The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [191]
29. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985).
30. Sacks describes this and other hallucinations and their causal explanations in his TED talk available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html.
31. Ibid.
32. Helen L. Gallagher and Christopher D. Frith, “Functional Imaging of ‘Theory of Mind,’” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 2 (February 2003): 77–83.
33. Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi, “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3, no. 2 (March 1996): 131–41.
34. L. Fogassi, P. F. Ferrari, B. Gesierich, S. Rozzi, F. Chersi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308, no. 5722 (April 29, 2005): 662–67; V. Gallese, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119, no. 2 (1996): 593–609.
35. M. Iacoboni, R. P. Woods, M. Brass, H. Bekkering, J. C. Mazziotta, and G. Rizzolatti, “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation,” Science 286, no. 5449 (December 24, 1999): 2526–28; G. Rizzolatti and L. Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (July 2004): 169–92.
It should be noted that the activity imaged in such fMRI studies is not the same as the recording of individual neurons in monkeys’ brains. As University of Groningen psychologist Christian Keysers explained, “When we record signals from neurons in monkeys, we can really know that a single neuron is involved in both doing the task and seeing someone else do the task. With imaging, you know that within a little box about three millimeters by three millimeters by three millimeters, you have activation from both doing and seeing. But this little box contains millions of neurons, so you cannot know for sure that they are the same neurons—perhaps they’re just neighbors.” See Lea Winerman, “The Mind’s Mirror,” Monitor on Psychology 36, no. 9 (October 2005): 48, http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.html.
36. Vittorio Gallese and Alvin Goldman, “Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2, no. 12 (December 1998): 493–501.
37. L. Fogassi, P. F. Ferrari, B. Gesierich, S. Rozzi, F. Chersi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308 (2005): 662–67.
38. Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth, and Marks S. Cohen, “Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty,” Annals of Neurology 63 (2007): 141–47.
39. Sam Harris, Jonas Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark Cohen, “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief,” PloS One 4, no. 10 (2009): e0007272.
40. Personal correspondence, December 23, 2009.
41. I should note that there are good reasons to be cautious when extrapolating from brain scanning research studies such as those discussed in this book, most notably those employing fMRI scans, for a number of reasons, including five that I outlined in an article for Scientific American Mind (Michael Shermer, “Why You Should Be Skeptical of Brain Scans,” Scientific American Mind, October/November 2008, 67–71): (1) The MRI tube is a very unnatural environment; it is claustrophobic, with the subjects’ heads locked into place to prevent movement; (2) scans measure blood flow change, not neural activity, and there is a delayed reaction from neuronal firing to blood rushing to the area; (3) the brain scan colors are artificial and exaggerate the differences between activity in one area and surrounding areas, which are often very subtle; (4) brain scan findings are statistical compilations across many subjects, not any one person’s brain; and (5) brain areas activate for various reasons. The neuroscientist Russell Poldrack told me: “It is tempting to look at one of those spots and say ‘This is where