The Smoke around Mirror Neurons: Goals as Sociocultural and Emotional Organizers of Perception and Action in Learning.

From the pragmatists to the neo-Piagetians, de- velopment has been understood to involve cycles of perception and action — the internalization of interactions with the world and the construction of skills for acting in the world. From a neurobiological standpoint, new evidence suggests that neural activities related to action and perception converge in the brain in high-level sensory association and motor planning ar- eas that have been described as " mirror neuron areas. " However, the term " mirroring " can be misleading for educators and neu- roscientists alike, as it suggests a direct and largely passive in- ternal refl ection of another person ' s goals and actions into one ' s own brain. Building from my colleagues ' thoughts on my earlier study of two hemispherectomized boys ( M. H. Immordino-Yang, 2007 , pp. 66 - 83; see commentaries, this is- sue), in this response to commentaries, I suggest a model in which the internalization of another ' s goals and actions hap- pens in a culturally modulated dynamic interaction between minds and is grounded in the neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses of the learner. In this approach, learners capi- talize on their strengths and preferences to internalize and construct representations of problem domains, a process that is organized by the " smoke around the mirrors " — sociocultural and emotional factors. Across many perspectives from the pragmatists to the neo- Piagetians, development has been analyzed in terms of cycles of perception and action — a combination of the internaliza- tion of interactions with the world and the construction of skills for acting in the world. In " A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains " ( Immordino-Yang, 2007 ), I showed that Nico (miss- ing his right cerebral hemisphere) and Brooke (missing his left) had compensated for basic neuropsychological skills to previously unexpected degrees and argued that the ways they had compensated revealed general principles about the active role of the learner and the organizing role of emotion and social interaction in development. 1 In this paper, building from my original argument and from those of my colleagues in their commentaries ( Ablin, 2008; Christoff, 2008; Snow, 2008; van Geert & Steenbeek, 2008 ), I argue that the juxtapo- sition of Nico ' s and Brooke ' s performances provides a power- ful wedge into the problem of individual differences through providing an extraordinary example of the relationship between perception and action in learning. This example leads to a tentative scheme that brings together cognitive developmental theory with recent neurobiological evidence on the functioning of mirror neuron systems in the brain, to produce pedagogically relevant insights into the nature of contextualized skill development and a deeper analysis of the functioning of mirror neuron systems in learning. In the sections that follow, I extend the argument from my original paper to claim that Nico ' s and Brooke ' s patterns of skills for prosody (the affective intonation or melody of speech) can be interpreted as complementary examples of the relationship between perception and action in development. I argue that taking such an interpretation leads to a more 1