NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 147points to, but does not explore, the relationship between mind- blindness and
race. Later I probe mirror neuron theories to question why, and to whom, wallets
held by black men could “invariably” look like guns in the South Bronx. I argue
for investigating how preconscious as well as propositional cognitive processes
can be influenced by racism.
3 Contagious shooting is a highly contested phenomenon; there seems to be little
empirical evidence to suggest that police officers are more likely to fire, and fire
more bullets, because other police officers have done so. But police departments
treat contagious shooting as a reality because police officers themselves have de-
scribed such events, and they have also been observed in police training sessions
(Rostker et al. 2008).
4 Recommendations to combat contagious shooting include that police officers
not only memorize policies about deadly force but also be asked to practice their
decision- making skills regarding the use of deadly force in situations as close to
real life as possible. They also are encouraged to undergo target identification
training, in which “we must make shooting a no- shoot target unacceptable be-
havior” (Joyner 2008, n.p.). Since the empirical existence of contagious shooting
is so contested, it is difficult to say whether any of these recommendations make
a difference.
5 Reportedly, the other officers did not merely hear or see Officer Carroll firing
his gun; they also heard him yell “Gun!” to indicate that the suspect was armed;
therefore they had explicit information to contend with as well (Fritsch 2000).
6 There is, as Maria Brincker puts it, an “intentional involvement with the world
already in our perceptional pre- action relation to it — and it is this involvement
along with background considerations that inform and shape our actual action
choice (2011, 291).
7 In addition, there are also hypotheses about the relevance of mirroring for more
complex aspects of cognition, such as aesthetic appreciation and the generation
of concepts. The cognitive significance of mirroring is achieved both through the
valuation of mirroring itself as informational (i.e., information without symbolic
representation) and by treating it as precognitive scaffolding for symbolic activ-
ities. One example is the neural theory of concepts, which combines embodied
simulation theory with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (2005) embodied mind
theory of metaphor. They argue that the brain generates concepts, which they
see as the building blocks of human reason, by processing information from the
sensorimotor system, including from mirror neurons. Rather than the mental,
top- down manipulation of symbols, reason is built from the bottom up through
the combination of various neural (rather than symbolic) representations —
including the neural representations of others’ actions derived from mirror
neurons. Gallese and art historian David Freedberg (2007) have also advanced a
mirror theory of aesthetic experience. In their view embodied simulation allows
us to experience images in terms of their emotional and intentional content.
While the authors do not discount the influence of cultural context in our aes-