Mirror neurons in the brain fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe someone else performing the same action, playing a vital function in learning and empathy. They have been implicated in everything from sensorimotor learning to language learning and crowd psychology.
Mirror neurons are special neurons in the brain that underlie the experience of empathy and also play a vital function in learning. What sets them apart is that they fire both when they perform a certain action and when they observe another person, especially of the same species, performing that action. So neuroactivity is the same whether it’s the individual performing the action or someone else. Two locations in the brain where these neurons have been observed are the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex. They are probably a neurological feature common to many if not all primates.
The phenomenon of mirror neurons proves that really seeing is believing. They underscore the reality that perception is not a one-way conduit from reality to the brain, but rather a complex feedback loop between the two. When a person sees someone he thinks is in pain, he may feel a weaker form of that pain. If that person sees someone performing a complex motor action, they can imagine themselves performing that action. Mirror neurons are probably a big part of what enables apprentices to gain skills from their masters.
These neurons were originally discovered in macaques in the 1980s by Italian neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese. Since their discovery, they have been hailed as one of the most significant recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and have been implicated in everything from sensorimotor learning to language learning to popular psychology theories. A deficiency has been theorized as the underlying neurological reason for the pathology of autism, or “mind blindness.”
The discovery of mirror neurons is intuitively interesting to many people because they have experienced their effects firsthand. These neurons are likely a big part of why emotions, like anger or pleasure, can be contagious, and would appear to underlie crowd psychology. Depending on how vivid the representation of someone experiencing a given emotion or performing a particular task, the more neurons that are fired, the more visceral the experience. This is why movies tend to hit harder than photographs, which in turn feel more emotionally tangible than text.
Text also activates certain categories of mirror neurons because most people “hear” text with a voice as they read it. This disembodied voice creates a subtle illusion of the presence of another person undergoing a thought process, and people can empathize with its various facets on that basis.
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