Recently, the topic is mirror neurons always sometimes run into. Reason enough to be so thorough to be employed term. After a short search I have age then 'The empathic brain' by Nadia Zaboura and 'empathy and mirror neurons' by Giacomo Rizzolatti , one of the discoverers of mirror neurons ordered.
Now to the actual book. In nine chapters explains Nadia Zaboura how to create the mirror neurons in their view, the basis for inter-subjective understanding, empathy and human communication. After a short introduction, 'Humanity: A mental or biological phenomenon', which at the very beginning of the book on the dichotomy points to be falling into what the current research community seems to (more on that later), followed by three historically motivated chapter, which of Descartes on Husserl to Merleau-Ponty rich and abundant giving insight into the historical development of the mind-body debate.
The fifth chapter gives then more evidence-oriented way back the main findings of the mirror neuron research and thus serves as a basis for last four chapters that discuss these findings from a social science focus, and probably represent the real concern of the book.
addition to the many facts and suggestions for new ideas that has given me this book, I am above all surprised by the above-mentioned dichotomy of the publications that we in this research area, and even find in this book . While reading I often feel that they author themselves on an emotional level very strongly connected to the humanistic ideas and feel from this point of view the ideas of other neuroscientists like Singer and Roth (which they seem to frequently refer to, without calling them, however) as dangerous and undermining feels. An attitude that reminds me as a physicist at times to the wave-particle dualism debate, which only in the quantum mechanics of the 20th Century took their resolution.
Admittedly, the neurosciences to me a relatively new field, but after all that I have read seems to me that Singer, probably the most popular representative, neurological determinism 'is mainly in his reflections on, stimulus-response' approaches focused (as they are experimentally directly measurable), while the representatives of the 'free will' primarily on longer time frameworks, such as ontogeny, or even argue the phylogeny. From this perspective, forcing his way for the physicists back to the analogy to quantum mechanics, because Newton's laws, which our everyday world of experience describes well the time is relatively long scales, and what we are because of their history, as intuitively plausible consider (as a parallel to humanism ), it appears as a special case for macroscopic systems in quantum mechanics, without competing with them.
This seems to me in some ways also be the case in neuroscience, for each of the two orientations appears in its own sphere of producing surprisingly good, and above all verifiable and reproducible interpretations and predictions. It is only the phase transition between these two spheres of action, which is neither the one nor the other is theory. Analogous to the history of quantum mechanics, we could conclude that the evidence not just of this phase transition can be caused by the expansion of a phase (or even an ideology) to the detriment of others. Rather it is about the abstraction of the current state of the distillate, both ideologies arise as special cases. In other words, it is about the overall epistemological authority.
All in all, to once again come to the book back, but it was interesting to indulge in his thoughts and perspectives and to include it, even though in places it was in terms of usage and complexity quite onerous.
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