Philosophy 102 - Reflections on Mirror Neurons

Philosophy 102-026

Unit 2

“Reflections on Mirror Neurons”

        I believe the main point of Temma Ehrenfield’s article “Reflection on Mirror Neutrons” is to prove that mirror neurons exist. Throughout the article, she uses experiments based on monkeys and humans to prove mirror neurons are real. I also believe that Ehrenfield thinks the existence of the mirroring neutrons is a “miracle”. I believe this because throughout the article Ehrenfield shown the mirror neutrons in a good light. In the article Ehrenfield stated, “Stimulating the mirror system helps stroke victims…two studies with stroke victims have found that stimulating the mirror system helped them recover particular motor actions”. This proves that Ehrenfield is showing the mirror neutrons in a good light because she is showing that they have ability to help people recover motor skills after the have a stroke. As a matter of fact, Ehrenfield has shown all the good mirror neutrons can do in the last four paragraphs of the article.

        Some strong features of Ehrenfield’s article would be that she did give some good facts about mirror neurons. She started the article by telling what mirror neurons are, and did not explain it in a scientific way. She explained it in very simple terms and brought it down for everyday people do understand it. She also had some strong back up for how she feels about the mirror neurons. Some of the weak features in Ehrenfield’s article would be that she used macaque monkeys a lot in the article. I am going to assume that a lot of the researches did not use humans for the research, and used the macaque monkeys, but I feel that if she was going to talk about mirror neurons she should have used more examples with humans. For instance, she could have said, “the mirror neurons in humans can help infants learn by watching the parents preform a task, and then doing the task themselves”. This is just one example that could have made me feel like it more important for humans. Reading the article, I was thinking that this is for monkeys and other animals but towards the end, she used examples of how humans used mirror neurons.

        I have learned that the article is a biological approach to mirror neurons. This is a biological approach because it’s dealing with part of the body (the mirror neurons). I also found that the research the scientist did was probably a blind study. This means that the subjects the researchers were studying had no idea what was going on. This is obvious because the monkeys that was used for the study of mirror neurons were newborns. Any newborn species would not know what was happening to them because they are new to the environment, and they would think the lab is how to world is and what the world looks like.

        I would apply this information by having college professors learn about the mirror neurons. I would do this because a lot of college professors do not know that most students learn by watching something happen, and then have the student preform that they just did. Studies shown that people who seen something happen are most likely to do it themselves. For instance, my calculus teacher last semester would show and talk about a lot of the concepts of what we would be learning. When it was time for an example he would tell the class to solve it, but never showed us how to solve it. If my professor knew about mirror neurons and that they activate when a person sees an action being preform and they are more likely to understand and perform the action themselves. In my opinion, I believe that the discovery and understanding of how mirror neurons and activated can be used to show kids how to perform a task. For instance, when parents or teacher teach a child how to read, they would sound out the words slowly. This allows the mirror neurons to activate and the child would be more likely to start sounding out the word as well.