The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human behaviour has been heralded as one of the most important findings in neuroscience in the last decade. With the maelstrom of attention in scientific culture, quickly came rampant speculation that mirror neurons may provide the key to understanding an array of human behaviours. Current theories suggest the ability to interpret the actions and gestures of others is subserved by a mirror neuron system, a network that possesses the unique property of responding to specific actions both when they are executed and observed. Evolution of the mirror neuron system has been viewed as an adaptation for action understanding, where meaning about a movement can be attributed to actions made by others, and enables an observer to understand the intent behind an observed motor act of someone else. From tool use, and language acquisition to empathy and altruism, mirror neurons became a significant area of interest, despite the fact that no direct empirical evidence exists for their presence in humans.

Initially discovered by Rizzolatti and colleagues using single-cell recordings in the macaque monkey, the mellifluous term mirror neuron was coined to reflect the fact that these neurons fire during task performance, and also during passive observance of the same action performed by another agent, thus mirroring the neurological activity occurring in the other agent’s brain. Difficulties arise with conflicting assumptions of the definition of this system, leading to different experimental approaches and interpretations. An unambiguous definition of mirror neurons is necessary to streamline the research and narrow a more careful focus on what mirror neurons are and what they mean. The prospect of a single population of neurons playing an active role in a wide range of executive functions is alluring, albeit slightly optimistic. It will be interesting however, to see what designs are applied to mirror neuron research in the future (even if its bullshit).

darwin was right (again)

Inspired by the Darwinian principle of natural selection, evolutionary robotics views robots as autonomous artificial organisms that have the ability to develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment and without human intervention. Alan Turing suggested in the 1950's that intelligent machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult to conceive by a mere mortals, but could be obtained through an evolutionary process with mutations and selective reproduction.

The general idea behind evolutionary robotics is to create a population with different genomes, each defining parameters of the control system of a robot or of its morphology. An initial random population of artificial chromosomes, each encoding the control system of a robot, is put into the environment. Each robot is then free to act (navigate, look around, manipulate) according to its genetically specified controller while its performance on various tasks is automatically evaluated. The fittest robots then reproduce by swapping parts of their genetic material with small random mutations. The process is repeated until the birth of a robot that satisfies the performance criteria. At the laboratory for intelligent systems, it was demonstrated that a couple hundred generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons.

SO CLOSE I CAN HARDLY STAND IT