During a recent lesson in class the prof. Ugo Morelli, director of Mart> Mac Master of Art and Culture Management, held a dialogue about the importance of the discovery of mirror neurons for theories of knowledge with the prof. Vittorio Welsh, Professor in Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Parma, which has contributed to the discovery. Here is a passage from the interview:
Morelli : As a metaphor that says I have to Feyerabend, the history of science is a chain of funeral, in the sense that research is used to send to the cemetery the previous theories. Again there was an important comparison about mirror neurons because some of the researchers working in the field of neuroscience has, by simplifying a lot, argued that the presence of these units mirror neurons, there would be in macaques, the old world monkeys, but not in humans. I have summed up a lot but the question is basically this. We recently had evolution of research in this field, and then verification, now falsified, the presence of mirror neurons in humans . We elaborate on this point?
Welsh: Sure! It 'was just recently published later this month, the result of a research group headed by Marco Iacoboni, an Italian who has worked for years at UCLA, Los Angeles, where a group of epileptic patients in referred for diagnostic purposes are implanted electrodes that allow you to record the activity of individual neurons has been demonstrated the presence of mirror neurons. Iacoboni and his collaborators have published the final document the existence of neurons in the brain of our species , neurons that have properties similar to those of mirror neurons that we had described the macaque .
This result is important, in my opinion, not so much because it gives the long-awaited trial proved the existence of mirror neurons in our species, but also because reveals constraints on developing knowledge . I say this because for those who wanted to see there was already ample indirect evidence that in some so did think it was highly unlikely that these findings could be explained in another way, I add that has been shown to contain a similar mechanism of reflection not only in macaques but also in birds, so it would be surprising result as a mechanism that offers adaptive advantages to its owner and that has been addressed several times during evolution, for some mysterious reason, had disappeared in our brains.
I believe that these data are important because they extend our level of knowledge of mechanism of reflection of the human brain . First, because we find this mechanism in areas of our brain, then why these neurons were found in pre-motor areas in the medial surface of the frontal lobe which have a key role in regulating our motor intentionality. Moreover some of these neurons, without going into details too technical, functional features that suggest they may play an important role in automatically to mimic all the actions that we see others do. Permit, therefore, through the activation of having a simulation the actions of others, which we believe is a key ingredient to understanding automatic imitation and not a parrot.
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