The social neuroscience of empathy. Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009: Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1156: 81–96.Google ScholarPubMed
Smith, Eliot, and Semin, Gun. 2007. Situated social cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (3): 132–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solomon, Miriam. 2007. Situated cognition. In Philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, ed. Thagard, Paul. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Stueber, Karsten. 2006. Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology, and the human sciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stueber, Karsten. 2012. Varieties of empathy, neuroscience and the narrativist challenge to the contemporary theory of mind debate. Emotion Review 4 (1): 55–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thelan, Esther, and Smith, Linda. 2004. Dynamic systems theories. In Handbook of child psychology, vol. 1, 6th ed., ed. Lerner, Richard M.New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Vidal, Fernando, and Ortega, Francisco. 2011. Approaching the neurocultural spectrum: An introduction. In Neurocultures: Glimpses into an expanding universe, ed. Ortega, Francisco and Vidal, Fernando. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Wahman, Jessica. 2008. Sharing meanings about embodied meaning. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22 (3): 170–82.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Clay C. 2009. Mirror neurons, the self, and culture: An essay in neo‐psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 37 (4): 701–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, J. H., Whiten, A., Suddendorf, T., and Perrett, D. I. 2001. Imitation, mirror neurons and autism. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 25 (4): 287–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, J. H., Waiter, G. D., Gilchrist, A., Perrett, D. I., Murray, A. D., and Whiten, A. 2006. Neural mechanisms of imitation and “mirror neuron” functioning in autistic spectrum disorder. Neuropsychologia 44: 610–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth. 1998. Neural geographies: Feminism and the microarchitecture of cognition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth. 2004. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the neurological body. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth. 2010. Underbelly. Differences 21 (1): 194–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaki, Jamil, and Ochsner, Kevin. 2009. The need for a cognitive neuroscience of naturalistic social cognition. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1167: 16–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed