Gregory Hickok: The Myth of Mirror Neurons (2014)

Review by Rae West 2022

I found a copy of this book in a well-known bookshop in Morecambe, in England. There was no indication of how it got there; perhaps it was a review copy via Lancaster University. I'd never heard of 'mirror neurons', which the title and the blurbs promised were 'myths'—"A devastating critique of one of the most oversold ideas in psychology" said a 'cognitive psychologist'. Familiar with the works of Harold Hillman, and having books with 'Myth' in their titles, I added this book to my collection.
The cover design (photo right) has a representation of cells and synapses which is a drawing—everything is in focus, something not found in these preparations. There's a purple/lilac design and grey ink, at a cover price of USA $26.95.
A computer search throws up online sites with odd titles, offering what look like copyright-evading PDF files of books like this one. They seem over-full with fake encouragements, and look shifty and evasive, and don't seem safe downloads. No doubt a by-product of the over-priced ‘education’ which has harmed the USA severely.

I couldn't find much about Hickok, except that he's a Professor with a PhD, I think on the hippocampus; I'd guess he went through the process of starting with a 'great man' in his lab, who was bringing up a group of acolytes who never criticise unless they want to be sacked. That's if they are able to criticise at all; it's amusing to think of the myth of American individualism.
('Wild Bill' Hickok appears twice in this typical poke-around by Miles Mathis, 'Looks like the Bushes are Jews'. Miles Mathis and others have demolished many pseudo-icons mentioned in The Myth of Mirror Neurons: Stephen Hawking, Chomsky, Bono, the BBC, 'Ted Bundy', Pinker,... but had the sense to steer clear of Einstein, Hitler, Freud. Maybe his daughters—Taylor & Ally—hadn't heard of them.)
He's at UCI, part of the California system of 'universities' at Irvine. It presents itself as overseeing healthcare throughout Orange County. I'd guess in collaborated with the AIDS and COVID frauds and jabs, so this need not be taken seriously. UCI looks very typical of the Jew-controlled 'university' system, one product of the Jew victory of the Second World War. I noticed an apparently newish position of Matthias Lehmann, Teller Family Chair in Jewish History and founding director of the UCI Center for Jewish Studies, with the joke authorizations of nuclear fakes, war fakes, and the 'Holocaust' fake. It claims to be in a safe and economically buoyant area (in Los Angeles). It sounds like a ghostly re-creation of the 'Kahal' system, with Jews collaborating to identify non-Jews and target them.
In late 2019, Wiki says it had 'roughly 30,000 undergraduates and 6,000 graduate students'.

The big problem with brain research is the lack of progress. Plus the disquieting fact that if the brain was understood, there might be disastrous consequences. So maybe it's best that not much has been discovered, and the practitioners seem to be floundering, buoying themselves up with lectures which say noting but remain unchallenged, and with unimpressive TED-talks and Youtube lightweight censored stuff. Maybe it doesn't matter; any society has room for wastage and failure.
Hickok recommends starting with Appendix A, A Primer on Brain Organization. This is about four pages on the naked-eye appearance of this strange organ. An anecdote somewhere describes an anatomist picking a brain to pieces, to reveal what can be seen of it. The appendix resembles this approach, but verbally, and in the familiar amalgam of Greek, Latin, and English expressions. It reveals indirectly how little is known.

In principle, we owe Hickok something for trying to open windows on this topic, which incidentally seems part of inter-University rivalry, in this case with Parma in Italy. But the book's not very successful because

He doesn't know about the deepest problems with brain research; which ought to be understood and explained
He doesn't understand the entire malaise which infects universities under the dead weight of Jewish paper financing
He doesn't have a sympathetic overview of university waste. After all, the endless unimpressive output of churches and religion has kept innumerable more-or-less worthless people alive. He's not aware of the many centuries of medical non-progress. Not everyone can be a great researcher. So there's something to be said for endless seekers of tenure.
He has nothing useful to say on what 'his' subject might achieve.

Online in Amazon, somewhere amid those painfully null reviews, someone suggested the idea has been firmly implanted by cheap Jewish mass-produced books by hack writers, that 'mirror neurons' were vitally helpful in understanding very many parts of human life. Unfortunately, Hickok gives no history of this movement, which might have been helpful in deconstructing bogus scientific structures while noting their money-making capacities. (A typical product that happened to appear to me in a computer search is: Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language, which looks like a multi-authored book, in a series Advances in Consciousness Research.)

Before tackling The Myth of Mirror Neurons let me mention the main pioneer critic (as far as I know) on cell biology, who was Harold Hillman (1930-2016. RIP). It's therefore possible he saw this book, though as far as I know he had the misfortune to be immobilised by stroke(s).
Here are two of his videos (not too long) on Neurons and on Synapses, which try to explain how uncertain these concepts are. They are not enormously good films, since the scripts are not very clear in stating what they are claiming; probably numerous biological Chairs and medical specialists heaved collective sighs of relief.
1986 film on Neurons mostly by Hillman
1986 film on Synapses mostly by Hillman

And this links to a copy of Hillman's A Career in Neurobiology. He said much the same things many times. This is a fairly short survey. The part on the brain outlines his empirical work on brains. The idea of 'firing' neurons comes from experiments with electrodes in brains. It's uncertain how to interpret the results, but most theoreticians seem to have little interest in such difficult problems.
On instrumentalism, given new hardware it's easy to find 'researchers' to try it, and advertise the results, however uncertain. Think of electron microscopes, and note that expensive gadgets permit long-term frauds. Huge particle accelerators, huge rockets, huge computers, huge telescopes, permit errors to persist, which cheap computers and cheap microscopes and cheap telescopes could have squashed. Even things like blood pressure meters and weather forecasts have had odd effects. Even the names of these things are subject to fashion: for example, 'nuclear magnetic imaging' was renamed 'magnetic resonance imaging' in case people were perturbed over 'nuclear' associations, not unreasonably as they are part of a huge Jewish fraud.
On race characteristics, Jews seem have a compulsion to 'work' on undefined or vague or invisible things: God, propaganda, viruses, consciousness, lies, space, time, miracles, unverifiable events, tiny details in living cells... Probably this is a result of voluntarily ghettoized inbred populations having nowhere else to go.

The Myth of Mirror Neurons by Gregory Hickok

This entire set of memes started in 1992, in Parma in northern Italy, more or less on a line between Genoa and Venice. Bologna of the spaghetti, is in the region. There's a large collection of Hebrew manuscripts there, and it's of course possible the whole thing was a Jewish fraud, though Hickok does not mention this possibility.

What looks like Vittorio Gallese's Lab of Social Cognitive Neuroscience seems to have been the start of this, plus a 'philosopher' Alvin Goldman. Depending on your point of view, this is a promising start.

I'd guess that one day, someone was playing with an unfortunate monkey with electrodes though its skull. ('Electrodes' are fine wires, insulated, supposedly designed to conduct small amounts of electricity). The experiments noted a reaction and the myth was born. It's still not really known how many neurons the brain has, and those maybe in (or near?) contact with an electrode is a tiny fraction of them. And moreover there's no real way to know what causes the 'firing': it could be as insignificant a fraction as one computer chip's opcode. And the possibilities conjured up were absurd: it was suggested in effect that a monkey would have detailed information on the way muscular changes occur. There was a handy pun with 'motor neurons'. The whole thing depended on funding applications, control over information, departmental skills, and sensible decisions as to retirement ages and the amount that could be milked.
(I recall that Steven Rose, another Jew, allegedly carried out experiments with new chicks, to see if he could detect changes in their brains.)

I won't spend time on the bulk of this book, for obvious enough reasons. But a few supposed consequences might as well get a mention.

Facial expressions: surely these need special neurons for sympathy and understanding? What amused me is the capacity of Jewish politicians to entirely suppress their intentions, for example assuring the stupid goyim that unlimited immigration is wonderful.

'Mirroring' was taken up by the presumably Jewish Derren Brown, probably better known in the UK than the US. He explained how he'd find a collaborator or partner by sitting in a same public place, such as a bar, and mimic behaviour of the other person—presumably discreetly—and see what happened.

It's worth noting the failures accompanying success. Many people think medical science has made huge strides. In fact, it's mostly been a question of controlling chunks of the world, making them amenable to food extraction, or clear water, or mimicry of natural living processes such as penicillin acting against bacteria, or the cabinet-making aspects of bone-setting. But medicos want careers and lots of money, and find themselves swept along by specious schemes of all sorts. Consider the COVID fraud, for example. Same with militarism: many weapons are hugely powerful and dangerous, and since 1914 have shown little sign of control mechanisms.

The book is indexed, slightly to my surprise, omitting two of the best critics, Hillman and Ling. It should have been deeper and better.