Professor Chris Frith
speaker
21 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Professor Chris Frith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Mirror neurons were originally discovered in monkeys.
They respond when the monkey performs a particular action, like picking up a peanut.
And then what they discovered, that a certain percentage of these neurons also respond when the monkey sees the experimenter making the same movement.
There will be a neuron which responds when the monkey picks up a peanut and also responds when the experimenter picks up a peanut in front of the monkey, but wouldn't respond to other kinds of movements.
My take on this, which is purely mine, is that one of the things that mirror neurons do is they make us more pro-social.
That is to say, if someone imitates you covertly,
you think they're a nice person, and therefore it seems to me it puts you in a state of mind where you're not going to be looking for deception.
Yes, the brain sort of creates for us, if you like, a delusion that we're independent entities.
To me, at least, what the imaging has shown is how much more embedded we are in the social world than we realise.
Professional violinists, the bit of the brain that controls the fingers of the left hand is actually larger.
It wasn't just new pathways, the relevant bit of the cortex actually got bigger.
It's one of the ways that people have recently demonstrated how plastic the brain is.
What do you mean by plastic?
I mean it can actually change.
When I was a student, we were taught after the age of 16, that's it, and your neurons start to die off and you never have any changes.
Since then, over the last 10 years or so, it's been found in animals that actually new neurons develop.
And in humans, that you can detect structural changes in the brain simply as a result of learning a new skill.
I mean, it has implications for all stages of life, and particularly for learning.
The example of the chap who became paedophilic in relation to this frontal lobe tumour fits very well with what we know about the frontal cortex, which in a sense is the most advanced bit of the brain, it's the bit that evolved most recently, and it in essence controls the rest of the brain that's behind it.
It would certainly address the issue of diminished responsibility.
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