68 CHAPTER THREE
language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy” (Blakeslee 2006). V. S.
Ramachandran calls them the “neurons that shaped civilization” (2011, 117).
Marco Iacoboni (2008, 2009) suggests they may be the biological founda-
tion for morality. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (2011) claim “it would be
difficult to overstate the importance of mirror neurons, not only for the
study of what we call low- level empathy but for our understanding of men-
tal life more generally” (xxx). One can find references to them in not only
philosophy and psychology but also theater and performance studies, aes-
thetics, literary criticism, art history, musicology, cultural studies, sociol-
ogy, and more. In social theories of the body and affect, mirror neurons are
used as evidence for the importance of feeling, embodiment, and intercor-
poreality over disembodied thinking, cultural inscription, and discourse.
Critics protest the expansiveness of such claims, and also raise method-
ological disagreements, disputes over their function, and even skepticism
over whether they exist in humans at all (for discussion see Caramazza et al.
2014; Hickok 2014, Rose and Abi-^ Rached 2013).^1 Research that is continuing
apace will be used to adjudicate these debates, for or against the existence
of mirror neurons systems in humans, and for or against their relevance for
understanding empathy, theory of mind, and other precognitive and cogni-
tive functions. How mirror neurons will look in a decade’s time is difficult
to gauge, but I am interested in them as phenomena that demonstrate how
the body and embodiment can be called into play in the biosocial brain.
Mirror neurons give the biological, fleshly body an important set of
roles. The basic idea of the dominant model of “mirroring” is that the brain
generates a grasp of the other, not with language and thinking but via simu-
lated action and feeling. Intersubjective or social understanding becomes a
bodily, prelinguistic activity instead of an intellectual or mentalist one. And
perception and action are coupled, so that perceiving and understanding
the other is tied to one’s own capacity for moving and acting in the world.
While the use of neuroscience to “authorize” such ideas is controversial
(Blackman 2012; Hemmings 2005; Leys 2011, 2012), the notion of felt, in-
terpersonally attuned, active perception and intercorporeality has a wide
appeal in social thought. Scholars have argued that mirroring resonates
with phenomenological, feminist, and neo-^ materialist perspectives on the
significance of felt, embodied experience over abstract and disembodied
cognition (Colebrook 2008; Krause 2010; Ravven 2003). Mirror neurons