The «shared manifold» hypothesis: from mirror neurons to social cognition.
Vittorio Gallese
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze
Università di Parma
E-mail: vittorio.gallese@unipr.it
Agency plays an important role in establishing meaningful bonds among
individuals, by enabling them with a direct, automatic, non-predicative, and noninferential simulation mechanism, by means of which the observer can recognize
and implicitly understand the behavior of others. It has been proposed that the
neural matching mechanism constituted by mirror neurons - or by equivalent
neurons in humans - is crucial to action understanding. Action, however, is
certainly not the only medium through which we can «empathize» with others.
There is indeed a multiplicity of states that we share with our conspecifics, like
emotions and sensations.
I will introduce a conceptual tool able to capture the richness of the
experiences we share with others: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. I will
posit that it is through this shared manifold that we can recognize other human
beings as similar to us. It is just because of this shared manifold that
intersubjective communication and mind reading become possible.
New empirical evidence suggests that the same neural structures that are
involved in processing felt sensations and emotions are active also when the same
sensations and emotions are to be detected in others. It appears therefore that a
whole range of different «mirror matching mechanisms» may be present in our
brain. This subpersonal architecture of simulation that we originally discovered
and described in the domain of actions could well be a basic organizational feature
of our brain.
References
1. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L. and Rizzolatti, G. Action recognition in
the premotor cortex. Brain 119: 593-609, 1996.
2. Gallese, V. and Goldman, A. Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of
mind-reading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12:493-501, 1998.
3. Gallese, V. (2000) The acting subject: towards the neural basis of social
cognition. In: Neural Correlates of Consciousness - Empirical and Conceptual
Questions. T. Metzinger (ed.), MIT Press, pp. 325-334.
4. Gallese, V. (2001) The "Shared Manifold" Hypothesis: from mirror neurons
to empathy. Journal of Consciousness Studies: 8, N° 5-7; 33-50.
5. Gallese, V. (2003) The manifold nature of interpersonal relations: The quest
for a common mechanism. Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London B., 358: 517-528.
6. Gallese, V. (2003) The roots of empathy: the shared manifold hypothesis
and the neural basis of intersubjectivity. Psychopathology, in press.