Cure Autism Now no longer exists. It was taken under the umbrella of Autism Speaks last year.

DAN! however, is still intact, and still spreading its dangerous biomed message.

Mirror Neurons in macaque monkeys (di Pellegrino et al 1992), and in humans (Fadiga et al, 1995) There is also Gallese et al (2004), Rizzollati et al (2001), Iacoboni et al (2005), Gallese et al (2006) and Rizollati et al (2009).

The last paper is probably the best.

What are you on Gareth?

Could I have some?

Do you HONESTLY believe any of this?

And why involve the only person who has ever given credence to AS?

I am discombobulated

I honestly can't believe I'm hearing this. 'Traitor' to the guy who gave AS a name and a place to be?

You have staggered and  seriously destroyed any faith I had in you.

And I DID have faith.

This is shameful.

Rockit, the question was about the direct observation of mirror neurons in humans. I wasn't just asking about any papers on the subject. I want to know if any scientist has directly observed them or a "mirror-neuron system" in humans.

One paper published in a science journal last year outlined the many different types of problems that exist with "mirror neuron" research.
The language used implies that the existence of human mirror neuron systems had not yet been demonstrated at the time the paper was written.

Here are some quotes taken from this paper:

"Despite our claim that the adaptation protocol is a superior way of identifying candidate mirror system areas, however, we still were unable to demonstrate the existence of mirror neurons in the human brain as we did not find any cortical areas exhibiting cross-modal adaptation [11]. "

"If mirror neurons exist at all in the human brain, it is likely that they lie within these areas. We hope that future human mirror system studies use similar and novel protocols for assessing movement selective responses rather than relying on the circular reasoning commonly used to interpret imitation and passive movement observation experiment results."

"...the study of mirror neurons and the human mirror system in particular has been characterized by much speculation and relatively little hard evidence."

"Taken together, it is not obvious how a dysfunction in the human mirror system might account for the multiple behavioral and physiological characteristics of ASD. In fact, the general search for a unitary explanation (a missing link) capable of explaining all the ASD characteristics seems like a counterproductive direction for the field [34]."

Anyone can read the full text of this paper free online:

Dinstein, I, Thomas, C, Behrmann, M, & Heeger, D (2008) A mirror up to nature. Current Biology. Vol 18, R13-R18, 8th January 2008.
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982207022014#back-bib33

I based my statement about CAN funding on information about the last study listed on this Monash University web page, which could well be out of date:

http://www.med.monash.edu.au/spppm/research/aprc/project2.html

How stupid of you, Rockit, to believe that anyone would be influenced by your baseless insults.

By that logic we should never learn anything, since everything we learn is because of the dendrite structure in the brain and is not encoded into our DNA. The brain is constantly rewiring itself throughout life as we learn and remember new things.

I completely oppose the idea of a cure too (duh), but that does not mean I do not believe it is possible with the right technology developed. If a cure was impossible, why would we need to bother fighting against one?

No, just an observation of several other sites. I read a lot, but don't often post anywhere. Too busy

The problem with that paper is that it assumes that MNS is a unitary theory which exists in isolation and attempts to explain the entire triad. In fact, it's merely one of a number of converging theories concerning local processing bias as opposed to global processing bias as being central to an understanding of ASCs. if you look at the entire picture of the research, you'll see that genetic studies, studies on savant skills, studies on the modalities, and brain imaging studies (including ERP studies which these authors don't mention) are heading in the same direction: that a preference for local processing WITHOUT failure to access global processing at times, is a fairly good explanation for ASCs. It's a connectivity issue, this unifying theory says. MNS theories are merely a part of that general theory. Just as important, perhaps, is the part played by the pre-frontal cortex.

Dinstein changed his mind after the Chong studies and had to back down in October 2008, BTW.

Human Cortex: Reflections of Mirror Neurons
Dinstein, I. 2008 Current Biology 18 (20), pp. R956-R959

I don't post on "several other sites". You must be suffering from some type of delusion.

Well, one of us is