84 CHAPTER THREE
outcome of how our embodied simulation of others develops and takes
shape” (Gallese 2009, 531; see also Gallese 2014).
Nonetheless, Cecilia Heyes (2010b) complains that in most accounts of
mirror neurons, “experience plays a relatively minor role in their devel-
opment” (576). What is needed, she argues, is an alternative account to
evolutionary adaptation to explain the existence of mirror neurons. Her
“associative hypothesis” is that mirror neurons are created in individual
brains through the experience of perceiving and performing comparable
actions. “The individual starts life with visual neurons that respond to ac-
tion observation, and a distinct set of motor neurons that discharge during
action execution. Some of the motor neurons become mirror neurons if the
individual gets experience in which observation and execution of similar
actions are correlated — when they occur relatively close together in time,
and one predicts the other” (2010a, 789 – 90). Experience, then, does not
simply develop mirroring capacities, but produces mirror neurons in the
first place (2010a). She points to fmri studies of pianists, who show more
mirror neuron activity than nonmusicians when watching a piano perfor-
mance, and of dancers, who appear to have greater responses to watch-
ing other dancers. Her experiments with Caroline Catmur and Vincent
Walsch (2007) enact mirroring through training body- subjects to move
their hands and feet in particular patterns and retraining them to reverse
mirror patterns. This flexibility suggests that mirror neurons are not pre-
coded and mechanistically triggered but can learn and unlearn or recode
with new experiences.^8 The associative hypothesis, as Cook et al. argue,
necessarily “shifts the balance of explanatory power from mns themselves
to the environments in which they develop” (2014, 191 – 92).
Lessening the grip of evolution and making room for experience to
shape mirroring is important, but it does not go far enough to render the
mirror neuron account of intersubjectivity adequately social. Also required
is a sense of how different patterns of experience shape different bodies’
relations to other bodies and objects in the world. The embodied simu-
lation model assumes that “human beings are basically similar to one an-
other, with a limited range of variations” (Keen 2006, 212). Gallese (2001)
argues that humans experience a shared manifold composed of a shared
functional relation to the world, a shared phenomenological experience
of it, and matching neural circuits in the form of mirror neurons. This