PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPSsmaller their social circles became, resulting in increased loneliness and
depression. Kraut’s team called this the Internet paradox, because the
participants were supposedly using the Internet for communication, but
were becoming more isolated. In 2001, however, the researchers returned
to their original sample after another year had passed and found that
the negative effects of Internet use had largely disappeared. What’s more,
a new investigation with a fresh sample appeared to suggest that time
spent using the Internet was largely associated with positive outcomes,
especially for extroverts.
This latter observation about the differential effect of the Internet on
extroverts and introverts would prove to be prescient. Many subsequent
studies suggest that social networking is beneficial for the majority of
people who have healthy, happy social lives offline, but can be unhelpful
they allowed Mukamel’s team to look for neurons with mirror-like
characteristics, some of which were found in the front of the brain and
in the temporal lobe.
This idea that the brain has its own simulation system in the form of
suites of mirror neurons has led to an explosion of claims, some more
grandiose than others. Writing in 2000, the neuroscientist Vilayanur
Ramachandran even went so far as to say that “mirror neurons will
do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a
unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that
have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments”.
Indeed, some experts believe that conditions such as autism, charac-
terized as it is by social problems, could be explained by abnormalities
in the mirror-neuron system.
Other psychologists and neuroscientists are more sceptical. In 2009,
Alfonso Caramazza and colleagues at the Universities of Harvard and
Trento performed a brain-imaging experiment which they claimed
disproved the existence of mirror neurons in humans. They concluded
that executing a hand movement and then witnessing another person
perform the same movement didn’t lead to adaptation (reduced
activity with repeated use) in relevant neurons, as ought to have
happened if human mirror-neurons really existed. Caramazza felt that
even the monkey research was open to interpretation. For him, just
because certain cells are active both when performing and observing
an act doesn’t mean those cells play a causal role in understanding
another person’s (or monkey’s) actions, as had been claimed. His view
was that “so-called mirror neurons may be responding as a conse-
quence of, and not as the basis for, action categorization.”