Movement and Mirror Neurons--A Challenging and Choice Conversation

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Phenomenology and the CognitiveSciences ISSN 1568-7759Volume 11Number 3 Phenom Cogn Sci (2012) 11:385-401DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9243-x

Movement and mirror neurons: achallenging and choice conversation

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

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Movement and mirror neurons: a challengingand choice conversation

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Published online: 2 December 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This paper raises fundamental questions about the claims of art historianDavid Freedberg and neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese in their article "Motion,Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience." It does so from severalperspectives, all of them rooted in the dynamic realities of movement. It showson the basis of neuroscientific research how connectivity and pruning are ofunmistakable import in the interneuronal dynamic patternings in the human brainfrom birth onward. In effect, it shows that mirror neurons are contingent onmorphology and corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic experience. Accordingly, itposes and answers the overlooked but seminally important question of how mirrorneurons come to be. The original neuromuscular research of Parma neuroscientistsand the findings of Marc Jeannerod concerning kinesthesia support the answer thatthe "underpinnings" of visual art appreciation are themselves underpinned. Anabbreviated phenomenological analysis of movement and its implicationsregarding the fact that the making of all art is quintessentially contingent onmovement, hence a dynamic enterprise, further bolster the given answer as does abrief review of an empirical phenomenological analysis of the natural dynamiccongruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the paper shows thatmovement and life are of a piece in the creation and appreciation of art as ineveryday life.

Keywords Developmental neuronal brain dynamics . Morphology . Corporeal-kinetictactile-kinesthetic invariants . Aesthetic experience . Dance . Kinesthesia . Emotions

Phenom Cogn Sci (2012) 11:385–401DOI 10.1007/s11097-011-9243-x

A shorter version of this paper was presented in May 2011 as an invited lecture in a four-speaker series onthe topic “Observer Effects: Conversations between Art and Science,” a series sponsored by theExperimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I thank Emily Bercir,Director of the Center, and Hèlène Listerlin, Dance Coordinator of the Center, for their invitation to takepart in the series, and Linnda Caporael, Professor of Science and Technology, for invigorating discussionsand for her kind and generous hospitality during my visit at the Institute.

M. Sheets-Johnstone (*)Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1295, USAe-mail: [email protected]

Author's personal copy

In their 2007 article titled “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in EstheticExperience” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, art historian David Freedberg andneuroscientist Vittorio Gallese state that their purpose, is to “challenge the primacyof cognition in responses to art” and to propose instead that “a crucial element ofesthetic response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms encompassingthe simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation, and that thesemechanisms are universal” (p. 197). With respect to these “embodied mechanisms”of simulation, they clarify that they are “concentrat[ing] on two components ofesthetic experience that are involved in contemplating visual works of art (as wellas other images that do not necessarily fall into this category),” namely, (1) “therelationship between embodied empathetic feelings in the observer and therepresentational content of the works in terms of the actions, intentions, objects,emotions and sensations depicted in a given painting or sculpture,” and (2), “therelationship between embodied empathetic feelings in the observer and the qualityof the work in terms of the visible traces of the artist’s creative gestures, such asvigorous modeling in clay or paint, fast brushwork and signs of the movement ofthe hand more generally” (p. 199). What they initially designate as “embodiedmechanisms” of simulation are, of course, mirror neurons, and the two componentsof aesthetic experience that interest them are the traditional aesthetic categories:form and content. In short, though Freedberg and Gallese do not put thecomponents of aesthetic experience that interest them in such terms, their claimis that mirror neurons in an observer play a decisive role in his/her appreciation ofboth the form and the content of a visual work of art. Thus, they state, “Thediscovery of mirror neurons illuminates the neural underpinnings of the frequentbut hitherto unexplained feeling of physical reaction often in apparent imitation ofthe actions represented within a work of art or suggested by the impliedmovements involved in its making.” It is notable that they find not only the“physical reaction” of observers explainable in terms of mirror neurons but theemotional reaction of observers as well. In particular, they posit a close neuronalrelationship between movement and emotions, affirming that, “mirror neurons alsooffer the possibility of a clearer understanding of the relationship betweenresponses to the perception of movement within paintings, sculpture andarchitecture… and the emotions such works provoke” (ibid.).

In what follows, I will raise questions about their claims from severalperspectives, all of them rooted in movement, that is to say, rooted in the dynamicrealities of animate life. I will start out first, however, with a general claim of myown that is supported by empirical observations of various scientists, and this inorder to provide grounds for my questions. I should perhaps mention in advance thatI am not the only one to raise questions about Freedberg and Gallese’s claims. Intheir article titled “Mirror and Canonical Neurons Are Not Constitutive of EstheticResponses,” philosophers Roberto Casati and Alessandro Pignocchi state thatFreedberg and Gallese’s proposal “is… open to the charge of irrelevance to theissues of aesthetic experience and of what constitutes artworks. Already the choiceof artworks [that they discuss], such as the Michelangelo, Goya, Caravaggio andPollock… is open to objection: all the works are both famous, so as to suggest andemphasize the importance of this issue for art; and mostly gory, so as better to nailthe empathic point” (Casati and Pignocchi 2007, p. 410).

386 M. Sheets-Johnstone


I

Mirror neurons are the neurological corollaries of corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinestheticinvariants. If there were no such thing as corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants,there would be no mirror neurons, for there would be no fundamental corporeal-kineticcommonalities among individual humans that would undergird mirror neurons, and inturn undergird the proposal that mirror neurons “underpin” understandings of the goal-oriented movement of others—“the goal-oriented movement of others” being the initialclaim of neuroscientists at the University of Parma—much less underpin empathy,social cognition, the origin of language, works of art, and so on, all such claims beingmade later on the basis of successive research programs on mirror neurons. Corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants derive from human morphology, a morphology thatby definition is species-specific, though species-overlapping movement patterns such asreaching, scratching, sitting, standing, lying down, kissing, walking, and throwing existand attest to corporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic evolutionary continuities.

Human morphology develops in species-specific ways both in the womb as we growfrom embryo to fetus and post-natally as we grow from infancy through childhood intoadulthood. Neurons develop and parcellate in the course of infancy. In their recentsecond edition of Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to CognitiveNeuroscience in which they cite Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’sresearch on neuronal development, cognitive neuroscientists Bernard J. Baars andNicole M. Gage state, “[T]ens of billions of neurons sprout as the fetus grows, eachnew cell following its own pathway to make up the brain, spinal cord, and peripheralneurons,” “peripheral neurons” undoubtedly referring to all neurons throughout theliving body, some of which connect to and from neurons in brain and spinal cord,neurons such as those found in “human biological motion,” i.e., neurons in muscles,tendons, and joints (Baars and Gage 2010, pp. 516, 171, respectively). They point outthat “when a baby is born, it will have more nerve cells than it will ever again have inits entire lifetime” and this because “neurons are constantly being pruned, if they makeunstable or unproductive connections” (ibid., 516). Moreover Baars and Gage pointout that “Once the fetus begins to use its senses and learn, around the beginning of thethird trimester of pregnancy” [I underscore the fact that Baars and Gage speak of afetus beginning to sense and learn; see also Furuhjelm et al. (1977) on the earliermovement capabilities of fetuses, movement capabilities such as kicking, sucking,waving, turning around, and so on; Windle (1971) on the prenatal development ofkinesthesia, in particular, on neural receptors in muscles that provide a sense ofmovement and position; and Piontelli’s (1987) comments on “the richness and thecomplexity of movements one could observe [in the fetus] since the early stages” andon “the freedom of movement each fetus could enjoy in the amniotic fluid,” pp. 455,456, respectively], the production of new neurons slows down, but “new synapticconnections keep sprouting in the trillions” (ibid; italics in original.). They concludeby stating that “The connectivity pattern of the brain is the key to its working” and that“synaptic growth and selective pruning continues throughout life” (ibid.). Their laterobservation that “Brain development begins with zero synapses and ends with athousand trillion connections” (ibid., p. 217) brings strikingly to the fore thefundamental import of connectivity and pruning, and with it, not just the unmistakableimport of interneuronal dynamic patternings in the brain, but the unmistakable import

Movement and mirror neurons 387


of life itself in the form of experience that shapes connectivity and pruning, experiencein which movement—animation—plays a quintessentially central role.1

Edelman’s own writings are equally striking. In the context of recognizing the factthat “[t]he network of the brain is created by cellular movement during developmentand by the extension and connection of increasing numbers of neurons” (Edelman1992, p. 25), Edelman points out with respect to pruning that “in some regions of thedeveloping nervous system up to 70% of the neurons die before the structure of thatregion is completed!” and that “[i]n general, … uniquely specified connectionscannot exist” (ibid., p. 17). After telling us that there are 10 billion neurons—notcounting glia cells—in the cerebral cortex and that “[e]ach nerve cell receivesconnections from other nerve cells at sites called synapses,” he comments, “But hereis an astonishing fact—there are about 1 million billion connections in the corticalsheet. If you were to count them, one connection (or synapse) per second, you wouldfinish counting some thirty-two million years after you began” (ibid.). He goes on topoint out that “[i]f we consider how connections might be variously combined, thenumber would be hyperastronomical—on the order of ten followed by millions ofzeros” (ibid.). A further observation of his concerns precisely the pointed absence ofgenetic determinism: synaptic connections among neurons are not prespecified inany precise way by our genes (ibid., p. 23). The brain is indeed a dynamic self-organizing system, as coordination dynamics researcher and writer and Pierre deFermat laureate J. A. Scott Kelso and his colleagues have shown over the past30 years and more (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006). The enormoussprouting of neuronal cells and their pruning in the course of fetal development, theirsynaptic growth and pruning in the course of life, and the sheer number of possiblesynaptic connections that might be made attest without question to the brain’sfoundational internal dynamics. Thus, however spatially fixed and permanent theanatomical parts of the brain, its neurology in a living sense in a living being isdefinitely on the move and not bound to spatially fixed and permanent pathways.

II

A pressing question thus arises from the start with respect to mirror neurons, anelementary question that to my knowledge has never been asked. The question arises

1 To address a reviewer’s concern as to how scientific studies presented in Section I relate to “how welearn to move ourselves in the course of our infancy”: If synaptic connections are not prespecified in anyprecise way by our genes, then synaptic growth and selective pruning are necessarily connected withexperience, precisely as Baars and Gage implicitly indicate when they write of a fetus beginning to use itssenses and to learn around the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. As references to researchersof earlier prenatal development show, that early sensing and learning center quintessentially on movement.Obviously, that sensing and learning continue when a fetus is actually born: it comes into the worldmoving; it is not only not stillborn, but continues to move and in the process, learns on the basis ofinchoate reaching movements to reach effectively and to grasp whatever object is attracting it; it learns toturn over in its crib; it learns to crawl and to walk; and so on. Moreover as Baars and Gage point out,synaptic growth and selective pruning is a life-long process, a process that, as concerns movement,depends precisely upon the degree to which movement informs one’s individual life and the degree towhich it is curtailed, that is, the degree to which one suffers “[t]he heart-ache and the thousand naturalshocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1).



from a simple inductively grounded observation and a surmise therefrom: we are notborn with mirror neurons; they are surely not within the tens of billions of neuronsthat sprout in fetal growth nor are they later prespecified genetically. The pressingquestion—how do mirror neurons come to be?—centers precisely on the originationof mirror neurons. Insofar as we are not born with mirror neurons, and furthermore,insofar as we all, in addition to sensing and learning as fetuses, learn our bodies andlearn to move ourselves in the course of our infancy and early childhood, a learning Idiscuss at length in The Primacy of Movement (Sheets-Johnstone 1999a/expanded2nd ed. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, chapter V), it would seem incontrovertible that themirroring capacity of certain neurons derives basically from kinesthetic experiencesof one’s own moving body, that is, from one’s own movement experiences. In effect,mirroring is basically the mirroring of another’s moving body on the basis of theactual and possible movements of one’s own moving body.

Kinesthetic experiences of one’s own moving body are commonly marginalized inadult human life—what Darwin in one instance with respect to infants refers to as “theafter life” of adult humans (Darwin 1965 [1872], p. 13)—but their marginalization doesnot completely occlude their experienced dynamics. If it did, not only would we neverbe capable of forming everyday habits such as washing our face, dressing ourselves,speaking, typing, much less playing a Bach prelude, but we would never—to use thestandard notion of “the background”—realize that “something went wrong” (for moreon this topic, see Sheets-Johnstone 2011) Kinesthesia is a fundamental, essentialsensory modality. It is truly amazing that in this twenty-first century, we humans stillbelieve we have only five senses; that is, that we fail to recognize and dulyacknowledge kinesthesia, the sense we have of our own movement and its spatio-temporal-energic dynamics, as in swinging a golf club, opening our arms and hugginga friend, running to catch a bus, threading a needle, and so on.

Bolstering the foundational significance of kinesthetic experience is the low-keybut seminally significant statement of well-known neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod.Interestingly enough, the statement occurs in the context of his discussion of what heterms “[the] longstanding controversy about the respective roles of the two mainfirst-person cues in conscious knowledge of one’s actions” and the anchorage of thatcontroversy in the classic debate between Wilhelm Wundt and William James(Jeannerod 2006, p. 56). Wundt claimed that our knowledge “is based on a prioriefferent information of a central origin,” James that our knowledge is “based on aposteriori information from sensory organs” (ibid.). Jeannerod points out that thecontroversy is irresolvable experimentally, even by way of experimental researchdealing with pathologically afflicted individuals, and this because kinesthesia is anongoing, insuppressible faculty. He states explicitly, “There are no reliable methodsfor suppressing kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement”(ibid.). “Information” terminology aside, Jeannerod’s declarative finding speaksreams about the foundational ongoing reality and significance of kinesthesia, reamsthat should certainly lead investigators to take seriously the challenge ofunderstanding the insuppressible living dynamics of kinesthetic experience. Asimilar awakening should readily follow Jeannerod’s question of “whether weconsciously monitor our own actions and how we eventually become aware ofthem,” and of his answer: “we remain unaware of most of our actions, unless anunpredicted event interrupts their course and brings them to consciousness” (ibid.,



pp. 58–59), that is, unless, as mentioned earlier, “something goes wrong.” Clearly—and particularly in light of the insuppressibility of kinesthesia—we do not have towait until something untoward occurs that awakens us into awareness and deters usfrom continuing on our way. On the contrary, precisely because movement is adynamic happening and because the dynamics of our everyday movement arecommonly habitual and thus within our everyday repertoire of what phenomenol-ogy’s founder Edmund Husserl terms our “I cans” (see, for example, Husserl 1980,pp. 106–12; Husserl 1989, pp. 13–15, 159–160, 228–31, 266–82, 340–43; Husserl1970, pp. 106–108, 161, 217, 331–32; Husserl 1973, 97), we can consult them anytime we wish in the course moving. In short, and as I have elsewhere shown (Sheets-Johnstone 1999a/expanded 2nd ed. Sheets-Johnstone 2011), any time we care to payattention to our own movement—our own so-called “action”—there it is. Not onlythis, but when we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves as infantsand young children (ibid.), we did so by attending to our own movement and in theprocess forged an untold number of dynamic patterns that became habitual. Familiardynamics—brushing one’s teeth, tying a knot, buttering one’s toast, writing one’sname, pulling weeds, sweeping, typing, waltzing, reciting a nursery rhyme, and soon—are woven into our bodies and played out along the lines of our bodies; theyare, to use famed Russian neuropsychiatrist Alexsandr Romanovich Luria’s eloquentand exactingly descriptive phrase “kinesthetic/kinetic melodies” in both a neurolog-ical and experiential sense (Luria 1966, 1973). Indeed, were someone else to brushour teeth, we would immediately recognize that someone else was brushing ourteeth, not just because we were not holding the toothbrush ourselves and not onlybecause we could actually see someone in front of us holding and moving ourtoothbrush, but because we would feel a foreign dynamics inside our mouth. In sum,when we turn attention to our own coordinated dynamics (Kelso 1995; Kelso andEngstrøm 2006), we recognize kinesthetic melodies; they bear the stamp of our ownqualitatively felt movement patterns, what I have termed our own familiar synergiesof meaningful movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, b, 2012a).

Precisely in this context, it is notable and indeed of considerable interest to pointout that in their initial experimental research to determine whether mirror neuronsexist in humans, Rizzolatti, Fogassi, and Gallese—the major neuroscientists atParma—did not utilize PET scan studies to determine neuronal activity in humanbrains; they utilized neuromuscular studies. They quite breezily pass over that fact intheir special 2006 neuroscience article in Scientific American titled “Mirrors in theMind” that gives a background history and summary of their findings to date. Inparticular, in describing their first experiments with human subjects in which the aimwas to determine “whether a mirror neuron system also exists in humans,” they state,“As volunteers observed an experimenter grasping objects or performing meaning-less arm gestures, for example, increased neural activation in their hand and armmuscles that would be involved in the same movements suggested a mirror neuronresponse in the motor areas of their brains” (Rizzolatti et al. 2006, p. 58). Thesuggestion of “a mirror neuron response in the motor areas of their brains” and inconsequence of a mirror neuron system in the human brain is clearly what is ofmoment to them. Accordingly, they pass over the kinesthetically interesting findingbecause of their desire to identify “the exact brain areas” that are activated whenvolunteers observe what they term “motor acts” (ibid.).



The classic debate between Wundt and James is of course of continuing interest inthis context for if kinesthesia is insuppressible, and if “increased neuromuscularactivation” occurs in observing the grasping movement and meaningless gestures ofothers, one can surely wonder precisely how such activation is related to mirror neuronsin the brain, even whether, for example, such activation sets off mirror neurons, a factthat resonates with James’s position regarding afferent knowledge of one’s ownactions. Most importantly, “increased neuromuscular activation” supports and evenvalidates the general thesis that mirror neurons are the neurological corollaries ofcorporeal-kinetic tactile-kinesthetic invariants, or in other words, that the kinestheti-cally orchestrated coordinated dynamics of one’s own movement are the ground floorof “embodied simulation,” that is, the ground floor of what the Parma group describesas our capacity to comprehend the “motor acts” of others on the basis of our “mirrorneurons.” In short, mirroring depends on, is contingent on, our own kinestheticallyexperienced human capacities and possibilities of movement.

III

Further validation of the kinesthetic origin of mirror neurons lies in infant psychiatristDaniel Stern’s descriptions of experiences of the “core self,” and of “affect attunement”(Stern 1985). With respect to the former, Stern states, “In order for the infant to haveany formed sense of self, there must ultimately be some organization that is sensed asa reference point. The first such organization concerns the body: its coherence, itsactions, its inner feeling states, and the memory of all these” (Stern 1985, p. 46).Accordingly, the constituents of the core self include the experience of self-agency,self-coherence, self-affectivity, and self-history, all such experiences being rooted inthe body. Stern’s descriptions of these bodily constituents implicitly show them to berooted through and through in movement and the tactile-kinesthetic body (see Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, 2011, especially 252–271, for a full discussion). In turn, Stern’s term“affect attunement” both aptly and exactingly describes dynamic interpersonalexchanges between infants and their mothers, exchanges in which the dynamics ofan infant’s movements, including at times vocalizations, are dynamically matched byits mother. Stern specifically points out that the dynamics are not imitated or mirrored,but are qualitatively analogous in a kinetic-affective sense. He in fact explicitly rejectscharacterizing the dynamic exchange as mirroring on the grounds that the label“mirroring” lacks “fidelity” to what is actually happening and suggests “completetemporal synchrony” (ibid., p. 144). I would add that the term and the very concept of“mirroring” fails to hone in on and capture not simply the intermodal dynamics ofaffect attunement, as Stern indicates by the term “fidelity,” but fails basically toidentify the kinetically expressed dynamics of affect attunement, that is, the basicdynamic congruency of movement and affect that substantively grounds theinterpersonal experience (Sheets-Johnstone 2009b, 2011). I will specify dynamiccongruency in finer terms in Section IV. For now, suffice to say that affect attunementis a matter of matching the dynamics of another person’s affective feelings, and asStern points out, it is most commonly intermodal (Stern 1985, p. 148).

To hone in on the question of the origin of mirror neurons in terms of thedynamics of the core self and of interpersonal attunements as exemplified by Stern



has actually required a shifting of gears, namely, a straightforward move from adeveloping fetal neurology as discussed in Section I to a developmental postnatalontogeny. Clearly, and as indicated previously, learning one’s body and learning tomove oneself are learnings in infancy and early childhood that are foundational tothe everyday movement patterns that define the lives of all adult humans. We canrightfully assume that that all such ontogenetical learnings—learning to walk,learning to speak, learning to write, learning to manipulate forks and spoons,learning to calculate distances, learning to navigate directionally, learning to temperthe intensity of one’s movement in performing a delicate task, and so on—build upnew synaptic patterns in the brain, patterns that are themes with variations dependingon circumstances. Some learning capacities and possibilities may be, andundoubtedly are, differentially honed by way of culture.2 Moreover they may bedifferentially honed by way of later individual somatic practices such as thosedeveloped in Feldenkrais training (Feldenkrais 1972; Ginsburg 2010) and in Body–Mind Centering (Cohen 2008; Miller et al. 2011). Differential honing notwithstand-ing, if connectivity is the key to the brain’s working, if synapses are key functionalaspects of brains that are open to variation and that can be newly created, then surelywe should realize that adhering to a simple brain neuronal system/function ormodule/function relationship cannot do justice to the literally animated and changingrealities of life itself. As noted earlier: the brain is a dynamic and dynamicallyorganized organ (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006; Edelman 1992). It does notadhere to that nineteenth century adage of sea captain Frederick Marryat whoproclaimed “a place for everything and everything in its place” (Marryat 1842), anadage later taken up by writers on household matters (Beeton 1861) and on thrift(Smiles 1875). The critical point is aptly made by way of analogy to any commoneveryday movement such as reaching, walking, pulling, stirring, waving, and so on.Reaching is not simply an arm movement any more than walking is simply a legmovement. Whatever the movement, the whole body is involved in its realization,not only by way of holding or stabilizing, but by way of the movement’s veryunfolding in which, as Luria finely recognized, there is a sequence of innervationsand denervations: a dynamic neuromuscular pattern unfolds. Just such internally

2 For a perspicuous account of what it means experientially to comprehend cultural differences, see danceanthropologist Sally Ann Ness’s descriptive analysis of “what the act of performing a choreographedmovement can mean in an ‘other’ culture—that is to say, in a society whose organizing principles, socialinstitutions, and value systems are profoundly unfamiliar or exotic relative to one’s own,” and her fine-grained exemplification of how, in order to have that comprehension, “a person must have some idea ofwhat performing any choreographed movement can mean at all” (Ness 1992, p. 2). Ness in fact clarifiesfurther the centrality of kinesthesia to this enterprise when she adds, “There must be some appreciation ofhow getting oneself physically through a choreographic moment can affect a human being, and how it canaffect one’s own cultural understanding” (ibid.). Her description of her own experience in a repertory classin which she learned a section of a dance by the Bill Evans Dance Company offers ample insights intomore and more refined kinesthetic experiences, experiences that at one point she terms “the dynamicmentality of one’s neuromusculature” (ibid., p. 4).

Dancer and teacher Adriana Pegorer highlights the centrality of kinesthesia from a quite differentcultural perspective. Pegorer teaches tango to visually impaired people. She writes that all the “glitteringdrama of courtship that this form of movement entails—with women in high heels and provocative dressesand the dominant attitudes of their male partners—is often what draws people in.” She goes on toemphasize, however, that “if all that [‘that’ meaning all visual trappings] is removed it’s the kinestheticsense of the dance, its essential aroma, which still remains” (Pegorer 2010, p. 36).



modulated neuromuscular unfoldings are precisely what led Luria to speak of“complex sequential activity”—writing one’s name, calculating a sum—as kinetic/kinaesthetic melodies. In a word, kinetic/kinaesthetic melodies unfold dynamicallyin moving bodies by way of dynamically unfolding neuromuscular innervations anddenervations and correlatively in brains by way of dynamically unfolding synapticconnections. The dynamic unfoldings are the bedrock of our experience of “complexsequential activity.”

In light of the foregoing considerations of what we might call the developmentaldynamics of brain life and their variations in terms of circumstances, differential culturalhonings, and possibly later somatic practices, and of what was said earlier about theinsuppressibility of kinesthetic experience, we can ask the following questions: do we notfirst have to be effective and efficient movers in the world prior to the formation of mirrorneurons and a mirror neuron system? Do we not first have to be kinesthetically aware ofour own “physical reactions” and affectively aware not simply of “emotional reactions”but aware in a tactile-kinesthetically enlightened way about emotions, that is, do we notfirst have to be aware of the natural dynamic congruency of movement and emotions ineveryday life? To ask such questions is not to say that there is anything doubtful orwayward about mirror neurons nor that their discovery is less than glorious. To ask suchquestions is only to point out the runaway use ofmirror neurons to explain at rock-bottomthe experiential intricacies of our appreciation and understanding of form and content invisual art. Clearly, the connectivity of the brain leads us not only to wonder about thesynaptic relationships of mirror neurons—where do their impulses go?—but about theorigin of mirror neurons to begin with. Such wonderings point us unmistakably in thedirection not of action, but of movement, and similarly, not in the direction of motorsbut of movement, for in the most basic sense, we are not acting bodies or mechanicalbodies but living moving bodies. We are indeed, as indicated, first challenged to learnour bodies and learn to move ourselves—all without an owner’s manual or instructionfrom others. Moreover, we should note specifically that whatever experiences we havein later years with respect to art and with respect to social cognitions, we do not feel thefiring of our mirror neurons. We feel the dynamics of our tactile-kinesthetic/affectivebodies. On this basis, there is no question but that mirror neurons develop on the basisof our tactile-kinesthetic/affective lives; they are rooted in tactile-kinesthetic/affectiverealities. We feel and have felt our own tongues before we stick them out in response toan experimenter, as in the infant research studies of psychologists Andrew Meltzoff andM. Keith Moore (Meltzoff and Moore 1977, 1983, 1995; see also Furuhjelm et al.(1977) on fetal movement; see also Piontelli 1987). However marginalized in our adultlives, our tactile-kinesthetic/affective bodies are the foundation of our everydayreachings, liftings, pushings, pullings, walkings, runnings, scratchings, stretchings,explorations, hesitations, and more.

When we duly take life-long neuronal formations, prunings, and connectivity intoaccount, the pressing question of origin can clearly not be responsibly skirted. Tomake “mechanisms” in the form of mirror neurons the “underpinnings” of visual artappreciation, the site of embodied simulations, is to reduce our response to both theform and content of visual works of art to particular neuronal firings in the brain. Itis precisely to overlook the “underpinnings” of those “underpinnings” in real-lifetactile-kinesthetic experiences together with the invariants of human morphologythat make those experiences possible.



IV

The test case for assaying the claim that mirror neurons “underpin” our aestheticappreciation of visual form and content is dance. Let me first assure any reader thatthis “test case claim” is not being made in order to back Freedberg and Gallese into acorner. In other words, although Freedberg and Gallese are focused in the very titleof their article on motion, emotion, and empathy in aesthetic experience, I am notintending to hold them to the claim that “motion, emotion and empathy” in theaesthetic experience of dance is reducible to mirror neurons, in effect, that we havean ongoing embodied simulated experience not only of the incredible technicalexpertise of the dancers on stage but the incredible dynamic complexities of thedance itself. Furthermore, I am not saying that the test case is dance because my ownart background is in dance—as choreographer and performer, professor of dance anddance scholar. I am saying it for two quite different reasons: first, because movementis actually foundational to all of the arts—to playing an instrument, to painting, toacting, to sculpting, to dance, to opera, and to architectural design and building; andsecond, because our “physical reactions,” as Freedberg and Gallese term “the feltactivation of… muscles,” (p. 197) and our “emotional reactions” to a work of art aswell, are rooted in movement, not only in our own natural ability to move, but in ournatural disposition to be moved to move, and in our experiencing other animatebeings moving and being moved to move.3 Accordingly, we are going to shift gearsfurther, that is, move beyond what have been basically ontogenetical considerationsto phenomenological ones. I will give a quite summary phenomenological accountof the qualitative structure of movement, move from there to a consideration of thedynamic realities of kinesthesia together with their various distortions and neglect,then to finer understandings of the dynamic congruency of emotion and movement,and finally, to conclusions concerning conversations between art and science.

The dynamics of movement are grounded in its qualitative structure (Sheets-Johnstone 1966 [1979–1980]).4 Its qualitative structure has four basic dimensions:tensional quality, linear quality, areal quality, and projectional quality. Tensionalquality is apparent in the force or intensity of any movement; linear quality has two

3 For a descriptive analysis and account of how trust, for example, moves us to move and in fact how “[l]apeur se déplace dans le corps et le fait se déplacer autrement que ne le fait la confiance,” see Sheets-Johnstone 2006a.4 To address a reviewer’s concern that I prioritize a phenomenological analysis, I should note that, while Iam familiar with Labananalysis as a system of movement analysis, a system that combines Labanotationand Effort/Shape, that is, both the “‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘when’ of movement” and the “how” orqualitative dimension of movement (for a lucid account of Labananalysis, see Youngerman 1984), I amnot such an analyst myself. I have, however, been told by people who are analysts that the qualitativestructure of movement as derived from phenomenological analysis is complementary to that provided byLabananalysis. The complementarity is not surprising: effort and shape are distilled terms encompassingor suggesting tensional and projectional qualities on the one hand, and linear and areal qualities on theother. What a phenomenological analysis provides is a first-person descriptive account of the experienceof self-movement; Labananalysis provides a more objective account of movement, that is, an account ofthe experience of movement from a third-person point of view. It is of interest to note too that there aretwo further major movement notational systems: Benesh Movement Notation and Eshkol-WachmannNotation, and that the latter system has been profitably used by ethologists in the study of certainmammalian display behaviors and of kinetic fighting patterns of wolves (see Golani 1976; Moran et al.1981, respectively).



dimensions: linear design, which has to do with the contours of the body, and linearpattern, which has to do with the paths traced by movement. Like linear quality,areal quality has two dimensions: areal design has to do with the expansiveness orcontractiveness of the body; areal pattern with the extensiveness or intensiveness ofmovement. Projectional quality is apparent in the manner in which force is released.Basically, there are four different possibilities: sustained, abrupt, ballistic, andcollapsing movement. I should emphasize that the qualities in here as a whole in anyanimate movement whatsoever; in other words, no quality exists separately. Indeed,the overall qualitative character of any movement—jagged, expansive, intense,explosive, and so on—is a composite of all the qualities. Consider a sneeze, forexample. A sneeze can be attenuated and end abruptly; it can be staccato all the wayalong, with no resolution; it can involve the body minimally in terms of linear andareal qualities or carry one off first into a jerky backward movement, then into aforward rushing movement; it can be moderately or forcefully intense; and so on.Try sneezing; pretend to sneeze; explore the dynamics of a sneeze—in fact explorethe dynamics of many sneezes, and you will come to realize the myriad possibilitiesinherent in this readily familiar and recognizable “act,” as it is likely to be called,possibilities that are in truth inherent in what is not an act, but in what is a quiteparticular rippling-through-the-body kinetic dynamic that is utterly spontaneous andunbidden. Being qualitatively distinct, each sneeze is a unique kinetically unfoldingdynamic, a kinesthetically felt whole-body happening. Sneezes can in fact beenlightening not only with respect to wholly natural bodily dynamics but withrespect to the relationship between those bodily dynamics and the natural rhythms ofbreath—inhaling and exhaling. Though we easily pass over the qualitative dynamicof our own movement—that is, pass over kinesthetic experience—as noted earlier,any time we care to pay attention to it, there it is.

The qualitative dynamics of movement are obviously central and foundational tothe aesthetic creation and realization of a dance. As a formed and performed art,dance is grounded in the qualitative intricacies, complexities, and possibilities ofhuman movement. Kinesthesia is in turn a sensory modality basic to the art ofchoreography and the art of dancing. An important fact attaches to this truth.Kinesthetic experience is not a matter of sensations, but a matter precisely ofdynamics. Though a diversity of people, including even dancers, choreographers,and teachers of dance, speak of kinesthetic sensations, they mislead by their inexactverbal translation of the experience of movement. Sensations are spatially pointillistand temporally punctual—an itch, a jolt, a flash of light, a shove, and so on (Sheets-Johnstone 2006b, 2010a, 2011 [expanded 2nd ed. of 1999a], 2012b). Certainly, adancer may find that changing the placement of her foot or the position of her torso,as the choreographer specifies, evokes a different postural sensation. But thatpostural experience is precisely the point. To experience sensations with respect tobodily positions is not the same as experiencing the dynamics of movement (cf.Gallagher and Cole 1998, e.g., p. 134, “I can tell you where my legs are even withmy eyes closed.” For a full discussion of the confusion, see Sheets-Johnstone 2003,2009a, Chapter X; Sheets-Johnstone 2005). When we move, we feel the dynamics ofour movement kinesthetically; we feel the dynamics of an unfolding form. We canand do sense movement dynamics visually on myriad occasions in everyday life, aswhen we see someone rushing toward us. We furthermore sense movement



dynamics visually when we recognize someone by the style of his or her walk.5 Andof course we sense movement dynamics visually when we see dancers dancing. Ourvisual sensing of movement dynamics is grounded in our awareness that our ownmovement has an inside and an outside, not simply in terms of the fact that it is bothpersonally experienced and publicly visible, but in terms of the fact that, throughkinesthesia, we experience directly our ability both to feel and to perceive our ownmovement (Sheets-Johnstone 2010b). To perceive our own movement as a three-dimensional happening, for example, that is, as a spatial happening, is anchored inkinesthetic experience, as when we are working to perfect the arc of a golf swing orto modify the amplitude of a tour jeté. Indeed, there would be no space, no conceptof space or of being “in space,” no objective “out there” short of movement to beginwith. When we are at a dance concert, we readily perceive the dynamics ofmovement before us, the kinetic melodies that dancers are experiencing kinesthet-ically and constituting by their very movement. Consider well-known dance criticArlene Croce’s fine-grained description of Merce Cunningham’s dancing, adescription that readily indicates and indeed captures the clarity of “outside”dynamics precisely as viewed by someone in the audience:

Cuningham’s hands are like chords of music: full articulation flows straight to theelectric extremities. He really does seem to have more in his little finger than mostdancers have in their whole bodies. And the diversity and specificity of nuance ofwhich his body is capable, after more than 35 years of professional dancing, areamazing. His performing this season has been limited mostly to quiet solos ofgreat tension and delicacy, though I recall vividly one burst of allegro when hedanced against the group in a different rhythm. The solo I [earlier] mentioned iscalled Loops; another is just called Solo but is commonly referred to as “theanimal solo” because of a passage in which Cunningham seems to turn bydegrees into a furry beast. No obviously representational gestures are made.Cunningham seems to get inside the animal and reproduce its senses in differentstates of consciousness. Nor does he lose his humanity; he could be an old manor a dreaming baby (Croce 1979, p. 49; italics in original).

The curious neglect of the sensory modality of kinesthesia is apparent not only inour everyday adult lives, but across a broad spectrum of today’s academicdisciplines: neuroscience, biological science, psychology, physiology, philosophy,music, even sports. Its neglect is strikingly if implicitly apparent in the third editionof a scientific textbook on movement titled The Scientific Bases of HumanMovement. Though the authors—neurophysiologists Barbara Gowitzke and MorrisMilner—state that their concern is with reflexive patterns, their remarks concerningvoluntary movement are telling. After acknowledging that “[v]oluntary movementrequires a foundation of automatic responses which assure a proper combination ofmobility and stability of body parts”, they state: “The voluntary contribution tomovement is almost entirely limited to initiation, regulation of speed, force, range,and direction, and termination of the movement” (Gowitzke and Milner 1988: 256).Granted their focus is on neurophysiology, the seemingly minor role attributed to

5 Our own walk has a certain style too, of course, precisely one that others may readily recognize, but ofwhich we ourselves are commonly unaware.



volition is nonetheless astonishing: “limitations” are not only integral to the verynature of voluntary movement but of indisputably sizable import to the mover, andnot only with respect to the qualitative structure of movement itself—to whatGowitzke and Milner term “speed, force, range, and direction”—but to the veryinitiation and termination of movement. Initiation and termination aside, thephenomenological analysis of movement that illuminates the spatio-temporal-energic qualities constituting the dynamics of movement demonstrates incontrovert-ibly the experiential import of the “voluntary contribution” (Sheets-Johnstone 1966,2009a, 2011). What becomes evident through that analysis is not just a realization ofthe complex qualitative structure of movement, but seminal realizations of receivedignorance about movement that deflect us from an awareness of its qualitativestructure. It awakens us, in other words, to an awareness of what movement is not. Itshould be noted that the charge of received ignorance is meant pejoratively nottoward individuals but toward habits of thought that pass for received wisdom. Inparticular, it is meant to call attention to the habit of not questioning commonunderstandings of movement and common ways of thinking about movement,understandings and ways that fail to recognize much less capture the dynamics of thephenomenon and that indeed perseverate misconceptions about the very foundationof animate life.

To refer to movement as a “motor act” or in terms of “motor programs” and“motor representations,” as Freedberg and Gallese do (Freedberg and Gallese 2007,e.g., pp. 200, 202), is wayward, a disfiguring way of referring to movement.Animate beings are not motors, and though it is common to call their internal partsand internal workings “mechanisms,” that term too does a disservice. Animatebeings are dynamic through and through: internal parts such as hearts, livers,spleens, stomachs, diaphragms, bladders, lungs—along with the brain—are dynamicorgans; muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and more function in dynamicallycoordinated ways with these dynamic organs. A motorology and its mechanics donot do justice to these coordinated dynamics (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm2006). As I have shown in answering the pressing question of where motor neuronscome from, Freedberg and Gallese’s motoric underpinnings are themselves under-pinned: they owe their existence to kinesthetic experience. In a deeper historicalsense, they owe their existence to species-specific morphologies and their relatedtactile-kinesthetic invariants. Mirror neurons are in effect neuronal offshoots,developmental descendants of another neuronal system, the neuromuscular systemthat develops on the basis of our learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves,that is, on the basis of kinesthetically informed dynamic patterns of self-movement.Today’s exclusively tethered brain science would do well to acknowledge and evendevote concentrated attention to the sensory modality of kinesthesia and the dynamicpatterns of self-movement it makes possible. Such acknowledgement and attentionconstitute precisely the grounds on which phenomenological investigations are ofcritical importance. They lead us directly to investigate “the things themselves”(Husserl 1983, p. 35; see also Socrates on “the things themselves” in Plato’sCratylus 439A; for a discussion of the concordance, see Sheets-Johnstone 2011,expanded 2nd ed. of Sheets-Johnstone 2009a), in the present instance, to both thecreation and appreciation of a work of art. As pointed out earlier, the creation of anywork of art is movement-dependent—not in a simple-minded sense, but in a highly



articulate sense. Kinetic/kinesthetic melodies inform its creation. In the art of dance,the melodies are one with the dance itself. In the art of painting, the melodies aremore distant, but not on that account imperceptible. To transform a surface is, afterall, to bring forth something where before there was nothing. Moreover thetransformative power of the lines, strokes, and dots on a canvas are there not just forthe artist creating a painting. They are there for the viewer in the completed painting.The qualitative kinetic dynamics that form the painting are indeed palpable. Acreative tactile-kinesthetic process has left its mark. We might recall noted art criticand historian Bernard Berenson’s writings on the tactile values of painting, that is,the tactile character of the visible. Berenson in fact wrote that the essential qualities ofartistic vision are a matter of touch and movement (Berenson 1962; see also Sheets-Johnstone 1990, Chapter 9, “On the Origin and Significance of Paleolithic Cave Art”).

The currently popular term “embodiment” and its derivatives are similarlywayward, deflecting us away from the realities of animate movement. Freedberg andGallese’s “embodied simulation” follows along the popular lines of embodiment.When they write that embodied simulation via mirror neurons is the source of“[a]utomatic empathetic responses,” “enabl[ing] the direct experiential understand-ing” of a work of art (Freedberg and Gallese 2007, p. 202), we can only ask:“Automatic empathetic responses?” “Direct experiential understanding?” Clearly, thecomplexity of aesthetic experience is short-changed by reductionist “embodied”explanations as are the experiential learnings that necessarily precede any bona fideaesthetic experience, experiential learnings in the form of active artistic involve-ments: going to museums and seeing paintings, going to concerts and listening tomusic, going to the theater and seeing dances and plays, even painting, playing aninstrument, or dancing and acting oneself. In short, empathetic responses and directexperiential understanding of a work of art rest on something far more complex than“embodied simulation.”

In today’s neuroscience and cognitive science and philosophy, virtually nothingremains un-embodied, not evenmovement! (Varela and Depraz 2005; Gibbs 2006). Therelationship between movement and emotions is taken for granted in this enterprisinglexical move. It clearly need not be. In his article “Action and Emotion inDevelopment of Cultural Intelligence: Why Infants Have Feelings Like Ours,” infantpsychologist Colwyn Trevarthen defines emotions “as manners of moving, and ofresponding to movement” (Trevarthen 2005, p. 63). He emphasizes the sensitivity ofinfants to “animacy” (ibid., p. 80), and more broadly, the way in which animal bodiesare “motivated with intrinsic rhythm and intensity in the ‘vitality’ or ‘sentic forms’ ofemotions,” stressing in this context the dynamic temporal dimension of emotion andmovement (ibid., p. 64). In an article titled “Emotions and Movement: A BeginningEmpirical-Phenomenological Analysis of Their Relationship” (Sheets-Johnstone1999b, 2009a, Chapter VIII), I elucidated the relationship in terms of “the thingsthemselves,” beginning with the studies of neuropsychiatrist Edmund Jacobson whosefundamental experimental finding was that what happens in a brain does not happenapart from muscular innervations (Jacobson 1967, 1970, 1973). I consulted the studiesof psychiatrist Nina Bull, studies that showed that “a basic neuromuscular sequence isessential to the production of affect,” that there is thus a generative as well asexpressive relationship between movement and emotion Bull (1951). In myphenomenological analysis, I showed how a dynamic congruency exists between



emotion and movement. In putting all the research together, I showed how emotionsmove us and move us to move, not only how fear moves us to move, but how joymoves us in ways different from anger and moves us to move in ways different fromanger, and so on, thus how emotions are quintessentially linked to kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic bodies (see also Sheets-Johnstone 2006a, b). Among my conclusions wasthe fact that “what feels and is moved to move is not a brain but a living organism”(Sheets-Johnstone 1999b, p. 274, Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, Chapter VIII, p. 214). Torecognize the dynamic congruency of movement and emotion is thus to recognize anessential fact: an ongoing kinetic form is dynamically congruent with the form of anongoing affective feeling. A particular kinetic form of an emotion is not identical withthe emotion but dynamically congruent with it. Precisely because there is a formalcongruency, we can separate out the emotion from the movement. We can thus bothfeign and mime an emotion: we can go through the motions of a particular feeling andwe can inhibit the motions of a particular feeling. The dual possibilities attestunmistakably to a fundamental dynamic congruency, a natural binding of affective andtactile-kinesthetic bodies. They attest indirectly to the fact that we recognize thekinetics of emotion on the basis of our own affective/tactile-kinesthetic experiences ofemotion. Our tactile-kinesthetic/affective bodies, of which our brains are an internalpart, are alive to the world about them, both the natural world and the social world.They experience those worlds. They are us.

V

In sum, movement underlies the creation and performance or exhibition of any artform. All such creations and their performances or exhibitions are dynamic in natureprecisely because they emanate from movement: they are made from, or of,movement. Accordingly, a veritably enlightening conversation between art andscience will be found not in a reductionism to the brain but in an exploration ofdynamics inside and out, a natural, engaged-in-the-world dynamics. Certainly,movement is difficult to study. Who in fact wants to study movement? It won’t staystill! That is precisely its foundational attraction, in the literal sense of attracting usfrom the very beginning of our lives, as infant psychiatrist René Spitz long agorecognized (Spitz 1983).

Movement and life are indeed of a piece, in the creation and appreciation of art asin everyday life. The challenge of a conversation between art and science rests on arecognition of that basic fact. Such a conversation is the conversation of choicebecause it is the preeminent and authentic conversation to undertake.

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Movement and Mirror Neurons--A Challenging and Choice Conversation

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