So glad this one came out! "After Midnight at the Zap Stop" by @ouranosaurus is an awesome story - full of late-night grease, and the luckless & the worthy. But also because it's a #neuroscience teaching opportunity. Might even be a #NeuroThursday!
One offhand line explains a technology as "stimulating a particular set of mirror neurons." Which works as a story element just fine. It sounds plausible and authoritative! But as a neuroscientist, I have strong opinions about #mirrorneurons. I don't think they're real.
To be clear, mine is a controversial opinion. Many neuroscientists would disagree. But it's a hill I'm willing to fight on, especially given how often "mirror neurons" crop up in popular science.
Supposedly, mirror neurons are brains cells that get involved both in action and action-observation. Whether you eat an apple, or watch someone else eat an apple. Linking self to other, the foundation of empathy and learning.
If you aren't familiar with mirror neurons, their Wikipedia page is pleasingly skeptical. But my issue goes deeper: I think mirror neurons are a nonsense concept. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_ne…
"Mirroring" - linking other to self - is a critical human function. It underpins learning, socialization, empathy. But critical human behaviors aren't performed by single cells.
To ask "which neuron is the mirror neuron?" is like asking "which wire drives the car?" It's a bad question. The car operates because many wires (and many other things) are acting in concert.
You can find a single neuron that appears to act in a mirror-like way. But that's mistaking the output for the whole system. It's like saying the car works because of its wheels.
And on top of that conceptual issue, there's a problem in the data too: mirror neurons arise as a *result* of learning. Not so likely then to be the *cause* of learning.
It's fair to say that your brain has a "mirror neuron system." But that's a "mirror (neuron system)," not a "(mirror neuron) system." To reuse the metaphor from before: you definitely have a car!
But to assign carhood to individual components, to assign mirror function to individual neurons? Not so much.
If you want to hear more about mirror neurons, I rambled about 'em in a one of my first #NeuroThursday episodes last year: benjaminckinney.com/mirror-neurons/
Now you can go back and listen to "After Midnight at the Zap Stop," and when that one offhand line comes up, you can smile and nod in your superior neuroscience wisdom, and continue to enjoy the story! escapepod.org/2018/07/05/esc…
With that, I return to #readercon! If you're around, come say hi! And consider this little discussion a sneak preview of my talk tomorrow afternoon. benjaminckinney.com/readercon-2018…

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More from @BenCKinney

Aug 13, 2018
Handedness comes in two groups, "right handed" and "not right handed." Most people use their right hands for almost all precision movement, but the other group is a broad spectrum from weakly-right to strongly-left. baen.com/handedness
The way we describe and define handedness creates the effect @CStuartHardwick rightly notices. Culture defines how we talk about it - but the behavior is mostly genetic. The % of righties has remained constant across continents and milennia.
Hand dominance is a more squirrelly thing than most people realize. For example, righties are better at *some* things with their left hand... and *some* of these asymmetries flip in lefties. Take a few minutes on #LeftHandersDay to learn more!
Read 4 tweets
Aug 8, 2018
Quick heads up on the #BlackSpecFic report: the story counts for @escapepodcast @Pseudopod_org and @PodCastle_org are incomplete, and revisions will be forthcoming.
But you should read and learn from the #BlackSpecFic report anyways! The missing data is due to idiosyncrasies of the @EAPodcasts model, and has no impact on any other magazine's numbers.
Long story short, we treat reprints very differently from other magazines. For @escapepodcast specifically, they were ~45% of our 2017 stories, and our editorial process has one unified pipeline for originals + reprints together.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 23, 2018
Regretting organizing my two Worldcon panels this year. It means I'm not free to throw up my hands in frustration and give up on programming. The last 24hrs have been the last worst icing on a bad cake that's long been baking.
I mean, my panels will be awesome. But if you're skipping programming because you don't trust the con, you've made a sensible choice.
There are always more people who want to be on programming than can fit. There's no way to make everyone happy. I get that. But this weekend's screwups come in the context of a long chain of trust-erosion.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 8, 2018
This Lindsey Sterling + Evanescence concert has been going for 3 minutes and it is already amazing.
Update: she is simultaneously dancing, playing violin, and kicking skeletons.
P.S. She too is a skeleton. Hard to be sure at this distance but I believe she has glittery bones.
Read 14 tweets
Jul 4, 2018
This phenomenon - when you look away from a moving thing, and you briefly see illusory motion in the other direction - is the "Motion Aftereffect," and it comes from some very basic brain maneuvers. Who wants to join me on going full #NeuroThursday here? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_af…
Most neurons in the brain (and elsewhere) do this thing called "adaptation," where they accept whatever's going on as the new normal. For example, if you sit down with your laptop on your lap, you'll soon stop noticing the weight.
This can arise from the crudest single-cell level: some ion channels in the cell membrane have negative feedback loops that self-dampen.
Read 14 tweets
Jun 23, 2018
This morning at #4thStreetFantasy I had an idea about Kill Your Darlings. Let me see if it rings true for anyone else.
As many of us on Writing Twitter may know, Kill Your Darlings is an aphorism that has some value, but is easily interpreted in ways that can be harmful. (Like most aphorisms.) But why is this one so sticky?
I think it has to do with *casting the author in a heroic light*.
Read 6 tweets

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