I FEEL YOUR PAIN 89neurons on their own “mirror” reality to how they participate with other
agents and capacities in generating intersubjective events.
Neuroscientific practices bring forth particular enactments of mirror-
ing; these are often basic, autonomous, and isolated by design. As Zaki
and Oschner (2009) point out, experimental studies often provoke what
they deem to be mirroring in response to very simple stimuli (visual or
auditory) within narrowly sketched scenarios. This is the case even though
the sorts of social events they ultimately seek to explain are multimodal,
involving a whole range of stimuli at once. Social scenes also have temporal
complexities that are not typically reflected in lab experiments. Even if iso-
lated motor actions have predictable schema, social scenes involve multiple
actions that unfold dynamically over more than one time frame. Further,
the perception of another’s motor actions takes place in the presence of
prior information (Zaki and Oschner 2009) and in the wake of previous
experience.^9 Damasio and Meyer (2008), for example, postulate that the
activation of sensorimotor neurons does not occur on its own but in com-
bination with memory systems. In their view action understanding “is not
created just by mirror- neuron sites, but also by the nearly simultaneous
triggering of widespread memories throughout the brain” (168). The same
might be true for empathic understanding at the level of “basic” empathy
(Stueber 2012). The outcome of mirror neuron activation would thus be
affected by the somatic history of the body-^ subject, the traces of experience
felt in the present. To extend Prinz’s (2004) argument, if mirroring plus
memory amounts to something like an embodied appraisal of the other, it
would be hard to say that such an appraisal is entirely devoid of symbolic
meaning.
Mirror neurons often are treated atomistically to prove their indepen-
dence from symbolic representation. When they are explored as agents
that co- act alongside other processes, systems, and contexts, however, their
full autonomy is called into question. To take one example, a series of ex-
periments by Shirley Fecteau et al. (2010) aimed to measure the effects of
symbolic priming on mirror- related motor activity — in other words, how
context can confer meaning to a stimulus, and how this meaning affects
the neural response in the premotor cortex. The researchers used trans-
cranial magnetic stimulation (tms), a technology that generates a pulse of